Firsting in the Early-Modern Atlantic World
Lauren Beck, "Firsting in the Early-Modern Atlantic World "
English | ISBN: 0367334682 | 2019 | 268 pages | PDF | 4 MB
English | ISBN: 0367334682 | 2019 | 268 pages | PDF | 4 MB
For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.