CANR
WORK TITLE: Squanto
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CITY: New York
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LAST VOLUME: CA 395
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Vassar College, B.A., 2001; Oxford University, M.St., 2003; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and historian. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, assistant professor, worked for five years; Barnard College, New York, NY, assistant professor of history, 2015—. New York Historical Society, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, 2012-13.
MEMBER:Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.
AWARDS:Bancroft Prize in American History, 2016, for The Saltwater Frontier; numerous fellowships and grants.
WRITINGS
Contributor to academic journals, including Common- place, Early American Studies, Reviews in American History, Slate, TIME, Cambridge History of America and the World, and William and Mary Quarterly.
SIDELIGHTS
Andrew Lipman is an educator and historian. He earned degrees from Vassar College and Oxford University before completing a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. Lipman was an assistant professor at Syracuse University for five years before becoming an assistant professor of history at Barnard College in 2005. From 2012 to 2013 he served as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New York Historical Society. Lipman’s academic research interests center on early American history. He has published articles in a range of academic journals, including Common- place, Early American Studies, Reviews in American History, Slate, and William and Mary Quarterly. His research has received support from Harvard University’s International Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World, the American Philosophical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Mystic Seaport Museum.
Lipman published his first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, in 2015. Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, the account proposes that studies of the contested frontier between Native Americans and European colonists have largely neglected to consider the coasts and waterways as a significant part of this territory. Lipman investigates the interaction between these two groups in the seventeenth century to show how traditions and practices of various Native American communities were threatened by European encroachment even before territorial encroachment moved inland. Lipman shows how communities reoriented themselves on the ocean as the European trade settlements displaced them from their lands.
Reviewing the book in the Junto Web site, Bryan Rindfleisch claimed that “Lipman recovers the astonishing maritime contexts of seventeenth-century America, where both Indigenous and European peoples encountered, collaborated with, and fought against one another on the water just as much as they did on the land.” Minty concluded that “Lipman has done a remarkable job of challenging us to see the Indigenous and American past in a different light. And I think it would be beneficial, if not a useful exercise, to consider if the saltwater frontier might similarly change how scholars view Indigenous and European encounters, relationships, and conflicts in other parts of (vast) North America.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that Lipman’s description of how the lifestyle of the coastal Algonquians were challenged by British and Dutch colonizers are “vivid and frequently agonizing.” The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded by insisting that “Lipman’s impressive work is crucial reading for historians as well as environmental studies scholars.”
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Lipman’s second book, the biography Squanto, A Native Odyssey, is the first book for adult readers that explores the real life of the Wampanoag Indian, born as Tisquantum and later known as Squanto, who made the first Thanksgiving possible. Lipman uses a blend of historical fact and cultural observations of life at the time to reconstruct Tisquantum’s life as an interpreter, teacher, counselor, and diplomat. The book fills in some gaps of Tisquantum’s history. Born in the late 1500s in Patuxet in what is today Massachusetts, Tisquantum was captured by an English captain in 1614, sold into slavery, and taken to Spain, London, and Newfoundland. Although struck by culture shock, he used his skills to adapt, learn his captors’ languages, and persuade them of his value as a guide in the New England territory.
Tisquantum eventually escaped and found his way back to Patuxet in 1619, now renamed Plymouth by the English settlers. Tisquantum helped the Mayflower colonists survive their first winter and inspired the legend of the first Thanksgiving. Tisquantum later used his linguistic skills to his advantage, but when he tried to depose a Wampanoag leader, he spelled his own demise and later died of a fever.
In the Wall Street Journal, Melanie Kirkpatrick called the book “a captivating, elegantly written biography…The laudable objective is to give the Wampanoag people their due in the often-misrepresented Thanksgiving story.” Commenting on the author’s use of newly discovered historical documents in Spain, Siddharth Handa noted online in Open Letters Review: “Lipman produces a trenchant synthesis out of the patchwork quilt of primary documents we have on Squanto, complicating everything he touches, and upending the easy generalizations this figure has attracted through the centuries.”
A writer in Kirkus Reviews remarked that Lipman restores the complexity of Tisquantum’s life, and said: “Engaging and well researched, this book about the mysterious life of a Native American icon will appeal primarily to historians and those with an interest in early American culture.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, October, 2016, Christopher L. Pastore, review of The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, pp. 1234-1236.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2024, review of Squanto.
Publishers Weekly, September 21, 2015, review of The Saltwater Frontier, p. 63.
Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2015, Kathleen Duvall, review of The Saltwater Frontier.
ONLINE
Barnard College Web site, https://barnard.edu/ (August 26, 2016), author profile.
Junto, https:// earlyamericanists.com/ (April 5, 2016), Bryan Rindfleisch, review of The Saltwater Frontier.
Open Letters Review, https://openlettersreview.com/ (September 14, 2024) Siddharth Handa, review of Squanto.
Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/ (September 17, 2024), Melanie Kirkpatrick, “‘Squanto’ Review: An Encounter at Plymouth.”
Andrew Lipman
Andrew Lipman
Associate Professor of History
Department
History
Office Hours
Milstein 802 / Office Hours: Th 3-5pm
Contact
212-854-5046
alipman@barnard.edu
Andrew Lipman joined the Barnard faculty in 2015 after five years teaching at Syracuse University. His research interests include the Atlantic World, Early America, Native Americans, violence, technology, and the environment. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, won the 2016 Bancroft Prize in American History. His second book, Squanto: A Native Odyssey, was released in 2024.
Lipman’s work has appeared in The Cambridge History of America and the World, Common-place, Early American Studies, Reviews in American History, and The William and Mary Quarterly and he’s contributed to Slate and TIME. His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, The Huntington Library, The International Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard, the John Carter Brown Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the New-York Historical Society. Lipman is an elected member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.
