A comprehensive history of Philadelphia from the region's original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century
Philadelphia is famous for its colonial and revolutionary buildings and artifacts, which draw tourists from far and wide to gain a better understanding of the nation's founding. Philadelphians, too, value these same buildings and artifacts for the stories they tell about their city. But Philadelphia existed long before the Liberty Bell was first rung, and its history extends well beyond the American Revolution.In Philadelphia: A Narrative History, Paul Kahan presents a comprehensive portrait of the city, from the region's original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century. As any history of Philadelphia should, this book chronicles the people and places that make the city unique: from Independence Hall to Eastern State Penitentiary, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross to Cecil B. Moore and Cherelle Parker. Kahan also shows us how Philadelphia has always been defined by ethnic, religious, and racial diversity--from the seventeenth century, when Dutch, Swedes, and Lenapes lived side by side along the Delaware; to the nineteenth century, when the city was home to a vibrant community of free Black and formerly enslaved people; to the twentieth century, when it attracted immigrants from around the world. This diversity, however, often resulted in conflict, especially over access to public spaces. Those two themes-- diversity and conflict-- have shaped Philadelphia's development and remain visible in the city's culture, society, and even its geography. Understanding Philadelphia's past, Kahan says, is key to envisioning future possibilities for the City of Brotherly Love.An important new biography of Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress
During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. The civil rights movement had changed American politics by opening up elected office to a new generation of Black leaders, including Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. Though her life in elected politics lasted only twelve years, in that short time, Jordan changed the nation by showing that Black women could lead their party and legislate on behalf of what she called the common good. In She Changed the Nation, biographer Mary Ellen Curtin offers a new portrait of Jordan and her journey from segregated Houston, Texas, to Washington, DC, where she made her mark during the Watergate crisis by eloquently calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. Recognized as one of the greatest orators of modern America, Jordan inspired millions, and Black women became her most ardent supporters. Many assumed Jordan would rise higher and become a US senator, Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan's untimely retirement from elected office--though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times. No change in the law alone could guarantee the election of Black leaders. It took courage and ambition for Barbara Jordan to break into politics. This important new biography explores the personal and the political dimensions of Jordan's life, showing how she navigated the extraordinary pressures of office while seeking to use persuasion, governance, and popular politics as instruments of social change and betterment.Now available in its sixth edition, The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques presents a comprehensive survey of all aspects of making ceramics for craft potters and ceramic artists. With its sound, practical explanations of ceramic processes, this indispensable reference book has gained a reputation as the potter's bible. Professional potters, beginners, students, and collectors will find authoritative information clearly and logically presented.
Frank and Janet Hamer explain the sources and character of materials, the behavior of clays and glaze minerals during forming and firing processes, forming methods, and glaze construction. In addition to brief outlines and detailed articles with cross references to illustrations, color photographs illustrate glaze effects and surfaces featured in the work of inventive, contemporary potters. The varied techniques of Raku, maiolica, crystalline glazes, salt and soda, stoneware, and porcelain are also presented. This new edition features over 500 full-color photographs and illustrations. With more than 300 diagrams to clarify everything in the ceramic world, in its sixth edition The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques will continue to serve as the authority on all things ceramic.Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2001
The highly-acclaimed first edition of this book chronicled the rise and fall of witchcraft in Europe between the twelfth and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Now greatly expanded, the classic anthology of contemporary texts reexamines the phenomenon of witchcraft, taking into account the remarkable scholarship since the book's publication almost thirty years ago. Spanning the period from 400 to 1700, the second edition of Witchcraft in Europe assembles nearly twice as many primary documents as the first, many newly translated, along with new illustrations that trace the development of witch-beliefs from late Mediterranean antiquity through the Enlightenment. Trial records, inquisitors' reports, eyewitness statements, and witches' confessions, along with striking contemporary illustrations depicting the career of the Devil and his works, testify to the hundreds of years of terror that enslaved an entire continent. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, and other thinkers are quoted at length in order to determine the intellectual, perceptual, and legal processes by which folklore was transformed into systematic demonology and persecution. Together with explanatory notes, introductory essays--which have been revised to reflect current research--and a new bibliography, the documents gathered in Witchcraft in Europe vividly illumine the dark side of the European mind.Chronicles the history of emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northerners
