When white Americans and European immigrants began to settle on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century, they were so unnerved by the deathly silence, broken only by the keening wind, that some of them went mad. Or at least this is the proposition investigated in a recent article by paleoanthropologist Alex Velez. Since he neither fully replicated their sensory experiences (omitting howling wolves as well as the creatures that shared settlers' sod homes) nor considered the cultural and historical context that would have conditioned their interpretations of said experiences, his study doesn't really explain the reports of "prairie madness."
But it does raise questions about what counts as silence, how silences are created, and how that relates to the physical spaces in which we find ourselves. Scholars have been, well, voluble about silences in the archives over the past several years. Therefore when I was writing my book The Dreadful Word and attempting to mentally reconstruct eighteenth-century criminal speech prosecutions, I was acutely aware of whom I was largely not hearing: white women, indigenous people, and African-descended people. Why were their voices so rarely in these records? And what would this silence have signified in eighteenth-century courts?
I also began wondering where, if not in prosecutions, I might hear these people's profane, abusive, or vulgar speech, or alternately, what sources might record their legally or politically significant behavior. I'm currently attending the Bright Institute at Knox College, a summer workshop for professors of early American history at liberal arts colleges. This year's theme is material culture, and in the course of our discussions I've had occasion to consider an inherited cupboard, a gifted dress, and stolen cloth as potential sources for legal history, particularly when trying to better hear the voices of women and enslaved people.
The spaces where our sources for legal history exist is especially on my mind this summer, as joyful tweets about "returning to the archive at last!" pop up in my timeline. These tweets are often accompanied by a photograph of a repository of documents, text-based sources with which legal historians are perhaps most comfortable. I intend to work in just such an archive in a few weeks. But I'm also thinking about what spaces might hold other kinds of sources that allow different voices to be heard. I'm wondering about the implications of marginalized people using objects to exercise legal power, and what it would mean to write their actions into the story of colonial New England.
None of these ideas is fully fleshed out; I'm essentially sitting in my sod house, listening to the wind and the wolves, trying to sort out my thoughts (without all the settler colonialism, I hope). I am beginning work on my next book, focusing on women's testimony in eighteenth-century New England courts. I am especially interested in the kinds of knowledge and expertise they brought to legal settings (both civil and criminal), how they established their credibility, and how the nature and extent of their participation in court business changed over time.
This is my final guest post for LHB. Thanks again to Dan Ernst for offering me the opportunity to guest blog this past month; I've really enjoyed the experience.
--Kristin A. Olbertson
