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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.

In following the rise of canis lupus familiaris from America's pet dog to dogmestic partner and ontological metaphor for capital unseen and humanly unseeable this dissertation hopes to reveal the 'spirit of calculation' that undergirds the nation's seemingly disinterested love for their four-legged others and demonstrate how cultural politics affect and are in turn affected by bio-politics and bio-power.;It argues that in response to the deflation of prevalent signifiers of social standing and sexual or matrimonial desirability during the financial and ontological crises of the 1830s, Jacksonians turned to the dog as an incorruptible sign of invisible individual substance. In their seemingly disinterested dedication to another, dependent species, they displayed advanced levels of self-denial, the defeat of the animal within, and sophisticated social skills suggestive of higher (rational) humanity, biological wealth, and natural status. Companion dogs thus became a commodity of distinction that exploited preexisting cultural bias toward less material concepts such as "gentility" and "grace." Canine companions helped salvage their caregiver's social position and desirability, better their chances in courtship, and secure the transmission of accumulated biological and cultural assets to the next generation. In transforming into timelessly dependable institutions for safeguarding and increasing embodied human capital, pet dogs became living and breathing "pet banks," whose perpetuity proved antithetical to President Jackson's ephemeral "pet bank" scheme.;Canine pet-bank power in capital management, courtship, and propagation not only raised dogs' desirability but also the stakes and quality of inter-species performances and, most importantly, the specter of "interest." as canine companions grew more and more numerous, more and more intimate, and more and more impertinent, they became dogmestic partners whose economic utility in the building, maintenance, and reproduction of cultural and biological capital was increasingly difficult to deny. In close readings of the works of nine American writers this dissertation traces literary strategies of denial that maximize the accumulation and transmission of capital through "artlessly" altruistic, inter-species companionship, on the one hand, and openly selfish intra-species relations on the other, by separating dogmestic and domestic partners, the source and vehicle for power, through time, space, and, most recently, reconceptualized human reproductive units. It is within these key moments, when inter-species intimacy stops to assist and begins to impede human survival, that humanity signifies animality, that the human can be decentered and the human-animal divide overcome.;In delineating heretofore hidden cultural connections, I hope to show that while the dogmestic has helped re-etch national, religious, racial, classist, gender and ethnic lines, and assisted in the bio-cultural dispossession of intra-species "Others," dogmestic practices have just as consistently and profitably been performed by members of miscellaneous outgroups to overcome putative bio-genetic differences and challenge the status quo. My analysis suggests that pet dogs or dogmestics play a decisive role in the identity formation, sexual selection, and reproduction of Americans and that ours is a world in which ignorance (and the metaphors to which it gives rise)---as much as knowledge---is capital and power..

This study examines the process of recruitment and the social makeup of militiamen in seventeenth-century New England. King Philip's War, 1675--1676, was the first major military crisis the Massachusetts Bay Colony faced. The government responded by impressing over a thousand men, employing a recruitment system that evolved from the colony's founding in the 1630s. The Massachusetts militia system was a hybrid of the English militia with additional safeguards. The founders of Massachusetts believed the English militia of the 1620s overly nationalistic, at the expense of local control. Thus, the Massachusetts system was created to be centralized in command, but local in recruitment. When faced with a military emergency, Massachusetts established composite companies of militiamen to fight the enemy, leaving the town militia companies mostly intact for defense. After 1652, the decision of which men were pressed was made by a unique local institution: the town committee of militia, comprised of civilian and military leaders from the community.;This study includes a social portrait of every militiaman who served during the war from Essex County, Massachusetts and the twelve communities that sent them. Essex towns represented every major community type in colonial Massachusetts and offer the perfect microcosm for understanding military recruitment in seventeenth-century New England. The details of the lives, actions, and family backgrounds of all 357 enlisted soldiers offer a new and superior understanding of early American soldiers and the communities that impressed them.;Conventional historical wisdom asserts that the universal military obligation of the colonies, which forced all males from sixteen-to-sixty to serve, created seventeenth-century armies that mirrored society. This study finds that untrue. The militia committees in every town impressed a large majority of men who had some negative factor in their past, such as: low economic standing, criminal behavior, or short residency. Town committees of militia did not chose men equally from the population; but carefully selected soldiers who would be least missed by the town and its families if they were killed. Even the earliest American soldiers were not representative of their society; they were more the "Rabble" of their communities than their "Flower."

As the English and French grappled for North American hegemony in the first half of the eighteenth century, trade with the Indian groups of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley transcended mere financial calculations and assumed a broader imperial significance. to the native peoples who exchanged their peltry for European manufactured goods, trade was the material manifestation of mutual obligation, political dialogue, and military alliance. If the contest for empire inevitably became a battle for the hearts and minds of potential Indian allies, the spoils of victory were most visibly reckoned in furs and skins.;Yet, despite the outspoken criticism of William J. Eccles, historians of Anglo-French trade rivalry continue to embrace the dubious claims of Cadwallader Colden and other eighteenth-century American imperialists that Canadian traders could not compete on level economic ground with their New York and Pennsylvania counterparts. Allegedly beset with shoddy and costly French goods, a jealous monopoly company that greedily fixed the price of furs and skins, and the levies and restrictions of a militaristic state, Canadians were deemed unable to match the success of their Anglo-American competitors, who conversely reaped the benefits of cheap and superior trade merchandise in a commerce largely free of meddling monopolists and obtrusive officials.;A rigorous cross-border comparison of trade-good costs, transportation charges, and peltry prices deflates this hoary myth of Anglo-American economic superiority. With few exceptions, French-Canadian fur traders supplied goods of equal or better quality at rates of exchange competitive with their New York and Pennsylvania rivals. Purely economic considerations, however, never determined success in the trade. as frustrated Anglo-American officials readily admitted, the cohesive and scrupulously-managed French-Canadian trade network proved aptly suited to winning and maintaining Indian friendship and alliance, while unregulated and unscrupulous American traders perennially poisoned Anglo-Indian relations. The persistence of characteristically Canadian commercial practices and Indian trade loyalties despite the 1760 conquest of New France is, perhaps, the most compelling measure of French-Canadian preeminence in the eighteenth-century contest for North American trade and empire.