An attempt will be made in this study to arrange the furniture of Colonial America into a proper sequence relative to the development and changes made in their design and construction.

Native and Colonial Americans had vastly different approaches to the world, and viewed nature and other people in quite dissimilar ways. The concept of self is central to this project because personal values and attitudes toward others are grounded in agency - actions that emerge from the self and define the way that one treats his or her surroundings and everyone or thing in it. The way that one's self is perceived is necessarily communicated within the context of social settings. Situation in a world of other people (and of nature) requires that actions be weighed in accordance with agency. The very concept of what it is to have self is a key way to understand a world-view, because the values that are central to cultural communities have their locus within self. As such, the importance of defining to what or to whom one is agent must be addressed. The concepts of self that were fostered in members of tribes and early settlement communities contributed greatly to the world-views of their members, and consequently the treatment of their surroundings. One aim of Native American religions was to cultivate within tribal members the worthiness of respect harbored within beings of all sorts. Native American oral traditions established in members, from early on, the skill of actively listening to nature and the mindset that the earth and its inhabitants should be approached with care and respect. This was apparent in the treatment of nature, for personhood was extended to living creatures of all kinds, and even what we might regard as inanimate objects. Native Americans viewed themselves as vitally related to all other living powers of the world. These approaches to interacting with nature, combined with a word-view that was willing to accept a wide array of entities as beings, instilled a broad concept of self within Native American peoples. In contrast, based on traditional Western thought - foundationally that of Descartes and highly influenced by John Locke - Colonial Americans developed a very different concept of self from which members of this culture saw the world as hierarchical. As a result, selves turned inward and understood personal existence as other than, or separate from, nature. Persons were manifestly cognitive beings with moral agency, and only other beings with the same attributes should be afforded equal respect or regarded as having rights, as such. The thematic that developed as a result was, and still is today, founded upon the value of property ownership and the utilization of property and natural resources for production. Why is it important to look at the individual Native American tribe member or Colonial American community member? Since the actions of each member contribute to the wellbeing of the whole group, and consequently of nature, it is important to grasp how self-conduct that is necessarily a product of the individual self, fits into the bigger picture and affects the attitudes and actions of the individual toward other people and the environment. This coincides with the purpose of this project to show how the concept of self for Native Americans can be illuminating in many ways, consequently casting light on how we might learn from their ways, rather than give the impression to readers that one concept of self is any better or worse than the other. It is my aim to illustrate the unique and intriguing way that Native Americans view the self as part of nature, and investigate how these differing concepts of self, in relation to nature, affect how the these groups act toward nature. My hope is that readers will be encouraged to reflect on their own values and the roles that those values play in modern America, including some of the implications that these concepts of self have had in the past and continue to have for the future.

<p>"The Afterlives of King Philip's War" examines how this colonial American war entered into narratives of history and literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and investigates how narrative representations of the War restructured both genre and the meaning of the historical event itself. This investigation finds its roots in colonial literature and history - in the events of King Philip's War and the texts that it produced - but moves beyond these initial points of departure to consider this archive as a laboratory for the study of the relationship between genre and knowledge on one hand, and literature and the construction of (proto-) national community on the other. Because of its unique place in the history of the colonies, as well as its positioning within literary studies of Puritan New England, King Philip's War is an example not just of how one community faced a crisis of self-definition, but how that crisis was influenced by, and in turn is reflected in, the literature it produced. In this conception, genre is more than literary form, but represents a social technology with implications for the broader production of knowledge: following the use and production of genre in narrative reveals both literary history and the complicated map of how narrative constructs knowledge in tension with the conventions of genre simultaneously hem in and catalyze reading.</p> / Dissertation

