Plain Paths and Dividing Lines - (Early American Histories) by Jessica Lauren Taylor

About the Book

"Jessica Taylor traces the ways in which English colonizers grafted their ways of ordering space atop Powhatan-ordered space in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. As she argues, Natives and newcomers found landscapes mutually understandable, and this manuscript follows English and Algonquian attempts, from the quotidian to state-level initiatives, to capitalize on mobility along paths and rivers, and police legal and physical boundaries. This manuscript focuses on landscape and uses material culture and archaeology sources throughout, thus taking an interdisciplinary approach to recover everyday colonial experience and render earliest contact between Indigenous nations and English settlers in what became Virginia and Maryland in an entirely new light"--

Book Synopsis

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. In this innovative new work, Jessica Lauren Taylor follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who built and crossed emerging boundaries surrounding Indigenous towns and developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay.

In a riverine landscape defined by connection, Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and into the continent for centuries. As Taylor finds, their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland's planters erected fences and forts, policed unfree laborers, and dispatched land surveyors. By chronicling English and Algonquian attempts to move along paths and rivers and to enforce boundaries, Taylor casts a new light on pivotal moments in Anglo-Indigenous relations, from the growth of the fur trade to Bacon's Rebellion.

Most important, Taylor traces the ways in which the peoples resisting colonial encroachment and subjugation used Native networks and Indigenous knowledge of the Bay to cross newly created English boundaries. She thereby illuminates alternate visions of power, freedom, and connection in the colonial Chesapeake.

Review Quotes

Compellingly examines coalescing relations among Indigenous, African and African American, and Euro-colonial peoples across an unstable spectrum of freedom and unfreedom. It highlights affinities and solidarities that linked Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous peoples, and explicates the mutual construction of systems of racial slavery, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism . . . As I finished this well-crafted book, it brought to mind the urgent nature of these topics in the twenty-first century. The richly multidisciplinary endnotes demonstrate that scholarly investigations of the Chesapeake places featured here are themselves sites of interaction and contestation in the present. Communities, scholars, public historians, landowners, the state, and other entities interact and articulate anew intercultural relationships, epistemologies, and sovereignties in these contact zones. The book's clear attention to struggles for spatial justice also invites engagement with Nikole Hannah-Jones's "The 1619 Project," which has one origin point in this region. Taylor is well positioned to trace the through lines of these continuously unfolding histories that have such deeply grounded pasts.--Christine DeLucia "William & Mary Quarterly"

An exceptionally rich and well-researched book. Taylor weaves English and Indigenous perspectives together to make a unique intervention.

--Paul Musselwhite, Dartmouth College, author of Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake

There is much to admire about this book, including the quality of the research--the excellent use of archaeology, both published studies and unpublished site reports, is especially commendable--and the persuasiveness of its arguments. Taylor has made several signal contributions to long-standing historiographical debates.

--Matthew Kruer, University of Chicago, author of Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

About the Author

Jessica Lauren Taylor is an Assistant Professor of oral and public history at Virginia Tech.