Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 616 pages, ISBN: 978-0300244052, $35.

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America

The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that
• European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success
• Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire
• The first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior
• California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War
• The Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West
• Twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy

Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West.

C O N T E N T S

List of Maps

Introduction: Toward a New American History

Part I | Indians and Empire
1  American Genesis: Indians and the Spanish Borderlands
2  The Native Northeast and the Rise of British North America
3  The Unpredictability of Violence: Iroquoia and New France to 1701
4  The Native Inland Sea: The Struggle for the Heart of the Continent, 1701–55
5  Settler Uprising: The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution
6  Colonialism’s Constitution: The Origins of Federal Indian Policy

Part II | Struggles for Sovereignty
7  The Deluge of Settler Colonialism: Democracy and Dispossession in the Early Republic
8  Foreign Policy Formations: California, the Pacific, and the Borderlands Origins of the Monroe Doctrine
9  Collapse and Total War: The Indigenous West and the U.S. Civil War
10  Taking Children and Treaty Lands: Laws and Federal Power during the Reservation Era
11  Indigenous Twilight at the Dawn of the Century: Native Activists and the Myth of Indian Disappearance
12  From Termination to Self-Determination: Native American Sovereignty in the Cold War Era

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

From Penn Press:

Mairin Odle, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 176 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1512823165, $40.

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement.

Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America. Although these bodily practices were quite distinct―one a painful but generally voluntary sign of accomplishment and affiliation, the other a violent assault on life and identity―they were linked by growing colonial perceptions that both were crucial elements of ‘Nativeness’. Tracing the transformation of concepts of bodily integrity, personal and collective identities, and the sources of human difference, Under the Skin investigates both the lived physical experience and the contested metaphorical power of early American bodies.

Struggling for power on battlefields, in diplomatic gatherings, and in intellectual exchanges, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans found their physical appearances dramatically altered by their interactions with one another. Contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference translated into altered appearances for many early Americans. In turn, scars and symbols on skin prompted an outpouring of stories as people debated the meaning of such marks. Perhaps paradoxically, individuals with culturally ambiguous or hybrid appearances prompted increasing efforts to insist on permanent bodily identity. By the late eighteenth century, ideas about the body, phenotype, and culture were increasingly articulated in concepts of race. Yet even as the interpretations assigned to inscribed flesh shifted, fascination with marked bodies remained.

Mairin Odle is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Stories Written on the Body
1  Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted: Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos
2  The ‘Ill Effects of It’: Reading and Rewriting the Cross-Cultural Tattoo
3  Pricing the Part: Economies of Violence and Stories of Scalps
4  Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory
Epilogue: Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

From Penn State UP:

Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky, eds., Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), 294 pages, ISBN: 978-0271094427, $120.

The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Europeans described Indigenous tattooing in North America, Thailand, and the Philippines by referring their readers to the tattoos Christian pilgrims received in Jerusalem or Bethlehem. When explaining the devil’s mark on witches, theologians claimed it was an inversion of holy marks such as those of baptism or divine stigmata. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands.

Katherine Dauge-Roth is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She is the author of Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France.

Craig Koslofsky is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe and The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700, and the coeditor of A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction, Marking Skin: A Cutaneous Collection — Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky

Part I | Marked Encounters in America, Asia, and Africa
1  ‘Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted’: English Ideas of Tattooing as Indigenous Literacy — Mairin Odle
2  Indigenous Taiwanese Skin Marking in Early Modern European and Chinese Eyes — Xiao Chen
3  Following the Trail of the Slave Trade: Branding, Skin, and Commodification — Katrina H. B. Keefer and Matthew S. Hopper

Part II | Marks of Faith
4  Jerusalem Under the Skin: The History of Jerusalem Pilgrimage Tattoos — Mordechay Lewy
5  Stigmata and the Mind-Body Connection — Allison Stedman
6  The Invisible Mark: Representing Baptism in Early Modern French Dramaturgy — Ana Fonseca Conboy
7  Rabies and Relics: Cutaneous Marks and Popular Healing in Early Modern Europe — Katherine Dauge-Roth

Part III | Standing Out: Marks of Honor, Shame, and Beauty
8  Skin Narratives: Speaking about Wounds and Scars in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus — Nicole Nyffenegger
9  Branding on the Face in Early Modern Europe — Craig Koslofsky
10  Mouches Volantes: The Enigma of Paste-On Beauty Marks in Seventeenth-Century France — Claire Goldstein

Afterword, Cultural Inscriptions: Body Marking after 1800 — Peter S. Erickson

List of Contributors
Index

Published by Paul Holberton and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Sarah Lloyd, ed., Tokens of Love, Loss, and Disrespect, 1700–1850 (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2023), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1911300946, £45 / $55. With other contributions by Timothy Millett, Tim Hitchcock, Susan Whyman, Steve Poole, Sally Holloway, Katrina Navickas, Joe Cozens, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Graham Dyer, Gary Oddie, and Brian Maidme.

