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Session A-3: Across The Wide Missouri: Illinois & Early Exploration Of The Trans-Mississippi West, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Jul 2016

Session A-3: Across The Wide Missouri: Illinois & Early Exploration Of The Trans-Mississippi West, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Illinois History is often perceived as a contradiction in terms. Until the arrival of Abraham Lincoln, most folks think that nothing of any note happened here. This presentation will address the French traders and explorers from the Illinois Country who pushed west up the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers in the century preceding Lewis and Clark's more famous jaunt. The two knew of these French travelers only too well and recruited a half dozen Illinois French at Fort Massac and Kaskaskia to show them how to get to the "unknown". The effect these men had on the Plains was profound.


Session B-1: The Prize: Teaching Early Illinois History To Secondary School Students, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Jul 2016

Session B-1: The Prize: Teaching Early Illinois History To Secondary School Students, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

This presentation will outline ways in which Illinois can be placed at the center of the story of colonial America and the events which triggered the Revolutionary War. The discussion will be accompanied by a bibliography of relevant secondary readings for instructors, lists of public domain primary sources for students, websites where these can be obtained, lists of Illinois historical sites connected to these materials, and suggestions as to how to interpret these sites for students.


Review Of Rethinking The Fur Trade: Cultures Of Exchange In An Atlantic World, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Feb 2015

Review Of Rethinking The Fur Trade: Cultures Of Exchange In An Atlantic World, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

The engine behind [European imperialism and colonization] was the fur trade, a vast, complex, too often misunderstood commerce that drew Europeans deep into the interior of the continent, enmeshed its native peoples in the global economy, and helped trigger almost 125 years of imperial war for possession of America. Susan Sleeper-Smith has done this important subject a considerable service with Rethinking the Fur Trade. In a massive, elegantly appointed anthology, she has provided graduate students with a comprehensive summary of modern scholarship in the field, instructors with a sophisticated and variegated classroom tool, and scholars with an invaluable historiographical reference.


Review Of Fur, Fortune, And Empire: The Epic History Of The Fur Trade In America, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Feb 2015

Review Of Fur, Fortune, And Empire: The Epic History Of The Fur Trade In America, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Eric J. Dolin’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire is a concise, engaging, and remarkably comprehensive survey of the American fur trade. Though aimed at a general readership, the author presents a broad-ranging, sophisticated story of the commerce, supported by nearly a hundred pages of citations. The author says that the inspiration for the book came from a passage in James Truslow Adams’s The Founding of New England: “The Bible and the Beaver were the two mainstays of the Plymouth Colony in its early years.” He knew something about Pilgrims and something about the fur trade, but nothing of the Pilgrim fur …


Session A-2: Encountering Ourselves: American Indians And The Age Of Revolution, Claiborne Skinner Feb 2015

Session A-2: Encountering Ourselves: American Indians And The Age Of Revolution, Claiborne Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

This session will explore how Europeans who encountered the indigenous peoples of North America came to see them as a window into their own past. This provided philosophers and political theorists with a means by which to critique Baroque civilization. The result was Locke's "Natural Law," and Rousseau's Noble Savage." The notion that the world had moved away from freedom and liberty by becoming civilized became a potent argument for both the American and French Revolutions.


The Upper Country: French Enterprise In The Colonial Great Lakes, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Feb 2015

The Upper Country: French Enterprise In The Colonial Great Lakes, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

The Upper Country melds myth and conventional history to provide a memorable tale of French designs in the middle of what became the United States. Putting the reader on the battlefields, at the trading posts, and on the rivers with voyageurs and their allies from the Indian nations, Claiborne Skinner reveals the saintly missionaries and jolly fur traders of popular myth as agents of a hard-nosed, often ruthless, imperial endeavor. Skinner's engaging narrative takes the reader through daily life at posts like Forts Saint Louis and Michilimakinac, illuminates the complexities of interracial marriage with the courtship of Michel Aco at …


Rethinking The Fur Trade: Cultures Of Exchange In An Atlantic World, Claiborne A. Skinner Feb 2015

Rethinking The Fur Trade: Cultures Of Exchange In An Atlantic World, Claiborne A. Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Review of: "Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World," edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith.


Illinois And The American Revolution, Claiborne Skinner Feb 2015

Illinois And The American Revolution, Claiborne Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

No abstract provided.


Session A-3: Across The Wide Missouri: Illinois & Early Exploration Of The Trans-Mississippi West, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr. Feb 2013

Session A-3: Across The Wide Missouri: Illinois & Early Exploration Of The Trans-Mississippi West, Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

Illinois History is often perceived as a contradiction in terms. Until the arrival of Abraham Lincoln, most folks think that nothing of any note happened here. This presentation will address the French traders and explorers from the Illinois Country who pushed west up the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers in the century preceding Lewis and Clark's more famous jaunt. The two knew of these French travelers only too well and recruited a half dozen Illinois French at Fort Massac and Kaskaskia to show them how to get to the "unknown". The effect these men had on the Plains was profound.


Session B-1: The Prize: Teaching Early Illinois History To Secondary School Students, Claiborne Skinner Mar 2012

Session B-1: The Prize: Teaching Early Illinois History To Secondary School Students, Claiborne Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

This presentation will outline ways in which Illinois can be placed at the center of the story of colonial America and the events which triggered the Revolutionary War. The discussion will be accompanied by a bibliography of relevant secondary readings for instructors, lists of public domain primary sources for students, websites where these can be obtained, lists of Illinois historical sites connected to these materials, and suggestions as to how to interpret these sites for students.