Constructing the Ocean’s Edge: Toward an Environmental History of the Atlantic World

This presentation examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the North Atlantic shore during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern coastal imaginaries shape the contours of cultural contact and exchange among Native Americans and Europeans? And how did those imaginaries shape the ways both groups interacted with coastal spaces in more material ways? A closer look at the ways coasts blurred the bounds of natural knowledge, conventions of conduct, and even the distinction between good and evil, may help us write uncertainty into an otherwise linear narrative of human progress, and, by extension, global expansion.