This dissertation is a comparative study of cultural relationships between European and Indian settler communities along the Six Nations' borders with New York and Pennsylvania from 1720 to 1780. It particularly examines "everyday encounters" between ordinary peoples---a dimension of colonial social and economic life that has usually escaped historians' attention. Palatine, Scots, Irish, Dutch, and English colonists not only lived close to Indian villages but also frequently interacted with Iroquois, Delawares, and other natives. Frontier farms, forts, churches, and taverns were scenes of frequent face-to-face meetings between colonists and Indians. My dissertation explores the dynamics of settler-Indian encounters and how they changed over time in the Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio valleys. Ordinary people powerfully shaped the larger patterns of cultural contact through their routine negotiations.;The dissertation establishes a new vantage point by exploring northeastern North America as the "Iroquoian borderlands" rather than the Middle Colonies' frontiers. It also employs comparative history to highlight the structural similarities and differences of the Six Nations' borders with nearby colonies. Both Pennsylvania and New York enjoyed alliances with the Six Nations that sustained a period of peaceful relations in the eighteenth century. But Pennsylvania's settlement expansion sparked a triangular contest over land between natives, European squatters, and proprietors that resulted in open warfare and native dispossession by the 1750s.;New York enjoyed the longest span of peace with the native nations on its borders. In the Mohawk Valley, strong religious, economic, social, and military ties enabled Indian and colonial communities to coexist for most of the eighteenth century. It was not until the American Revolution that New York experienced the same racially charged warfare that Pennsylvania and other British colonies had experienced much earlier. The Revolution overturned the patterns of accommodation that prevailed between the Iroquois and the New York colonists. It uprooted the British-Iroquois alliance and led to dispossession for many Iroquois in punitive postwar treaties with the U.S. The comparative context more precisely reveals the means whereby the permeable Iroquoian borderlands of the early eighteenth century were transformed into juridically and racially defined state and national borders by the 1780s.

As Europeans expanded across North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they parceled their territorial acquisitions into a variety of administrative subdivisions. Naming and dividing the land became an integral part of the project of colonization; the conquest of territory involved the transformation of unknown places into clearly defined jurisdictions. This dissertation examines the invention of one jurisdiction, the state of Maine, viewing the evolution of its borders as a reflection of the growth of state power in the region. Seeing an inextricable link between social and territorial boundaries, it ties the development of the territory of Maine to the formation of an alliance between property owners and English governments. The alliance promoted a vision of territoriality in which the land was divided into clearly marked jurisdictions exclusively governed by particular towns, counties, and provinces. These jurisdictions, in turn, granted and protected clearly marked estates that were the exclusive property of individuals; property rights and state sovereignty reinforced one another. This English system of territoriality competed with other visions of the land attached to different social arrangements. to Native Wabanakis, the right to use the land flowed from membership in fictive kin groups that included both human beings and the spirits of surrounding animals and natural features. French colonial officials treated their possessions adjacent to the Gulf of Maine as a network of military, economic, and missionary outposts that upheld the authority of church and state in a peripheral region. English notions of territoriality gained precedence over others because the alliance between property owners and the state facilitated the large-scale mobilization of human and material resources in trade and warfare. Far from being unproblematic facts of the environment, Maine's boundaries are the physical traces of a historical process in which English colonists acquired vast quantities of natural resources at the expense of their French and Indian rivals. to give legitimacy to these conquests, the colonists promoted a form of state sovereignty characteristic of English-speaking North America: the land, under this system of territoriality, was construed as a measurable object to be possessed and exchanged by individuals.

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Oral health disparities persist across various sociodemographic groups in the United States. Data were obtained from the 2007-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey(NHANES)to investigate differences in tooth count, self-rated condition of teeth, decay in at least one tooth, and ownership of dentures across racial/ethnic groups.

This dissertation will examine the James River stoneware tradition, which encompasses parts of Henrico, Dinwiddie, Prince George, and Charles City Counties, south and east of the Falls of the James at Richmond, Virginia. This area has one of the richest histories in American ceramics. The essential elements of stoneware production will be examined. This dissertation will provide the only comprehensive overview of this regional industry with in depth descriptions of the relevant potteries, potting families and their environment. Detailed description of ceramic forms and decorations specific to individual potters will be provided. The archaeological research done at the potting sites, much of it participated in by the author will be presented. This will allow future attribution and dating of James River stoneware.;Landscapes of the 19th century James River stoneware industry will be explored and the nature of the potters' craft and community will be analyzed within the Meshwork as used by Tim Ingold. Through applications of both structural and semiotic approaches the production, relationships, and landscapes of the potteries will be organized and problematized. An effort will be made to provide as deep and broad a context as possible including social, political, and economic conditions. Archaeological, historical, and oral data will be used to understand the potters' habitus and the roles of artisans, their neighbors, landscapes and artifacts in actively creating that world.

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