This is a hybrid event.
Through confusion and coercion, land deeds became a devastating technology of colonial encroachment onto Native land in colonial North America. Yet they are also a record of the plants, animals, and environmental features central to both Native and settler placemaking. Using seventeenth-century New Jersey as a case-study, this paper focuses on the hodgepodge geography of markers and boundaries reflected in land deeds, forged in hyperlocal contexts as Dutch, English, and Lenape inhabitants negotiated and physically traversed the boundaries of settlement. Understanding the social, epistemological, and environmental contexts of land negotiation helps illuminate territorial occupation, disputes, and sovereignty in colonial North America.
Join the conversation at the Environmental History Seminar.
Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper.
Purchasing the $40 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.
The in-person reception starts at 4:30 PM and the seminar will begin at 5:00 PM.
The virtual seminar begins at 5:00 PM and will be hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
If you have any questions about the program or accessibility needs, please contact Cassie Cloutier at ccloutier@masshist.org.
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