Claiming Land, Claiming Water Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic

Herrmann, Rachel B. (Editor)/ Roney, Jessica Choppin (Editor)/ Gray, Edward G. (Contributor)/ Koot, Christian J. (Contributor)/ Zukas, Alexander (Contributor)

ISBN 10: 1512829250 / ISBN 13: 9781512829259

Published by Univ of Pennsylvania Pr, 2026

About this Item

384 pages. 9.00x6.00x9.00 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # __1512829250

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Claiming Land, Claiming Water Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1512829250
• ISBN 13: 9781512829259
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.56 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Explores how and why people manipulated borders in the early modern Atlantic world

Claiming Land, Claiming Water shares what historians and geographers wish readers knew about maps and borders before, during, and after the founding of the United States. The essays collected in this volume model how people can learn to interpret maps as arguments, rather than as historical facts, and to read maps for evidence of people and places that were elided, renamed, or destroyed.

Contributors travel through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the place known by many names: the Atlantic World; the North American continent; borderlands; and homelands. Onto this place where people exercised power over space by forging relationships, colonizers came and imagined borders onto maps. Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps, the book takes readers through this era of immense disruption to teach them strategies for reading and interpreting these maps critically. Essays attend carefully to water alongside land and land alongside water in search of new interpretive avenues that reframe what we know about space, control, and sovereignty.

By using historical examples of people―farmers, fishers, hunters, religious leaders, colonial projectors, traders, sailors, soldiers, diplomats, and cartographers, it becomes possible to resist the temptation to impose modern geographical constructs backwards onto the histories we read, teach, and write. Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigates why some of these people imagined and made claims to bounded space, and how and why other people confounded and challenged those claims.

Contributors: Sarah Chute, Edward G. Gray, Kim M. Gruenwald, Rachel B. Herrmann, Christian J. Koot, Chad McCutchen, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, John Morton, Paul Musselwhite, Charles Prior, Karen Rann, Jessica Choppin Roney, Samuel Truett, Harvey Amani Whitfield, Alex Zukas.

About the Authors

Rachel B. Herrmann is Senior Lecturer in Modern American History at Cardiff University.

Jessica Choppin Roney is Associate Professor of History at Temple University and Director of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is the author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Johns Hopkins Press, 2014).