Coins are physically and visually intriguing. Explicitly designed to have monetary value, they can be used for their intended purpose. But coins have also frequently been repurposed to communicate private and public messages—from ad hoc scratchings and punch marks to complete re-engraving of surfaces. As carriers of messages, coins have the advantage of being unobtrusive: They can easily be carried around, and their exchange does not arouse suspicion.

Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect gives insight into the many unofficial purposes coins served in the past. Drawing on the largest extant collection of defaced coins and tokens, Sarah Lloyd brings together the full range of expertise required to understand the phenomenon, with contributions from eleven scholars and collectors. Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect focuses on a period in British history when modification of coinage expressed political commentary, commercial activity, familial and emotional commitment, personal identity, and life history. It examines the coins and tokens themselves and looks at who modified them, where, why, and how. Defaced coins and tokens are often enigmatic objects, and this book offers a means of decoding and assessing them, while also drawing attention to their value as a distinctive source of historical evidence. Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect considers what these surviving coins reveal about the society in which they were produced and the light they shed on major historical developments of the period.

Sarah Lloyd is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a public historian with extensive experience of working with twenty-first-century communities on history and heritage projects. She researches the social and cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain.

From Brepols:

Francçois de Callataÿ, ed., Numismatic Antiquarianism through Correspondence, 16th–18th Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0897223911 , €150.

This book brings together 14 articles into a volume of conference proceedings from the 2017 meeting on numismatic antiquarianism held in Rome.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword — François de Callataÿ
About the Authors

1  Fool Me Once, Don’t Fool Me Twice: Collecting Forgeries to Train the Eye, 17th–early 19th Centuries — Daniela Williams
2  Moulages de monnaies antiques ou comment produire des copies, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles — Guy Meyer
3  The Missing Caesar: Inventing Bronze Coins for Otho — Johan van Heesch
4  Speaking about Manuscripts: Unpublished Works in Correspondence — Michiel Verweij
5  Recording Coin Finds and Hoards in Early Modern England — Ute Wartenberg and Jonathan H. Kagan
6  Two Centuries of Collecting, Describing, and Explaining Contorniates — John Cunnally
7  Di vizi e di virtù: Di Pertinaci e di Didii, di Pescenniie di Gordiani — Federica Missere Fontana
8  Numismatic Antiquarianism: Coins from the Ancient East in Early Modern Europe — Martin Mulsow
9  Queen Elizabeth and the Twelve Caesars — Andrew M. Burnett
10  Peiresc and the Coins through his Correspondence — Elena Vaiani
11  About Books and Coins: The Letters of Charles Patin to Giulio Antonio Arevoldi between 1679 and 1693 — Marco Callegari
12  The Story of Francesco Gottifredi’s Unpublished Book through the Analysis of the Letters of his Contemporaries — Maria Cristina Molinari
13  Monastic Antiquarianism in Austria and the République de Médailles: The Numismatic Collection of Göttweig Abbey — Manuela Mayer
14  Publishing the Doctrina Numorum Veterum: New Evidence on the Three Editions of Joseph Eckhel’s Masterwork — Bernhard E. Woytek

Happy Shakespeare Day! . . . Distributed by Paul Holberton Publishing and The University of Chicago Press:

Robin Simon, Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick: Plays, Painting and Performance (London: Hogarth Press,, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645441, £55 / $65.

In London in 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) remarked, “What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.” Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon’s highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge.

William Hogarth (1697–1764) and David Garrick (1717–1779) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting, and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century. History painting was considered the highest form of art: a picture illustrating a moment drawn from just a few lines in a revered text. Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III (1745) transformed those ideas because, although it looked like a history painting, it was also a portrait of an actor in performance. With it, Hogarth established the genre of theatrical portraiture, a new and distinctively British kind of history painting. This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. In this context another trio of genius features prominently: Lichtenberg, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Denis Diderot. Familiar paintings and performances are seen in an entirely new light, while unfamiliar pictures are also introduced, including major paintings and drawings that have never been published. The final chapter shows that the inter-relationship between plays, painting, and performance survived into the age of cinema, revealing the pictorial sources of Laurence Olivier’s legendary film Richard III.

Robin Simon FSA is Editor of The British Art Journal and author of the acclaimed Hogarth, France, and British Art: The Rise of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2007). He is Visiting Professor in the Department of English, University College London, and Professorial Research Fellow in the History of Art at Buckingham University.