The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American Revolution and reaching adulthood in the lead-up to the Civil War, this remarkable generation ultimately played an outsized role in political and legal conflicts over slavery's future, influencing both the nation's path to the Civil War and changes to the US Constitution. Through exhaustive research in archives across New York State, where the largest enslaved population in the North resided at the time of the American Revolution, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater begins by exploring how English colonial laws shaped late eighteenth-century gradual abolition acts that freed children born to enslaved mothers. The boys and girls affected by these laws were born into a quasi-free legal status. They were technically not enslaved but were nonetheless required to labor as servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these children of gradual abolition found multiple ways to protect and nurture the boys and girls in their midst. They supported and founded schools, formed ties with white lawyers and abolitionists, petitioned local and state officials for better laws, guarded against kidnapping and cruelty, and shaped New York's evolving identity as a free state. Black fathers used their votes during annual state elections in the early 1800s to influence legislative antislavery efforts. After many but not all black men in the state were disfranchised by a race-based property requirement in 1822, black citizens across New York organized to regain equal suffrage and to expand and protect other crucial, non-gendered features of state citizenship. Women and children were critical participants in these efforts. Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into midcentury campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable common school education, and the expansion of freedom across the nation.The Academic Job Search Handbook is the comprehensive guide to finding a faculty position in any discipline. Building on the groundbreaking success and unique offerings of earlier volumes, the fifth edition presents insightful new content on aspects of the search at all stages. Beginning with an overview of academic careers and institutional structures, it moves step by step through the application process, from establishing relationships with advisors, positioning oneself in the market, learning about job openings, preparing CVs, cover letters, and other application materials, to negotiating offers. Of great value are the sixty new sample documents from a diverse spectrum of successful applicants. The handbook includes a search timetable, appendices of career resources, and a full sample application package. This fifth edition features new or updated sections on issues of current interest, such as job search concerns for pregnant or international candidates, the use of social media strategies to address CV gaps, and difficulties faced by dual-career couples. The chapter on alternatives to faculty jobs has been expanded and presents sample résumés of PhDs who found nonfaculty positions.
For more than twenty years, The Academic Job Search Handbook has assisted job seekers in all academic disciplines in the search for faculty positions at different kinds of institutions from research-focused universities to community colleges. Current faculty who used the book themselves recommend it to their own students and postdocs. The many new first-person narratives provide insight into issues and situations candidates may encounter such as applying for an international job, combining parenting with an academic career, going from an administrative job to a faculty position, and seeking faculty positions as a same-sex couple.Explores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when urban and rural indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year--centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities --similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan--resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts. Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the hospitality cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the post in postindustrial and the neo in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted--not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts--but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust
The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words - Khurbn Yiddish, or Yiddish of the Holocaust - puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals--Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak--Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art--highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.A fascinating account of two eighteenth-century princes from East Africa, their travels, and their encounters with the British Empire and slavery
In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo--what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique--boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes--known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John--convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa. In The Two Princes of Mpfumo, Lindsay O'Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. O'Neill also shows how the princes' experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts.Like most teenagers coming of age in the 1950s, Kate Muir wants the basics-rock and roll and a sense of belonging. But for Kate, one thing she can't live without is her endless supply of lavender tea.
At sixteen Kate would be happy just to blend in with her Mystic Water peers, but she has a cursed fate, her mama says. Kate can see the future, which makes being like everybody else nearly impossible. In spite of her special gift, Kate is forbidden to alter the future in any way, no matter what she sees. Her only chance at living a somewhat normal life is to drink lavender tea, the only remedy that stops the visions.
