Entangled Histories: Making New Connections

Entangled Histories: Making New Connections 
in Early America, c. 1750–1850
 
Hosted by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies

The conference will feature scholars who challenge traditional narratives of imperial or national history by applying a wider lens to Anglo-America. The goal is to foster a wide-ranging debate on relations across borders – geographic, political, legal, social, and ethnic – in the Americas.

While Atlantic studies often highlight mobility and exchange, this conference will have a different focus. The intent is to link Anglo-America to the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, or French empires, and to situate the British Atlantic in relation to East Asia or the Gulf Coast borderlands. Some papers will feature historical figures on the legal, social, or geographic margins of British America – such as maroons, refugees, smugglers, missionaries, indigenous peoples, etc. The program for this conference will highlight the value of entangled history in current debates on global capitalism and slavery, sovereignty and state power, ethnogenesis, and other major issues.

Two plenary speakers – Alison Games of Georgetown University and Pekka Hämäläinen of Oxford University – will open the conference with a debate about entangled history. The rest of the program will involve panel sessions with pre-circulated papers. Those papers will be posted on a password protected website available to registered attendees.

This conference has received generous support from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Philosophical Society, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, and the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire.


Conference details, program schedule, and registration information are now available at the Entangled Histories website. Any questions about the conference may be directed to Eliga Gould (eliga.gould@unh.edu) or Julia Mansfield (julia.mansfield@stanford.edu).

For more information, see the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.