reviews
Richard Miller reviews a valuable resource for teaching visual literacy and engaging students in close analysis of early images of Native Americans.
A New World: England's First View of America by Kim Sloan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
High school history teachers who are interested in the early interactions between English colonists and the native North American population traditionally begin with what happened after 1607, utilizing the well-known and often inaccurate accounts of John Smith, John Rolfe, and others. In part, this has been a function of the resources at their disposal. However, for educators who desire to get at more foundational ideas of what the British thought of the peoples they were encountering, Kim Sloan’s A New World: England’s First View of America, is an excellent resource. The book is a record of the 2007 British Museum exhibition (that also travelled in the United States) about the acclaimed, but little known series of watercolors produced by John White, who voyaged to ‘Virginia’ (actually North Carolina) with a group of English explorers sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to attempt to establish a colony.
The book is divided into six chapters, written by Sloan and other White experts, focusing on different aspects of his work and legacy: the first three, by Sloan, examine White’s background, historical milieu, and efforts as both artist and recorder of the native Carolina Algonquians and governor of the ‘Lost Colony’ at Roanoke; Joyce Chaplin’s chapter explores the complex reality of the interaction between the arriving Europeans and native peoples; Christian Feest assesses the usefulness of the images as historical documentation; and Ute Kuhlemann concludes the narrative with an exploration of the diffusion of White’s images to a much wider European public through Theodor de Bry’s engravings (that illustrated Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Viriginia, 1590).
The second half of the book contains a catalogue of the watercolors, often juxtaposed with de Bry’s engravings. It is this section that may be most useful to high school history teachers, interested in helping increase the visual literacy of their students. Introduced by an interesting account of the historiography of the drawings, which cover the full range of White’s works [including North Carolina, the West Indies, and European images, as well], each illustration is accompanied with an in-depth analysis of what is depicted, including valuable ethnographic discussions. Teachers could utilize the images with or without the text, to create lessons where students are asked to figure out what is going on in the image, before reading the explanation. Additionally, the dual versions – White and de Bry – offer the opportunity for students to scrutinize the visual record to ascertain what are the differences between the two, and then to try to explain why de Bry might have made his image in the manner he did. Image #24, “An Indian man and woman eating,” is a good example of a pairing that offers rich details of what White captured, and how de Bry made some alterations. Similarly, #10, “As ossuary temple,” offers some interesting alterations that would entail students’ keen visual analysis before attempting an explanation.
A New World is a rich trove of images and text that can aid high school and college history teachers interested in developing their students’ visual literacy, while engaging them in close analysis of images. It will expand their knowledge of the world the native peoples inhabited before the arrival of the British, as well as help to deepen their understanding of the ideas the colonists brought with them when they finally did establish a successful colony at Jamestown.
Richard Miller is a history teacher at The Beacon School, a public high school in New York City; he developed an on-line EDSITEment lesson, “Images of the New World,” utilizing many of White and de Bry’s images. It can be accessed at: http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=714.
