review of Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World

The engine behind [European imperialism and colonization] was the fur trade, a vast, complex, too often misunderstood commerce that drew Europeans deep into the interior of the continent, enmeshed its native peoples in the global economy, and helped trigger almost 125 years of imperial war for possession of America. Susan Sleeper-Smith has done this important subject a considerable service with Rethinking the Fur Trade. In a massive, elegantly appointed anthology, she has provided graduate students with a comprehensive summary of modern scholarship in the field, instructors with a sophisticated and variegated classroom tool, and scholars with an invaluable historiographical reference

review of Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

Eric J. Dolin’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire is a concise, engaging, and remarkably comprehensive survey of the American fur trade. Though aimed at a general readership, the author presents a broad-ranging, sophisticated story of the commerce, supported by nearly a hundred pages of citations. The author says that the inspiration for the book came from a passage in James Truslow Adams’s The Founding of New England: “The Bible and the Beaver were the two mainstays of the Plymouth Colony in its early years.” He knew something about Pilgrims and something about the fur trade, but nothing of the Pilgrim fur trade. From this, Dolin set out to explore the role of the trade in the founding of America and its expansion westward

The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes

The Upper Country melds myth and conventional history to provide a memorable tale of French designs in the middle of what became the United States. Putting the reader on the battlefields, at the trading posts, and on the rivers with voyageurs and their allies from the Indian nations, Claiborne Skinner reveals the saintly missionaries and jolly fur traders of popular myth as agents of a hard-nosed, often ruthless, imperial endeavor. Skinner\u27s engaging narrative takes the reader through daily life at posts like Forts Saint Louis and Michilimakinac, illuminates the complexities of interracial marriage with the courtship of Michel Aco at Peoria, and explains how France\u27s New World adventurism played a role in the outbreak of the Seven Years War and the beginning of the modern era. In this story, many of the traditional heroes and villains of American history take on surprising roles. The last Stuart kings of England seem shrewd and even human; George Washington makes his debut appearance on the stage of history by assassinating a French officer and plunging Europe into the first truly global war. From unthinkable hardship to dreams of fur trade profits, this fascinating exploration sheds new light on France and its imperial venture into the Great Lakes

Session A-1: The New Illinois Civics Curriculum: Perils and Pitfalls

The Illinois Legislature will require all Illinois students to complete one semester in civics in order graduate beginning with students entering next academic year. IMSA adopted a combined one-semester civics/American history curriculum this year that can serve as a critical study in how to achieve the goals the state hopes to achieve. Rather than wrestle with the issue of American History vs. American Government curriculum, we are attempting to present a History of American Government, exploring the origins of our political institutions beginning in the Dark Ages and how these have evolved to meet the needs of the times. We believe this approach adds color and drama to the civics material and provides the students with a sense of just how unique and precious these are

Session A-2: Encountering Ourselves: American Indians and the Age of Revolution

This session will explore how Europeans who encountered the indigenous peoples of North America came to see them as a window into their own past. This provided philosophers and political theorists with a means by which to critique Baroque civilization. The result was Locke\u27s Natural Law, and Rousseau\u27s Noble Savage. The notion that the world had moved away from freedom and liberty by becoming civilized became a potent argument for both the American and French Revolutions

The Illinois History Documents Project

With the grand exception of Abraham Lincoln, most Illinoisans tend to think of American History as something which happened somewhere else: Jamestown, Philadelphia, Gettysburg and such. This is a shame, as the pageant of our state\u27s past stands up rather well, thankyouverymuch, if one only knows where to look. People have inhabited Illinois for the last ten thousand years. The state\u27s written history extends back nearly 300 years; and what a history it is! Native Americans, Frenchmen, British, and Americans all vying for possession of the heart of the continent In the nineteenth century, pioneers, canalmen, railroadmen, steamboatmen, inventors, and entreprenuers reshaped the land in pursuit of their dreams. It is a dramatic story, and one very much worth the telling. The Illinois History Website is an ongoing research project undertaken by the faculty and students of the History/ Social Science Department of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. The goal is to provide secondary and college students with access to primary documents illustrating our state\u27s past. The collection begins with the arrival of the French in Le Pays des Illinois in the 1670\u27s, continues on through the colonial wars, the American Revolution and into the nineteenth century, and will eventually extend into the twentieth. The project has focussed particularly on reproducing materials, long out of print, which otherwise would be unavailable for school library collections. The documents contained in the Website were selected to provide a window into our past through the words of the people who lived it. There has been no attempt to edit content and so teachers and students who wish to use these materials are warned that they may contain violence, discussions of adult issues, and/or attitudes offensive to modern readers. These issues concerned us, but we preferred to retain the authenticity of the original documents

Session B-1: The Prize: Teaching Early Illinois History to Secondary School Students

This presentation will outline ways in which Illinois can be placed at the center of the story of colonial America and the events which triggered the Revolutionary War. The discussion will be accompanied by a bibliography of relevant secondary readings for instructors, lists of public domain primary sources for students, websites where these can be obtained, lists of Illinois historical sites connected to these materials, and suggestions as to how to interpret these sites for students

Session D-4: Canoes, Men of War, and the Founding of Louisiana

How did the explorer Rene-Robert Cavalier de La Salle was able to sell his plan to claim the Mississippi Valley for France. Louis XIV, to this point, had been skeptical of an American empire, worried that England’s burgeoning Royal Navy could easily blockade and conquer any territories France might claim. Between 1679 and 1682, however, Bourbon policy changed and La Salle was able to lay claim to a vast domain extending from the Appalachians to the Rockies and from the Gulf of Mexico north to Minnesota. This annexation was a fateful moment in world history. England’s American colonies were now hemmed in by the French and their Indian allies. The friction which resulted would ultimately trigger the French and Indian War which would cost France her American Empire and set the American colonies on the road to revolution

Session C-1: Teaching New Salem: Jacksonian America in an Illinois Village

Salem State Park is inextricably bound up in the legend of Abraham Lincoln. Obscured by this is the fact that the rise and fall of the village of New Salem offers teachers a microcosm of the era of Andrew Jackson, westward expansion, and the aspirations and disappointments of antebellum America