Kate's older brother, Evan, is her opposite-popular, charming, everyone's friend-and the main reason Kate isn't completely rejected by the local kids. When Evan dies in a tragic accident, Kate withdraws into herself and becomes more of an outcast than ever before.
But a chance encounter with a young man from the most prestigious family in Mystic Water tosses Kate into a whirlwind of friendship, acceptance, and love. Just when she believes this new life might last, Kate has a terrible premonition. Will she break the rules and alter the future? At the risk of exposing her special ability, can she prevent the horrible event from happening before it's too late?
Journey into this enchanting heart-filling tale of magical realism and the powerful changes brought on by accepting oneself.
A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method.
A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers, and general readers. Like Cecilia Penifader, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants, humble people living socially below the knights, bishops, and kings who figure so large in history books. Judith M. Bennett shows that peasants, too, made history. She explores how peasant lives were closely entangled with the lives and interests of those more privileged, looking at manors as well as villages; parishes, faith, and ritual practices; royal taxes and justice; economy and trade; famine and disease. By moving out from Cecilia's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people--poor as well as rich--into a medieval society. The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historian's craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship, and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich, and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society.The first comprehensive biography of Philadelphia's Henry C. Lea (1825-1909): historian, publisher, political activist, and reformer
Writing in 1868, the Philadelphia publisher-cum-historian Henry Charles Lea informed a friend, I am trying to collect the materials for a history of the Inquisition. The collecting of these materials--books, manuscripts, and copies of thousands of pages of documents housed in musty European archives and libraries--would occupy Lea (1825-1909) for the remainder of his life. It also led to publication of A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1884-87) and his acknowledged masterpiece, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906-7). Regarded as classics, these path-breaking books inaugurated better understanding of the history of an institution whose aims and methods troubled Lea and remain subjects of heated debate. The first biography of Lea since 1931, The Inquisition's Inquisitor offers the most comprehensive review to date of his writing on the history of the Catholic Church. Though Lea is generally regarded as a leading practitioner of scientific history, Richard L. Kagan examines the extent to which Lea's religious convictions compromised the ostensibly objective character of his work. Lea's extensive surviving correspondence also enables Kagan to examine other aspects of Lea's long and productive career as one of Philadelphia's most prominent citizens. Lea appears here a young literary critic; a businessman who skillfully transformed his family's publishing firm into the country's leading producer of medical books; a dogged political reformer; and a philanthropist whose largesse benefitted many of Philadelphia's cultural institutions. Newly discovered sources also allow for insights into Lea's private life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon, and the periodic breakdowns that required abandonment of his beloved intellectual pursuits. The Inquisition's Inquisitor concludes with a survey of Lea's legacy with respect to current understanding of the Inquisition and to Philadelphia, where reminders of his accomplishments include an eponymous library at the University of Pennsylvania and public elementary school in nearby West Philadelphia.Reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of chivalric whiteness
The Other Faces of Arthur reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of whiteness in the global North Atlantic: Scandinavia, Britain, Iberia, and North Africa. Taking a comparative approach that draws on language traditions not commonly studied together and places lesser-known Arthurian texts in conversation with each other, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia explores the important role of translation in the dissemination and analysis of Arthuriana, showing how these texts functioned within the settings that produced them. Introducing the framework of the global North Atlantic within the field of global medieval studies, Otaño Gracia examines Arthurian texts written in Castilian, Catalan, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse, among other languages, in order to illustrate the various ways that the writers adapt the materials to serve their specific cultural and aesthetic purposes. Tracing how Arthuriana shifts and changes throughout the global North Atlantic, Otaño Gracia uncovers the hierarchies of power present in Arthurian texts and how they reflect, manipulate, and critique the power relations existing in the courts that circulated the texts. Arthuriana's obsession with chivalry, Otaño Gracia demonstrates, is fundamentally about whiteness; these texts deploy chivalric whiteness to naturalize relations of domination and normalize violence against racialized subjects. The Other Faces of Arthur establishes Arthuriana as a pan-European project of racialization that ultimately serves to rationalize geocultural conquest and expansion.How German Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism
Still Lives is a systematic study of the ways Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism. In a time of intensifying anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies, German Jews documented their lives and their environment in tens of thousands of photographs. German Jews of considerably diverse backgrounds took and preserved these photographs: professional and amateurs, of different ages, gender, and classes. The book argues that their previously overlooked photographs convey otherwise unuttered views, emotions, and self-perceptions. Based on a database of more than fifteen thousand relevant images, it analyzes photographs within the historical contexts of their production, preservation, and intended viewing, and explores a plethora of Jews' reactions to the changing landscapes of post-1933 Germany. Here, the authors claim that these reactions complement, complicate, and, sometimes, undermine the contents of contemporaneous written sources.
Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery
As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane's enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household. New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian's story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region's early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people's intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver's whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders' persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England's founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region's law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England's most populous state, Massachusetts.From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of moral suasion and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an antislavery war.
In Force and Freedom, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the bourgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. Drawing on the precedent and pathos of the American and Haitian Revolutions, African American abolitionists used violence as a political language and a means of provoking social change. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War. Force and Freedom takes readers beyond the honorable politics of moral suasion and the romanticism of the Underground Railroad and into an exploration of the agonizing decisions, strategies, and actions of the black abolitionists who, though lacking an official political voice, were nevertheless responsible for instigating monumental social and political change.In this haunting tale, Daphne du Maurier takes a fresh approach to time travel. A secret experimental concoction, once imbibed, allows you to return to the fourteenth century. There is only one catch: if you happen to touch anyone while traveling in the past you will be thrust instantaneously to the present.
Magnus Lane, a University of London chemical researcher, asks his friend Richard Young and Young's family to stay at Kilmarth, an ancient house set in the wilds near the Cornish coast. Here, Richard drinks a potion created by Magnus and finds himself at the same spot where he was moments earlier--though it is now the fourteenth century. The effects of the drink wear off after several hours, but it is wildly addictive, and Richard cannot resist traveling back and forth in time. Gradually growing more involved in the lives of the early Cornish manor lords and their ladies, he finds the presence of his wife and stepsons a hindrance to his new-found experience. Richard eventually finds emotional refuge with a beautiful woman of the past trapped in a loveless marriage, but when he attempts to intervene on her behalf the results are brutally terrifying for the present. Echoing the great fantastic stories of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, The House on the Strand is a masterful yarn of history, romance, horror, and suspense that will grip the reader until the last surprising twist.In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.
Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law
A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law. While in the Spanish Empire, Natives were a recognized part of la república de indios, the republic of Indians, other Natives across the early American South understood themselves to be joined with European colonists in larger polities, each jealously guarding their own bodies of liberties under royal sanction. Thus, rather than simply rejecting European pretensions to rule them as subjects and vassals, Native Southerners as diverse as the Apalachees, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, and Timucuas redefined their status to become political players in legislative assemblies and the courts of distant monarchs. They pushed for incorporation in larger political systems in which they had a say and were themselves instrumental in creating. Adapting pre-invasion practices to the technology of writing and the challenges of colonialism, Indigenous petitioners sought exemptions from labor and protection for the lands that God gave to them, as well as the right to install preferred leaders, avoid enslavement, ally with the Crown against colonists, ease harsh colonial laws, and even amend the terms of treaties and compacts. Bradley J. Dixon shows how their petitions also stand as enduring contributions to American political thought and how it was these vassals and subjects who gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty. In the South, the Spanish and English empires came to resemble one another precisely because they were both dependent to a remarkable degree on maintaining Indigenous political consent and were founded in large part on Indigenous conceptions of law.