Seminar Readings

Syllabus: Early Maritime History, 1523-1865

Week 1 (9/8/97): On Going Maritime

Meeting Notes #1

Recommended Starting Points

Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," [1893] in Billington, ed. Frontier and Section (1961) pp. 37-62.
Daniel Vickers, "Beyond Jack Tar," William & Mary Quarterly, L (April 1993), 418-424

I. The European Maritime World Before 1607

Week 2 (9/15/97): Water and Braudel's Meditteranean Sea

Meeting Notes #2

*Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Vol I (1966), Chs. II, III, IV
Lionel Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World [1971] (Johns Hopkins, 1995)
Vincent Cassidy, The Sea Around Us: the Atlantic Ocean, A.D. 1250 (Louisiana State Press, 1968)
Ian Friel, The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England, 1200-1520 (JHU, 1995)

Week 3 (9/22/97): Seafaring and Europe's Atlantic Ocean

Meeting Notes #3

Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: the Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600, Chapters 1 and 5, as distributed
Dava Sobel, Longitude (Penguin, 1996)

Week 4 (9/29/97): Mapping and Verrazzano's American Coast

Meeting Notes #4

D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: Atlantic America, 1607-1800 (Yale UP, 1987), Part One, as distributed

Week 5 (10/6/97): First Soundings: America Approached by Sea

Meeting Notes #5

Morison, The Northern Voyages, Ch. Ix ("The Voyages of Verrazzano")
"Letter of Giovanni da Verrazzano to Francis I, July 8, 1524," in Lawrence C. Worth, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524- 1528 (Yale, 1970) pp. 133-143, as electronically distributed.

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II. Comings Ashore (1607-1750)

Week 6 (10/13/97): Death and Survival in Chesapeake Bay

Meeting Notes #6

General Background:

Carl O. Sauer, Sixteenth-Century America: The Land and People as Seen by Europeans (Berkeley, 1971), esp Chs. 4, 13 & 14
David H. Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford, 1989)
Donald Wharton, ed., In the Trough of the Sea: Selected American Sea-Deliverance Narratives, 1610-1766 (Greenwood Press, 1979)

I. THE CHESAPEAKE BAY REGION

Primary Sources:

David Quinn, ed., Virginia Voyages from Hakluyt (Oxford, 1973)
P.H. Hulton, America in 1585-- The John White Drawings (1985)
Philip Barbour, ed., Complete Works of Captain John Smith. 3 Vols (UNC, 1986)8
*John Smith, "Exploring the Head of Chesapeake Bay," Generall Historie of Virginia, pp. 85-108.
Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia [1705]

Secondary Sources:

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery/American Freedom (Norton, 1975), pp.1-91.
*Arthur P. Middleton, Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (1940), 3-69.
John Seelye, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (Oxford, 1977), Prologue, Chapeters II, III, IV.
Carville V. Earle, "Environment, Disease, and Mortality in Early Virginia," in Thad Tate, ed., The Chesapeake in the 17th Century
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience," W&MQ ( ), 213-239.
Melville H. Jackson, "Ships and the Sea: Voyaging to the Chesapeake," in David B. Quinn, ed. Early Maryland (1982)
John W. Reps, Tidewater Towns: City Planning in Colonial Virginia and Maryland (UP Virginia, 1972)
William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (Little, Brown, 1976)

Week 7 (10/20/97): Errand Along the New England Coast

II. MARITME NEW ENGLAND

Meeting Notes #7

Primary Sources:

*William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1607-1647 (Mod. Library, 1952), chs. I - X.
John Winthrop, Journal of The History of New England, 1630-1649, esp. "Anno 1630," pp. 23-52.
William Wood, New England's Prospect [1634], Alden Vaughan, ed., (UMass, 1977)
Cotton Mather, "Relating Wonderful Sea-Deliverances," in Magnalia Christi Americana, pp. 343-357

Secondary Sources:

Emerson R. Baker, et al, American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega (UNebraska, 1994)
Karen O. Kupperman, "Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in 17th C New England," in David D. Hall and David G. Allen, eds., Seventeenth-Century New England (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), pp. 3-37.
John Seelye, Prophetic Waters, Ch. V-X
William Cronin, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (Hill&Wang, 1983)
David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and new England in 17th Century (Cambridge UP, 1987), esp Ch.VI , "The Vast and Furious Ocean"
Bernard Bailyn and Lotte Bailyn, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714 (Harvard, 1959)
Christine Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 (Norton, 1989)
Water Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History (Harvard UP, 1965)
Robert Albion, William A. Baker and Benjamin Labaree, New England and the Sea (Wesleyan UP, 1972)

Week 8 (10/27/97): Life Before the Mast

Meeting Notes #8

Daniel Vickers, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (UNC, 1994), esp. Chs. 3,4 and pp. 261-289
W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard UP, 1997)
Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates,and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (CambridgeUP, 1987)
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast [1840] (Signet)

III. The Ascendance of Maritime New York (1750-1855)

Week 9 (11/10/97): Maritime New York: The Physical Givens

Meeting Notes #9

Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experience (Cambridge UP, 1990)
Ralph Gabriel, The Evolution of Long Island (Yale, 1921)
I. N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909
Ann L. Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water-Bound (NYU Press, 1987)

Week 10 (11/17/97): "A Big & Risky Business": NY's Maritime Capitalists

Meeting Notes #10

Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress (Hill and Wang, 1996)
Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (Scribner's, 1939)

Week 11 (11/24/97): "Workers Who Get Wet?": NY's Maritime Laborers

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale[1851], ed. Andrew Delbanco (Penguin, 1992), through Ch.

IV. The Ebbing of Atlantic America

Week 12 (12/1/97): Whaling : Enterprise and Metaphor

Melville, Moby-Dick, to the end
Margaret S. Creighton, Rites & Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870 (CambridgeUP, 1995)

Week 13 (12/8/97): The Persistence of Maritime America

Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod [1855]
William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (U California Press, 1975)
Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea [1855] (HarvardUP, 1963)

Grading/Performance Evaluation Scheme

The evaluated activities of the seminar are divided into 1000 shares.

There will be five divisions of these shares:

For Ist assignment -- mounting a course home page/technical discussion; due
10/9/97 -- 150 shares on individual basis [e.g., 5 to 15 each]

For 2^nd assignment -- mounting an analysis of early Chesapeake/New England as maritime cultures; due 10/31/97 -- 150 shares to mess members [Crabs/Cods]

For 3^rd assignment -- to be assigned -- due 11/21/97 -- 150 shares to collaborative groups

For 4^th/final assignment -- of your choosing with consultation -- 400 shares to mess/group/solo -- due 12/12/97

For general participation -- 150 shares

Following each assignment, comments and assignment of shares will be sent (upon request) to a seminar member via a link from her/his course homepage to her/his CUNIX e-mail account

Shares will tallied at the end of the semester, ranked, and translated into letter grades, with seminar members with more shares receiving higher grades than those with fewer shares.

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