Tag: France

Small Brass Image of a Man

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Described in a 1653 letter by the Puritan John Eliot, no known version of this object exists today.

Creators: Unknown, likely French.

Date of Creation: ca. 1650s

Place of origin: Likely France

Physical measurements: Unknown.

Materials: Brass

Process by which it was made: Casting

Current location: N/A

Further Reading

Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: Remapping a New History of King Philip’s War. 2018. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. 

Cipolla, Craig, editor. 2017. Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American

Archaeology, Tuscon, AZ, University of Arizona Press. 

Clark, Michael P., editor. 2003. The Eliot Tracts. Westport, CT: Praeger. 

Greer, Allan, editor. 2019. The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth

Century North America, Second Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 

Information contributed by Marie B. Taylor.

Relation de ce qui s’est passé en La Nouuelle France, es années 1640. et 1641

A section from the seventeenth-century “Jesuit Relations,” which presents the dying words of Chiwatenhwa, a legendary “first convert” among the Wendats.

Creators: Joseph Chiwatenhwa [Wendat]; Barthélemy Vimont; Paul Le Jeune; Jérôme Lalemant

Date of Creation: Printed 1642

Place of origin: Paris

Materials: Paper

Process by which it was made: Letter-press printing

Current location: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania; Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Information contributed by John Pollack.

Atlas de la Confédération Argentine

The first atlas of Argentina, written for the country’s new government by a French geographer.

Creator: Victor Martin de Moussy, with assistance and preface by Louis Bouvet

Date of Creation: 1869

Place of origin: Paris

Physical measurements: 48cm x 34cm, 24 pages of text, 29 plates

Materials: Paper

Process by which it was made: Print

Current location: Multiple copies.

Further Reading

Andermann, Jens.  The Optic of the State.  Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil.  Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

Bernstein, David.  How the West Was Drawn:  Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West.  Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Craib, Raymond B.  Cartographic Mexico:  A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 2004.

Monmonier, Mark.  “The Rise of the National Atlas.”  In Images of the World:  The Atlas through History, eds. John A. Wolter and Ronald E. Grim.  New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1997.  369–399.

Solnit, Rebecca.  Infinite City:  A San Francisco Atlas.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2010.

Information contributed by Brian Bockelman.

Réfutation d’un écrit des ex-Colons réfugiés à la Jamaïque, intitulé

Courtesy of Duke University Libraries.

An early nineteenth-century pamphlet from the northern monarchy of Haiti.

Creator: Chevalier de Prézeau

Date of Creation: 1815

Place of origin: Cap-Henry, Haiti

Physical measurements: 41 p. 20 cm.

Materials: Paper

Process by which it was made: Print

Current location: Duke University Libraries

Courtesy of Duke University Libraries.

Further Reading

Baron de Vastey, The Colonial System Unveiled, trans. and ed. Chris Bongie (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014).

Doris L. Garraway, “Print, Publics, and the Scene of Universal Equality in the Kingdom of Henry Christophe,” L’Esprit Créateur 56, no. 1 (2016): 82–100. 

Marlene Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 

David Geggus, ed., The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014).

Chelsea Stieber, Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

Information contributed by Chelsea Stieber.