L. H. ROPER
PROFESSOR OF
HISTORY
CO-GENERAL
EDITOR, THE JOURNAL OF EARLY
AMERICAN HISTORY
AND
THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1500-1830 (BOOK SERIES)
(PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR FURTHER INFORMATION)
JFT 620
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:
I WILL RETURN TO FULL-TIME TEACHING AND NO LONGER SERVE AS THE
CHAIR OF
THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AS OF 15 AUGUST 2009. ALL OF MY
ADVISEES WILL STILL HAVE ME AS ADVISOR, BUT
WILL HAVE TO GO TO DR BERNSTEIN TO HAVE MAJOR PLANS APPROVED FOR
GRADUATION AFTER THE FALL TERM STARTS. PLEASE NOTE ALSO THAT I
HAVE RELOCATED TO JFT 620.
NOTICE #2: SUNY--NEW PALTZ WILL HOST A SYMPOSIUM ON THE
IMPACT OF THE EXPLORATION OF THE REGION BY HENRY HUDSON AS PART OF THE
400th ANNIVERSARY OF HUDSON'S 'DISCOVERY' OF THE HUDSON RIVER.
THIS PROGRAM WILL TAKE PLACE ON 25-26 SEPTEMBER AND WE WILL
WELCOME DISTINGUISHED HISTORIANS FROM FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE
NETHERLANDS, AS WELL AS THIS COUNTRY WHO WILL GIVE PRESENTATIONS ON THE
CONTEXTS OF AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HUDSON AND HIS TIMES AND THE
DEVELOPMENTS WHICH FOLLOWED FROM HIS VOYAGE IN 1609. FOR FURTHER
INFORMATION, INCLUDING A COPY OF THE PROGRAMME, PLEASE VISIT www.newpaltz.edu/crreo.
OFFICE HOURS FALL 2009 (EFFECTIVE
24 AUGUST THROUGH 18 DECEMBER)
T 12.30 pm - 2.30 pm
H 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, and will do so in the Fall of 2009) 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).
I will teach these graduate courses as a sequence in 2009-10.
For further information on my courses, please contact
me. I will also
offer my Seminar in History (HIS492)on the subject of ‘Early
Modern
Britain and its Empire’ in the Fall.
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), offered 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’.
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
The 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.
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.), Au sommet de l'Empire: Les
élites
européenes dans les empire coloniaux (XVIe
siècle- XXe siècle) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009).
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. This book has now seen the light of day as The English Empire in America, 1602-1658:
Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), http://www.pickeringchatto.com.
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 Scotlandin
1707). At the end of the year, I will present a further
consideration of these issues at the University of Uppsala in Sweden
next March
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 2009
HIS522/1 COLONIAL AMERICA
TEXT (available at the University Bookstore)
- Alan Taylor, Colonial America (Penguin).
- Additional
readings on electonic reserve, accessible via our course 'Blackboard'
site.
HIS492/1 SEMINAR IN HISTORY (This course
fulfills the campus 'Writing Intensive' requirement. It also
fulfills the 'research' requirement for History (Liberal Arts) major
plans, a 'Europe' OR 'non-West' requirement for Social Studies
(Secondary Education) major plans, and a 'World' OR 'upper-division
elective' for History-Social Studies (Elementary Education) major
plans).
TEXTS (all available at the University Bookstore)
- Simon Schama, Dead Certainties/Unwarranted
Speculations (Vintage).
- Peter C. Mancall (ed.), Envisioning
America.
- Additional
readings on electonic reserve, accessible via our course 'Blackboard'
site.
HIS221/1 UNITED STATES HISTORY TO 1865 (This course fulfills the 'USST'
requirement for General Education 3. It also may fulfill a
'United States' requirement for all History/Social Studies major plans).
TEXTS (all available at the University Bookstore) (all of these
texts are published by Bedford Books/St Martin's Press)
- Roark, Johnson, et al. Envisioning
America, vol. 1.
- Salisbury (ed.), The
Sovereignty and Goodness of God.
- Perdue and Green (eds.), The
Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents.
- Greenberg (ed.), The
Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents.
- Duus (ed.), The Japanese
Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents.
JOURNAL OF EARLY
AMERICAN HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1500-1830 (BOOK
SERIES)
I also serve as one of the co-general editors, with
Dr Jaap Jacobs and Dr Bertrand Van Ruymbeke of a new journal,
The Journal of Early American History,
and a related book series,
The
American Colonies, 1500-1830,
which are publised by Brill Academic Publishers of Leiden, the
Netherlands. I would like to invite authors with appropriate
manuscripts (both book and article-length) to submit their work to
these venues. For articles, please use our electronic 'Editorial
Manager' site,
http://www.editorialmanager.com/jeah/.
For further information, please visit
http://www.brill.nl/jeah.
Prospective authors should feel free to ask me any questions that
they may have.
OTHER WEBSITES OF INTEREST
- The Observer (Sunday) and its daily
counterpart, the Guardian, offer a different perspective on
international news as well as on football (soccer), cricket, film, and
books guardian.unlimited.co.uk
- The Independent (UK newspaper also
provides a different perspective on international news as well as
football and cricket reports but their web site is not as good) http://www.independent.co.uk/www/
- Columbia University Seminar on Early
American History and Culture www.columbia.edu/~rta4/seminarhome.html
- Public Record Office of Great Britain
http://www.pro.gov.uk/
- British Library http://www.bl.uk/
- Royal Commission on Historical
Manuscripts for on-line searches of archival repositories in the United Kingdom
http://www.hmc.gov.uk/
- The Bodleian Library of the University
of Oxford, founded in 1602,
is another important British manuscript repository, particularly for
the early modern period http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/
- South Carolina Department of Archives
and History, Columbia,
SC www.state.sc.us/scdah
- International Seminar in the History
of the Atlantic World, Charles
Warren Center, Harvard University http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/index.html
- South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC www.historic.com/schs/index.html
- Cricket news and ball-by-ball
commentary of Test matches and one-day internationals, CricInfo www-usa.cricket.org
- The Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg,
VA, maintains the leading journal
in the Early American field, the William and Mary Quarterly, maintains
a conference, and has other important information for students of
'colonial America'
and the early modern Atlantic world. THE
OMOHUNDRO INSTITUTE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE WILL HOLD ITS
ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON THE SUNY NEW PALTZ CAMPUS IN JUNE 2011. www.wm.edu/oieahc/
- This site contains a large number of
useful links for students of American (and related) history to 1815 www.h-net.msu.edu/~ieahcweb/links
- The leading professional organization
for historians in this country, the American Historical Association http://www.theaha.org/
- The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, should also be on any researcher's list of
potential document repositories lcweb.loc.gov
- Another useful site for students of
European expansion in the early modern period is www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook03.html
- For an in-depth and detached
perspective on news and sport (including Test Match Special broadcasts
of England's Tests--infinitely superior to the American derivation,
baseball, in every respect), the BBC web site is a must www.bbc.co.uk