SUNY New Paltz

L. H. ROPER

PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF HISTORY

Department of History

JFT 916A
600 Hawk Drive
New Paltz, New York 12561-2440
Phone: (1845) 257 3542
Fax: (1845) 257 2735
E-Mail Address: roperl@newpaltz.edu



‘In action’ conducting research in the Medieval and Early Modern Reading Room at the National Archives of Great Britain (formerly, the Public Record Office) in Kew, Richmond, May 2004 (photo courtesy of Joyce Hoad)

NOTICE:  JFT WILL BE CLOSED DURING SUMMER 2008 AND I WILL BE AWAY FROM CAMPUS.  THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT WILL BE LOCATED IN HUM B4; PROFESSORS SCOTT-CHILDRESS (FIRST SESSION) AND BERNSTEIN (SECOND SESSION) WILL SERVE AS CHAIRS.

OFFICE HOURS FALL 2008 (EFFECTIVE 25 AUGUST THROUGH 19 DECEMBER)

            TH   2 pm - 4 pm (and by appointment)

PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS

            I have taught full time at New Paltz since the Fall term of 1994 I am interested primarily in the creation and development of early American societies and the expansion of early modern European trading and colonization interests, as well as the history of the Americas and the British Isles in general.  Thus, I customarily teach United States History to 1865 (HIS221, Spring 2008) and I also offer courses in the history of Tudor-Stuart England (HIS357), the ‘Age of Discovery’—a course on interaction between European and non-European peoples between c.1415 and c.1780 HIS470, Fall 2008), the History of the United States South to 1897 (HIS326), and undergraduate and graduate courses in Colonial America (HIS321/HIS522) and the American Revolution (HIS322/523).  For further information on my courses, please contact me.  I also regularly offer a Seminar in History (HIS492)on the subject of ‘Early Modern Britain and its Empire’ (Spring 2008) and a preceptorial for first-year students, 'American Heroes' (HIS151), as part of a 'First-Year Interest Group' ('FIG') (Fall 2008).

All of my upper-division courses incorporate, with appropriate degrees of emphasis, material that deals with interaction between peoples, as well as       political and social history and the consequences of those interactions, such as slavery as it existed in the Atlantic World between 1492 (Columbus’        arrival in the ‘New World’) and 1888 (emancipation of slaves in Brasil). I received my Ph.D. (History) from the University of Rochester (NY) in 1992   and am qualified to teach the entirety of United States History, American Indian history, plantation societies in the  Americas, and the history of               early modern Britain and Ireland (1485-1837).
 
My research, which naturally dovetails with my teaching, investigates the formation of the English Empire (British after the Union of England and  Scotland in 1707). I try to comprehend this subject in a transatlantic sense rather than from an ‘American’ or ‘imperial’ perspective. I am also very much interested in the character of colonial American societies and their connections with the wider world, in early modern Europe and in the expansion of European interests after 1400 and the effects thereof, and in historiography (especially of the United States).



My first book, Conceiving Carolina:  Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York and Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), offers the first systematic treatment of the early history of South Carolina in over a century. Based on extensive archival work in Great Britain and in South Carolina, as well as on the printed primary sources from the period, my investigation determined, inter alia, that the degree of West Indian socio-political influence on Carolina, has been exaggerated and, correspondingly, a Caribbean-style society did not develop naturally or inevitably on this part of the North American mainland. Rather, the ruthless behavior of the ‘Goose Creek men’ created constant tumult in the province, deterring European migration and discouraging planters on the scene. This political activity, along with other factors, such as disease, competition from other colonies, and a stagnating English population resulted in the creation of a slave society in South Carolina. Most importantly, these ‘Goose Creek men’, the key political characters in the colony, who derived their status and power from their control of the illegal Indian slave trade, did not generally behave in an anti-proprietary manner as has generally been believed; their attitude towards government and society seems more Hobbesian than anything else. Thus, we cannot describe the proprietary regime which governmed the colony for almost the first sixty years of its existence, as inherently unsuitable or doomed to failure, as it had been generally characterized. Instead, the ‘revolution’ of 1719 against the proprietary government that resulted in the royal takeover of the colony (not completed until 1729) stemmed from the crisis of the Yamassee War (1715-16), which, in turn, arose from the rapacious character of Carolina's ‘dealers in Indians’.

I presented aspects of this research at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, and the annual conferences of the Omonhundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World (at the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University), the Society of Early Americanists, the South Carolina Historical Association, as well as the inaugural Transatlantic Studies Conference at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

 

My interest in early South Carolina has, as a matter of course, led me to a closer study of the history of slavery in the Atlantic World.  While conducting research at the Bodleain Library (University of Oxford) during my sabbatical in the Spring of 2004, I found the text of one of the province's early statutes on slavery that had been missing for some three centuries.  My transcription of this document, accompanied by my analysis of its significance, 'The 1701 "Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves":  Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina',  appeared in the April 2007 number of the William and Mary Quarterly.  http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/wmq/index.htm 


My Carolina project also led to a more wide-ranging project entailing a collection of essays which I co-edited, with Professor Bertrand Van Ruymbeke of  Université de Paris VIII-St Denis—Constructing Early Modern Empires:  Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750—which was published in March 2007 with  Brill Academic Publishers.  This volume reassesses the phenomenon of proprietorships—and, by extension, the transplantation of ‘Old World’ values and practices to the ‘New World’—in the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires. It takes a comparative approach and provide analyses of colonial development from Quebec/New France to Brasil and from the English West Indies to the Illinois country. The contributors come from England and the Netherlands, as well as from this country and from France.  Three of these contributors participated in a session at the Seventh Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference held at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) in July 2001.


