Timothy J. Shannon

Queequeg's Tomahawk: A Cultural Biography, 1750-1900

Since the colonial era, the tomahawk has served as a symbol of Indian savagery in American arts and literature. The pipe tomahawk, however, tells a different story. From its backcountry origins as a trade good to its customization as a diplomatic device, this object facilitated European-Indian exchange, giving tangible form to spoken metaphors for war, peace, and alliance. The production, distribution, and use of the pipe tomahawk also illustrated contrasting Indian and European notions of value and utility in material objects, exposing the limits of such goods in promoting cross-cultural mediation and understanding.

Rumor Has It

Rumors are the red-headed stepchildren of the historian’s profession. As Gregory Evans Dowd notes in the opening pages of this fascinating book, historians take pride in their fact-checking, documentation, and triangulation of evidence. Rumors belong to less responsible forms of reporting, like partisan political web sites, supermarket tabloids, and celebrity gossip magazines. But rumors are also a fundamental means by which humans collect and disseminate information along their social networks (say, for example, your garden-variety history department in a college or university) and therefore offer important lessons about how we construct group identities and determine who is included and excluded from them. Dowd’s inspiration for taking rumors seriously comes from two giants among early twentieth-century historians. From Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft (1932), he borrows the notion that rumors develop on “a bruiting ground” (p. 3), where individuals join in a common task of trying to construct a plausible reality from incomplete information. (Bloch’s own inspiration in this regard came from his experiences on the front during World War I.) Like Georges Lefebvre in The Great Fear: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932), Dowd is interested in uncovering the ideological assumptions that inspire and sustain rumors during times fraught with political and physical insecurity. Dowd also returns frequently to the insights of sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, whose experiences in a Japanese internment camp during World War II influenced his study of rumors as projections of one group’s perceptions of its own vulnerabilities and weaknesses onto an enemy other. Dowd and his scholarly predecessors all agree that rumors are far more than false or spurious information shared irresponsibly. Rather they emerge from “the thick loam of history, social structure, and experience” (p. 8) and are fruitful subjects of historical inquiry. Dowd does his rumor-mongering along the early American frontier, over a period stretching from the early sixteenth century to the Jacksonian era.

Iroquois Home Front

This book is part of a bumper crop of recent scholarship on the Iroquois in the eighteenth century. It is tempting to ascribe this output to the 250th anniversary of the Seven Years’ War, which has been the occasion for academic conferences and public programs on both sides of the Atlantic that have renewed interest in Iroquois relations with the British Empire, but Iroquois scholarship has always chugged along at a steady pace. This productivity is indicative of both the prominence of the Iroquois in early American history and the rich textual record left behind by their interaction with Sir William Johnson, who served as the British Crown’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1755 until his death in 1774. It is often said of the rock group Velvet Underground that not many people bought their records, but everyone who did started a band. So it seems true that anyone who has ever cracked open a volume of the Papers of Sir William Johnson has written a dissertation.1 Like many scholars before her, Gail D. MacLeitch has mined the Papers of Sir William Johnson deeply in writing this study of the Iroquois during the era of the Seven Years’ War. The war itself, however, serves only as a backdrop for her analysis of the impact that engagement with British power had on Iroquois economic production, gender relations, and self-identity. This is a story, in other words, told from within Iroquoia, looking outward as colonial neighbors and imperial officials drew Iroquois men and women more deeply into a web of interdependent relationships. MacLeitch succeeds in bringing a new perspective to a familiar era, illuminating the subtle and sometimes abrupt ways in which the Iroquois adjusted their internal affairs to new geopolitical realities. In a sense, this is a book about the Iroquois home front during a time of imperial war. MacLeith’s central assertion is that “asymmetrical forms of cultural borrowing and exchange facilitated the aggrandizement of British imperial and colonial forces in North America at the same time that they weakened the position of the Iroquois” (p. 2). Behind this awkwardly phrased thesis lurks