The American Palimpsest: A Layered History of Persistence and Change

FAIN: FEL-289520-23

Francois Furstenberg
Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD 21218-2608)

Research and writing leading to a book on the environmental, Indigenous, settler colonial, and imperial history of the continental United States up to the twentieth century. 

I am proposing to write a short (c. 75,000-word) synthetic book that uses the metaphor of the palimpsest to reframe the interconnected histories of environmental, Indigenous, imperial, and settler colonial pasts, exploring the hidden ways in which they have each contributed to shape U.S. history. In contrast to other current paradigms -- frontiers, borderlands, settler colonialism, and others – the proposed book stresses long-term continuities in the American past. It highlights the often erased but always ongoing legacies of environmental, Native American, and imperial history on the United States. As a work of history, the proposed book challenges still-dominant popular understandings of a colonial frontier expanding and wiping out Indigenous societies. As a work of academic synthesis, it integrates multiple frames of analysis and scholarly fields that too often remain separate.