O objetivo desta dissertação é entender as concepções de tempo e espaço presentes nos códices mexicas produzidos no período colonial inicial, entendendo-as como parte das concepções de história desse povo. Para alcançar esse objetivo foram analisadas centralmente as representações de calendário e lugares políticos e de paisagem em cinco narrativas históricas contidas nos códices mexicas produzidos durante os séculos XVI e início do XVII: Boturini, Mendoza, Aubin, Vaticano A e Manuscrito 40, manuscritos compostos por textos pictoglíficos e alfabéticos, produzidos pelas elites mexicas e seus descendentes, a partir de demandas nativas, castelhanas e missionárias. As representações temporais e espaciais levantadas nas narrativas foram cotejadas com exemplos de origem pré-hispânica, contidos nos códices mixtecos e nos monumentos e gravados em pedra mexicas, com a finalidade de inferir possíveis relações com permanências e transformações das concepções de tempo e espaço dos mexicas durante o período colonial inicial. O entendimento desse conjunto de concepções, centrados nas representações de calendário e de lugares políticos e de paisagem contidas nas narrativas históricas mexicas, pode contribuir para compreender como as elites mexicas e seus descendentes concebiam sua própria história após a conquista castelhana. / This Master thesis aims to comprehend the conceptions of time and space in the colonial Mexica or Aztec codices, assuming them as part of the Mexicas conceptions of history. To achieve this objective, the representations of calendar signs, political and landscape places were centrally analyzed in five historical narratives from Mexica codices produced during the 16th and early 17th centuries: Boturini, Mendoza, Aubin, Vaticano A and Manuscrito 40. These manuscripts produced by the Mexicas elites and their descendants, based on native, Castilian and missionary demands were composed by pictoglyphic and alphabetical texts. The time and space representations were analyzed and compared to pre-Hispanic samples at Mixtec codices and Mexicas stone monuments, for the purpose of infer the possible relations of persistence and transformation on the Mexicas conceptions of time and space during the early colonial period. The comprehension of this set of conceptions, centrally on the representations of calendar signs, political and landscape places, may contribute to understand how the Mexicas elites and their descendants conceived their own history after the Castilian conquest.

O objetivo desta dissertação é entender as concepções de tempo e espaço presentes nos códices mexicas produzidos no período colonial inicial, entendendo-as como parte das concepções de história desse povo. Para alcançar esse objetivo foram analisadas centralmente as representações de calendário e lugares políticos e de paisagem em cinco narrativas históricas contidas nos códices mexicas produzidos durante os séculos XVI e início do XVII: Boturini, Mendoza, Aubin, Vaticano A e Manuscrito 40, manuscritos compostos por textos pictoglíficos e alfabéticos, produzidos pelas elites mexicas e seus descendentes, a partir de demandas nativas, castelhanas e missionárias. As representações temporais e espaciais levantadas nas narrativas foram cotejadas com exemplos de origem pré-hispânica, contidos nos códices mixtecos e nos monumentos e gravados em pedra mexicas, com a finalidade de inferir possíveis relações com permanências e transformações das concepções de tempo e espaço dos mexicas durante o período colonial inicial. O entendimento desse conjunto de concepções, centrados nas representações de calendário e de lugares políticos e de paisagem contidas nas narrativas históricas mexicas, pode contribuir para compreender como as elites mexicas e seus descendentes concebiam sua própria história após a conquista castelhana. / This Master thesis aims to comprehend the conceptions of time and space in the colonial Mexica or Aztec codices, assuming them as part of the Mexicas conceptions of history. To achieve this objective, the representations of calendar signs, political and landscape places were centrally analyzed in five historical narratives from Mexica codices produced during the 16th and early 17th centuries: Boturini, Mendoza, Aubin, Vaticano A and Manuscrito 40. These manuscripts produced by the Mexicas elites and their descendants, based on native, Castilian and missionary demands were composed by pictoglyphic and alphabetical texts. The time and space representations were analyzed and compared to pre-Hispanic samples at Mixtec codices and Mexicas stone monuments, for the purpose of infer the possible relations of persistence and transformation on the Mexicas conceptions of time and space during the early colonial period. The comprehension of this set of conceptions, centrally on the representations of calendar signs, political and landscape places, may contribute to understand how the Mexicas elites and their descendants conceived their own history after the Castilian conquest.

This thesis uses ecofeminist and human-animal studies lenses to explore human animal and nonhuman animal relations in early America. Most ecocritical studies of American literature begin with nineteenth-century writers. This project, however, suggests that drawing on ecofeminist theories with a human-animal studies approach sheds light on eighteenth-century texts as well. Early American naturalist travel writing offers a site replete with human and nonhuman encounters. Specifically, naturalist William Bartram's travel journal features interactions with animals in the southern colonial American frontier. Amateur naturalist Elizabeth House Trist's travel diary includes interactions with frontier and domestic animals. Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories, a conduct manual that taught children acceptable behavior towards animals, provides insight about the social regulation of human and nonhuman relationships during the late eighteenth century, when Bartram and Trist wrote their texts. This thesis identifies and analyzes textual sites that blur the human subject/and animal object distinction and raise questions about the representation of animals as objects. This project focuses on the subtle discursive subversions of early Euroamerican naturalist science present in Bartram's Travels (1791) and the blurring of human/animal boundaries in Trist's Travel Diary (1783-84); Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1794) further complicates the Euroamerican discourse of animals as curiosities. These texts form part of a larger but overlooked discourse in early British America that anticipated more well-known and nonhuman-centric texts in the burgeoning early nineteenth-century American animal rights movement.