Encounters Through Encroachment: 17th and 18th Century Interactions on Maryland's Eastern Shore
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2017-01-01
Department
History
Program
Historical Studies
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This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Abstract
On Maryland's Eastern Shore, early encounters between groups of Native Americans and newly arriving Africans and Europeans appear highly blurred or nonexistent in its historical narrative. This theses argues that many such encounters and interactions did occur between Maryland's early inhabitants of the Eastern Shore, on many levels, and was a predominant occurrence during the seventeenth and eighteenth-century. New trends in historical scholarship strive to showcase various encounters by questioning dominant portrayals seen throughout the history of North American settlement. Nevertheless, scholarship written for Maryland's Eastern Shore is sparse. This research looks at encounters and interactions as a means for understanding how various groups related to one another and interacted from their initial contact through times of oppression brought about by discrimination and the advancement of colonial agendas. Also affirmed here is a necessity to emphasize the fluidity that existed in early colonial society between the various groups and to open new conversations within historical presentation for those still living on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were both periods of discovery and nation building for the newly forming colonies, therefore, it is important to address the many false impressions of obscurity and separateness projected in early historiographies regarding those who shared in this formation. The intent here is to clarify how relationships were not separate histories, but an inclusion of competing cultures that shared an early landscape. Upon contact in the New World individual group histories dissolved, merging into a shared narrative. In contrast to many historical presentations in the past, not all Africans entered the early Maryland landscape as slaves, nor did all Natives abandon traditional homelands. What is unfortunate is that early encounters came to be defined by notions of racial superiority and established boundaries that marginalized and rendered many important historical participants into obscurity and presumed extinction. This theses, firmly within the realm of new historical trends, establishes that through such relationships came an inevitable exchange of cultural knowledge, rather than its erasure, and points out possibilities that for a moment the course of Maryland's history could have taken a path towards solidarity.