The WMQ-EMSI Workshop Series is designed to identify and encourage new trends in our understanding of the history and culture of early North America. It fosters intellectual exchange among scholars working on thematically related topics that may be chronologically, geographically, or methodologically diverse. The participants are primarily mature scholars working on second or subsequent book projects; they share their works in progress with the aim of deepening and enriching their perspectives, their approaches, and ultimately the final products of their research.
2025 WMQ-EMSI Workshop: “Small Nations, Big Histories”
Friday & Saturday, June 20 & 21, 2025
Huntington Library
1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA
Stewart R. Smith Board Room
***note the new location!
RSVP before Thursday, June 12, to attend and receive pre-circulated papers.
Conveners:
Elizabeth N. Ellis, Princeton University &
Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire
In early America, did the size of a nation or polity matter? Smaller political units were not powerless, and recent work has highlighted how Indigenous, African, and colonial actors from small polities transformed the continent between 1450-1850. But how did they gain and retain power in an age of imperial competition?
The history of “small nations” is a big subject. This WMQ-EMSI Workshop aims to bring together scholars from history and related disciplines whose work considers the place of small nations in early American history (1450-1850). The workshop will take a broad view of the subject matter. The “small nations” framework allows us to resituate the histories of nation states that dominate the historiography as well as communities that have historically been marginalized within the literature or dismissed because of their small populations or scant archival records. It also invites us to reconsider the history of polities such as the Muscogee Nation and the early American republic, often described as “nations” but that were themselves unions or associations of smaller political units that each had their own histories and agendas. We are particularly interested in exploring connections and exchanges between the different iterations of the histories of small nations.
Friday, June 20, 2025
9:30 am Welcome and Introductions
10:00 am Session One : “Tribute, Tolls, Taxes: The Politics of Internal Revenue in Small Native Nations”
11:00 am Session Two : “Lenape Sovereignty and the Treaty of Fort Pitt”
12:00 pm Break : Lunch and Garden Strolls
1:30 pm Session Three : “Small Nations, ‘Indian Rings,’ and the Kansas Plunder System, 1829-1859”
3:00 pm Session Four : “I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom”
Julia Gaffield, William and Mary Quarterly
A book talk conversation with Julia Gaffield and Scott Wagner, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Southern California.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
9:30 am Session Five : “Virginia Britannia as a Small Nation”
10:30 am Session Six : “The Making of a New Colony: Legal Innovation, ‘Colonos’ and Slavery in Spanish Trinidad During the Age of Revolutions”
11:30 am Break : Lunch and Garden Strolls
1:00 pm Session Seven : “Routes of Protest: Free People of Color in the French Revolutionary Diasporic Caribbean”
2:30 pm Session Eight : “The Problem of Small Nations Within: Self Determination as a Crisis of US Democracy”
3:30 pm Final Discussion
Image: Map of the several nations of Indians to the Northwest of South Carolina], 1724. Image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The WMQ–EMSI Workshops are sponsored by the University of Southern California–Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (with financial support from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Carole Shammas) and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and are hosted by the Huntington Library and the University of Southern California.
