Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds‪.‬

HISTORIANS OF NEITHER THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS OF THE MAINLAND of southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans established there after 1560 have ever been comfortable working with the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as a distinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people of African descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export, low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in the American national context that took shape during the fifty years following the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had, however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern North America into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete political societies come to understand, first, that they had a common interest in relation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had a common identity and composed a distinctive region within it. To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these early colonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degree or another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the South became a self-conscious entity in the years after the Missouri Compromise, residents of those old societies, especially Virginians and South Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. If historians of the South have been content to search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South, and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitous in such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism and decontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and have suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. For more than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has driven historians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that did not treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of the United States and its subset, the South.