In the fall of 2007, I was invited to make a contribution to an international conference held at the Université de Bordeaux III--Michel de         Montaigne, which included papers on the leadership of colonial European societies from Russian Siberia to the Belgian Congo to the Dutch         East Indies.  My paper, 'Big Fish in a Bigger Transatlantic Pond:  the Social and Political Leadership of Early Modern Anglo-American              Colonies' tracks and discusses the 'state of play' in our understanding of those who assumed control of English settlements during the                  seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  These papers will be published in C. Laux, F-J. Ruggiu, and P. Singaravelou (eds.),  Servir outre-mer: Les élites européenes dans les colonies du début du XVI siècle au milieu du XXe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming).

While finishing my book on South Carolina, I started a new project that investigates the history of the English Empire between the resumption of English exploration of the North American coast in 1602 and the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658.  I  moved backward chronologically about a half-century from my Carolina work to begin an examination into the organization, motives, and activities of the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth (both chartered by King James I in 1606) and the world in which these concerns and their contemporary entities were conceived and developed.  I will complete the book manuscript over the summer of 2008 and it will appear in 2009 as The English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown.  The volume will constitute part of the 'Empires in Perspective' series published by Pickering & Chatto in London, http://www.pickeringchatto.com/.    

I presented the first fruits of this investigation in a paper that restores some of the links between Jacobean politics and early English colonization that revolved around Anna of Denmark, James I's queen-consort (d. 1617) at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in Denver in October 2001.  An improved version of this essay appears in Carole Levin, Jo Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds., High and Mighty Queens of Great Britain (New York:  Palgrave, 2003), 45-59.  I later presented a related paper on ‘The Ambiguous Crucible of Empire:  Theater, Politics, and Colonization in Jacobean England’ at the North American Conference on British Studies in Boston in November of 2006, http://www.nacbs.org/.  (The NACBS also sponsors a prize for undergraduate essays on British history subjects.)

The nature of my inquiry then necessitated research at the Huntington Library (Pasadena, CA), at Yale University (where I was Alexander O. Vietor Fellow in Early American History and Cartography at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), and at the Bodleian, the National Archives of Great Britain (formerly, Public Record Office, and the British Library while I was on leave and a return to the National Archives and the British Library, as well as a visit to the Centre for Kentish Studies in Maidstone in the summer of 2007.

After returning from my sabbatical, I gave a paper on ‘Parliaments and English Politics: Charles I and Virginia, 1638’ at the Tenth International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard Universityin August 2005; the revised version of this effort subsequently appeared as 'Charles I, Virginia, and the Idea of Atlantic History' in Itinerario (the journal of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (‘FEEGI’) jointly housed at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the University of Oregon in this country, http://uoregon.edu/~dnm/feegi/), 30:2 (2006), 33-53.

In addition, I completed an essay on the ill-fated effort by certain English Catholics in the 1630s, spearheaded by the lawyer Sir Edmund Plowden, to colonize 'New Albion', the area between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, under a charter issued, uniquely, by the government of Ireland.  Having presented this research at the Honors Center on the SUNY--New Paltz campus http://www.newpaltz.edu/honors/honorscenter.html and at the Columbia University Seminar on Early American History and Culture http://www.columbia.edu/cu/seminars/earlyam/, the fully fledged article will appear in the first  number of Itinerario for 2008.

Of course, scholars have spilled a lot of ink on this subject already, but almost all of it has gone either towards explaining the settlement of the Chesapeake region (with an eye, consciously or otherwise, on the origins of the United States--in 1783) or, to a lesser degree, on charting the expansion of England. I plan to carefully reconsider the context in which Jamestown, Massachusetts Bay, and other colonies were founded (in the period from 1605-41), just as I tried to do for South Carolina; to see who was involved (and who was not) and to determine what English people thought about reality, including colonization and overseas trade, at the turn of the seventeenth century. When we understand the views and behavior of this time, as well as the record permits us, then we can better understand the consequences it generated, including American settlements and an English Empire (British after the Union with Scotland in 1707).

STUDY ABROAD IN SCOTLAND

          I serve as liaison for the Study Abroad program for  New Paltz (and other SUNY) students to study  in Scotland at the University of Dundee.  I travelled to Dundee in the summer of 2002 and had  the chance to inspect the facilities at the university and its environs.  I came away impressed and the students who have studied there have had wonderful experiences invariably.  The campus is adjacent to the city center and its neighborhood reflects its predominantly student population.  The university's  staff are highly professional and very keen to make overseas students feel welcome.  Dundee, Scotland's fourth largest city with a population of some 150,000 people, is about ninety minutes by train from Glasgow, Scotland's largest city and is located close to the foothills of the Highlands and midway (about 75 minutes) between Edinburgh, the nation's capital and cultural center, and Aberdeen, Scotland's third largest city with its own attractions.  It has regular transport connections to London, Ireland,and to the the continent.  For further information, please e-mail me and/or visit the University of Dundee site,  http://www.dundee.ac.uk/

COURSE OFFERINGS and TEXTS for FALL 2008

QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDE TO EFFECTIVE PROSE FOR ALL STUDENTS

HIS470/1 AGE OF DISCOVERY, 1415-1780 (This course meets the the university 'Writing Intensive' requirement as well as the 'Research' requirement for the History (Liberal Arts) major plan.  Alternatively, it may be used to fulfill an ‘upper-division elective’ for History and History/Education majors or majors can apply it to either their ‘Europe' or 'non-Western' requirements)

TEXTS (available at the University Bookstore)

QUICK AND DIRTY GUIDE TO RESEARCHING AND WRITING HISTORY

HIS151/1 AMERICAN HEROES  (This course fulfills the 'USST' requirement for General Education, but registration is limited to first-year students.  It does count for History and History/Education major plans)

TEXTS (all available at the University Bookstore)

 

OTHER WEBSITES OF INTEREST