Conor William Howard

“Imagined Homelands” examines how settlers in Maine and New Brunswick developed connections to the places they claimed as homelands and to the empires for which they held allegiance. This project explores a wide range of social, political, cultural and especially environmental factors that led some settlers to view themselves as the rightful claimants to lands taken from Indigenous peoples. At the same time, my dissertation seeks to understand some of the factors which led to the cultural and political divergences of English-speaking North Americans in the United States and Canada in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and to provide a firmer understanding of how many North Americans of European ancestry have come to think of North America as “home.”

Moreover, it focuses on the intersection of landscape, culture, and settler understandings of ecology and climate to investigate how Mainers and New Brunswickers mobilized beliefs about land use, history, and political identity to stake their claim to land. Overall, I argue that Euro-American claims to land lie not only in spurious, imported, legal arguments and systematic disavowal of Indigenous presence, but also in a far-reaching cultural and intellectual reimaging of space and of place. Moreover, these claims are built upon settlers coming to view their claimed homelands—places like Maine and New Brunswick—as fundamentally distinct from the Indigenous Wabanakia (Dawnland) which occupies the same physical space, as they reimagined Indigenous spaces as settler homelands. Through this process, settlers strove to lay claims to land not merely as conquerors or through legal frameworks where in the users and improvers of land could claim it as their own, but rather by imagining or presenting themselves as the true first inhabitants of their imagined, often idealized visions of North America.