Opening Statement

[PMancall]

Once upon a time, colonial American history began with the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, followed by the establishment of self-government in Virginia in 1619, the founding of Plymouth in 1620, and the creation of Massachusetts Bay a decade later. For much of the past two hundred or so years partisans based in New England or near the Chesapeake argued about where the national story began. Similarly motivated individuals used 2007, the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, to launch a new round of such claims. It seems likely that the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth in 2020 will prompt a new round of proponents arguing for the central role of New England.

But in the past generation the study of early American history has changed dramatically. The major impetus for the shift has been the rise of Atlantic history, which has reminded all of us who teach the field that no one before the mid-1760s could have anticipated the emergence of the United States. From the sixteenth century through much of the eighteenth century, various peoples competed to control the natural and human resources of North America. We can use surviving visual evidence to bring this contest to life for our students. Though we lack the volume of pictures that survives for later periods, images from the Anglo-American colonies provide a starting point for larger discussions of how “American” history unfolded in the era before the Revolution.

I have written the essay here to start the discussion about how we can use images to teach the colonial era. I have showed these pictures to students ranging from college juniors and seniors to ninth graders and I have often posed the same questions to them. What, to begin, do they make of the images that came from Roanoke in the 1580s? What messages do these images send about the potential for colonization? How can we use the image of the Pequot War to understand the colonists’ texts, such as William Bradford’s classic Of Plymouth Plantation? What does that picture reveal about changes in relations between Europeans and Native Americans from the 1580s to the 1630s? And, once we understand these seventeenth-century images, how can we compare them to later views, such as political propaganda from the 1760s and 1770s?

See Colonial America Visual Evidence Essay for images.

[eric]

The relative paucity of images from the era of explosive growth in British North America is an interesting problem. If we think about some kinds of images that your essay sets aside--portraits, for example, or city views--we might modify the claim that there aren't many images by saying that there aren't many instructive images. Decoration and illustration are not absent from the long middle period of British North America, but the use of images to make arguments seems to slow 'way down. Maps would be the obvious exception--there is a rich literature about the way Europeans deployed mapping to bolster claims to territory in North America. But the quality shared by the DeBry engravings and Revolutionary-era images like "The Able Doctor" is the desire to make an argument. This makes them especially interesting to use in the classroom. But it also raises the question: why weren't British Americans making arguments with pictures in the intervening century and a half? Or are we overlooking some examples?

[PMancall]

This comment raises a crucial question about the range of available visual evidence for the colonial period. You are right that there are other kinds of images available--city views (which were often printed, though some like Peter Cooper's of Philadelphia were painted); portraits, typically from well-to-do families; maps, which sent messages in their choice of images, the use of placenames, and the territories they cover (or ignore); and illustrations in books, mostly printed in Europe, depicting American resources or peoples. My opening statement did single out those you have rightly called "instructive," but I do not want to suggest that these are the only images that survive. That said, we are also confronted with the fact that we do not have the rich visual evidence for the mainland Anglo-American colonies that we possess for other areas--such as Mexico and the West Indies. Colonial churches tended to have fewer decorations than European churches, though if we expand our definition of "colonial" to include New Mexico we have the still standing church at Acoma. Indigenous peoples across the Americas also left very distinctive visual clues, from intricately woven baskets to incised pots to strings of wampum. But even if we include this evidence we still possess fewer resources than those who study Spanish America, which raises questions about the ways that Anglo-Americans in particular understood the importance of visual evidence. Does anyone know of any codices, like those from Mexico, for the Anglo-American colonies?

--PCM

[stwajda]

Might we expand the media of visual culture beyond paint/canvas and paper/ink? This may help us to understand how colonists "saw." Two media that immediately spring to mind:

--Embroidery, including samplers (usually decorative, but, by the Stamp Act Crisis, included images of houses, gardens, and people, representing, I think, common law conceptions of property, improvement, and nation).

--Ceramics: images appeared on Delftware vessels and tiles, and English ware such as punch bowls depicting scenes or commemorative events.
.
I think it's interesting to consider word and image when discussing colonial visual culture. For example, the term "prospect" was used to describe a view of a landscape but we also know the word defines a possibility of future success.

Late in the colonial period, American image makers were using pantographs and perspective "machines" to draw quickly and make reproductions. The sure mechanical hand, able of dependable reproduction, versus an earlier workmanship of risk: this may tell us much about the market for images.

[PMancall]

This is a great point about expanding the kinds of imagery that we can examine. Toward that end I highly recommend Ann Smart Martin's Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 2008). Her book, which includes eight pages of color images, makes very vivid the material culture of Anglo-American (and even some African-American) residents of the Virginia hinterland. She very carefully shows the range of material goods that one merchant sold, and combines his store records with pictures of commodities such as ribbon, fabric, desks, bowls, and other goods. The text itself is excellent, but one can get much from just the pictures, which could be used in a class in addition to the kinds of illustrations I have already suggested. Such images also would work well with various kinds of goods such as teapots decorated with protests against British acts in the 1760s and 1770s. They form a nice counterpoint to images created for wide dissemination, and give us a sense about how political messages spread in both the public and private spheres.