Groundless

Early American history has become destabilizing. Just two years after Kathleen Donegan described American colonization as an “unsettling act,” Gregory Evans Dowd unearths the groundlessness that underpins so much of early American history.1 “Panic” born of rumor, Dowd writes, “dislodged populations; moved governments; and altered the course of policy, diplomacy, and battle” (291). Drawing upon previous scholarship by Marc Bloch, Georges Lefebvre, and Tamotsu Shibutani, Dowd explores the social nature of rumor on the early American frontier, a fertile seedbed for violence, insecurity, and doubt. While Groundless is carefully rooted in the archives that discuss early American Indians, the book argues more broadly for the value of studying rumor, making it a valuable resource for a wider audience of social history scholars. Rumors had power in early America—as historians of gossip and conspiracies have already shown. They tempted European adventurers into the North American interior in search of gold, in ways that abetted the dispossession of Indians. Indians’ own rumors ascribed blame for smallpox epidemics. Rumors sketched nightmares of Indians being enslaved, or Indians colluding with imperial powers. They threatened alliances, exposed internal divisions, and precipitated bloodshed. Although rumors are untrustworthy, Dowd argues that they contain a “rough but genuine empiricism”: since rumors demanded investigation, they became opportunities for Indian and colonial communities in ambiguous circumstances to explain the unexplained (378). Indeed, they became “part of the objective reality left to us from the past, texts that both yielded and shaped perceptions” (379). Rumors drew their power from the communities that passed them around.

Criminology · Frontier · Gossip · Media studies · Political science · Power (physics) · Rumor · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law