Jonathan Quint

As a historian of Early America, I focus on the complex relationships between Indigenous communities and European and American empires in the Great Lakes basin. I draw from the literatures of Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Atlantic World, North American borderlands, global histories of empire, labor history, and social history.

My dissertation explains the formation of a tripartite Indigenous-U.S.-Canadian borderland in the Great Lakes between 1760-1820. I examine the interplay of various political strategies, social tactics, discursive methods, and economic practices to reveal how sovereignty and territory were communicated, enforced, and contested within a multiethnic region inhabited by Anishinaabe, Wendat, French, and Anglo-American settler populations.

Publications and Writing

"New Gnadenhutten, Moravian Missionaries, and Ojibwe Land Tenure on the Clinton River, 1781–1787," Ethnohistory (2023) 70 (1): 25–44.https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-10117246

Review of Karen Marrero's Detroit's Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth-Century: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/883493

Several short pieces for the William L. Clements Library:

• Empire and Encounter at Detroit: https://clements.umich.edu/sterling-pt1-empire-and-encounter-at-detroit/
• Habitant, Hired Labor, and the Enslaved: https://clements.umich.edu/sterling-pt2-empire-and-encounter-at-detroit/
• Native Nations, Native Labor: https://clements.umich.edu/sterling-pt3-empire-and-encounter-at-detroit/
• Review of Dunnigan's Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701-1838: https://clements.umich.edu/book-review-frontier-metropolis-picturing-early-detroit-1701-1838/

Areas of Interest

• Indigenous - Settler Imperial Histories (1760-1820)
• Borderlands
• British & French Atlantic Worlds
• The North American Fur Trade
• Natural & Built Environments