Several times in the

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Several times in the last month or two I’ve mentioned that I’ve been giving the better part of my time, of late, over to the 17th century rather than the 21st. Specifically, I’m making a final push to finish my doctoral dissertation which is about 17th century New England, Indians and English settlers, their economic interactions and basically how they were always managing to whack each other. It’s the main reason the posts have been a bit sparse.

In any case, I’ve had a number of readers write in and say I should discuss what I’m writing about on TPM. Now, I’ve — I think wisely — chosen not to do that. It’s arcane stuff and it’s not, nor will it be, what this site is about. But tonight when I was working through a database of journal articles I came across an article I wrote — disturbing as it is to admit even to myself — about ten years ago. I wrote it during my first semester of graduate school. And it was published a couple years later, in the Fall of 1995, in the New England Quarterly. A couple years later it was anthologized in a book called New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, Ca. 1600-1850, an anthology of articles about New England Indians getting knocked around by European settlers over the course of two hundred or so years.

So, this is something I wrote a while before I even started the dissertation project. But it’s what got me interested in the subject. And it’s broadly similar to what the dissertation is about: same topic, same region, some of the same cast of characters. This article — the title is … ahem .. “‘A Melancholy People’: Anglo-Indian Relations in Early Warwick, Rhode Island, 1642-1675” — is about a small town in New England, during the first couple decades of settlement, where Indians and English settlers lived more or less right on top of each other. (Click here to download the pdf file, which is on the large side.) The quote in the title is a line from a letter written by Roger Williams, and it’s a reference to how bummin’ the Indians were sharing turf with the settlers.

Needless to say, it’s not your standard TPM fare. But if you’re interested …

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