Title: Reckoning
Description: "Reckoning" revisits an old story--the meeting of cultures in the colonial northeast--from a new perspective: communications. Descriptions of early New England often conjure images of orderly Puritan towns, with Indians and others pushed to society's edges. But New England was not just a patchwork of walled-off pastures and plots. It had an alternate, human geography as well--a geography of letters, travelers, and movement. Using diaries, travel literature, almanacs, court records, war narratives, and a database of nearly 3,000 letters, I track travelers and news across the northeast from roughly the 1630s to the 1670s. Through that reconstruction, I reinterpret some of the defining moments of colonization (including the Pequot War, the Anglo-Dutch War, and King Philip's War) as contests to control communications. Ultimately, "Reckoning" uses the study of communications to unearth unseen contingencies, vulnerabilities, and travails involved in the making of the English northeast.

The English quest to control the northeast entailed a great struggle to control the flow of information over space. For decades, English colonists were the losers in this struggle. Despite its reputation as one of the most stolid bastions of English settlement, the northeast was in fact a precarious borderland in which colonists largely avoided overland travel and even relied on Algonquians to send news. But the 1660s marked a great tipping point, in which the power balance shifted significantly in their favor. Tracing this trajectory, I use New England's story to revisit longstanding assumptions about encounter, empire, and colonial power. Travel and communications, in fact, provide uncannily strong barometers of power. Who could travel where, who ruled the routes winding through the woods, who dictated what news might be sent--These things, I argue, tell as much about power and geographic authority as any deed or document. Gaining control of New England was not solely a matter of consuming territory, of transforming woods into farms. It also meant mastering the lines of communication. Even ordinary vestiges of colonization--horses, postal service, roads--acted as vectors of conquest. With their bodies, with their very feet, colonists marked the bounds of English New England.