At Barnard, Lipman teaches a variety of courses, including “Introduction to American History to 1865,” “Early America to 1763,” “Revolutionary America, 1763-1815,” “Colonial Gotham: The History of New York City, 1609-1776,” and “A History of Violence: Force and Power in Early America.” He has also led graduate seminars at Columbia on Early American History and Native American History.
Education
Select Publications
Selected Honors and Fellowships
Elected Member, Society of American Historians, 2024
Elected Member, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2019
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2017-2018
Elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2016
Bancroft Prize in American History, 2016
Finalist for the New England Society Book Award, 2016
Honorable Mention for the PROSE Award in U.S. History, 2016
Mellon Foundation Fellowship, New-York Historical Society, 2012-2013
Franklin Grant, American Philosophical Society, 2012
Short-Term Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, 2012
Travel Grant, Harvard Atlantic Seminar, 2011
Short-Term Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2011
Appleby-Mosher Research Grant, Syracuse University, 2011
School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Completion Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2009
Cochran Travel Grant, University of Pennsylvania, 2008
Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2004-2009
First-Class Honours, University of Oxford, 2003
Travel Grant, History Faculty, University of Oxford, 2002-2003
Maguire Fellowship for Graduate Study, Vassar College, 2002-2003
Revell Carr Fellowship, Williams-Mystic Program, 2001
Sophia Chen Zen History Thesis Prize, Vassar College, 2001
Clyde and Sally Griffen American History Prize, Vassar College, 2001
General and Departmental Honors, Vassar College, 2001
Professor Andrew Lipman Publishes New Book on the Life of Squanto
September 25, 2024
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Andrew Lipman
On September 17, 2024, Andrew Lipman, associate professor of history, published a new book titled Squanto: A Native Odyssey.
In this work, Lipman explores the life of Squanto, the Native American man who made the first Thanksgiving possible in the 17th century. The majority of schoolchildren in the United States are only taught about Squanto in the form of holiday legend. Lipman provides a closer look at the historical significance of Squanto’s actions while analyzing the mysteries that still surround his life story.
The book explores how Squanto escaped bondage under the English after a ship captain kidnapped him in 1614, how he returned home, and why he helped the English Mayflower passengers after having been enslaved by an Englishman.
Published by Yale University Press, Squanto: A Native Odyssey is Lipman’s second book. It marks an unprecedented reconstruction of Squanto’s narrative, from his upbringing in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet to his journey in captivity across the Atlantic, his career as an interpreter, and his enigmatic death.
The biography was positively reviewed in The Wall Street Journal by Melanie Kirkpatrick who praises Lipman’s “captivating, elegantly written biography,” for successfully giving “the Wampanoag people their due in the often-misrepresented Thanksgiving story.”
Lipman, Andrew SQUANTO Yale Univ. (NonFiction None) $28.00 9, 17 ISBN: 9780300238778
The story of the Native American who helped Plymouth's English settlers survive their first year in the New World.
Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, was the Wampanoag Indian who served as the interpreter and guide for colonists who arrived on theMayflower in 1621. American popular culture has preferred to render him as a simple "friend of the white man"; in this book, Barnard history professor Lipman restores his complexity. The author explores both the known and unknown elements of Squanto's life to argue that he was a man motivated by "communal concernsand his personal ambition." Lipman initially examines Tisquantum's early years in Plymouth, known to Natives as Patuxet. In the absence of written records, he chooses an ethnographic approach, grounding his observations in "daily life, material culture, language, religion, social structure, and government" in Wampanoag society. Lipman then follows the adult Squanto, who was sold into the European slave trade, on his forced travels to Malagá, London, and Newfoundland. Though little is known of Tisquantum's time in exile, Lipman offers glimpses of captive life through the stories of other captured Natives. Lipman then reenvisions Squanto's traumatic homecoming to a Patuxet ravaged by plague. Tisquantum navigated this new world using two historically documented skills: his linguistic fluency and ability to persuade, both of which had served him well during captivity. The author suggests that during this time, Squanto became deluded about his powers. His attempt to depose a Wampanoag leader named Ousamequin, "revealed his arrogant, conniving, and reckless side" and led to his downfall, followed by his death from what a white settler called "an Indean feavor." Engaging and well researched, this book about the mysterious life of a Native American icon will appeal primarily to historians and those with an interest in early American culture.
A balanced, thoughtful blend of biography and history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Lipman, Andrew: SQUANTO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802865231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d9466c4. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Squanto by Andrew Lipman
September 14, 2024 Siddharth Handa
Squanto: A Native Odyssey
By Andrew Lipman
Yale University Press 2024
An unalloyed pleasure of reading new biographies lies in stumbling on that rare book promising to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle of history and dust the cobwebs off a personage languishing under a pile of stale assumptions. For individuals plagued by a spotty historical record, such an attempt is always a high wire act where the historian is obliged to balance well-informed conjecturing against the urge to overreach, and the results can either enlighten or devolve into inane gossip. “There are good reasons no one has written a stand-alone study of him before”, writes Andrew Lipman (associate professor of history at Columbia University) in Squanto: A Native Odyssey, frankly admitting the challenges in the path of any biographer of Tisquantum, the man more commonly known as Squanto.
Best remembered for being an early liaison between the Native American population in Southern New England and the Mayflower Pilgrims, he was a member of the Patuxet tribe of Wampanoags, leading an eventful life the complexities of which have largely been lost. Squanto first appears on the historical stage in 1614, as a captive of English adventurers, destined to a future of slavery that took him from his native Patuxet (in and around modern day Plymouth, Massachusetts) to far flung places like Spain, London, and Newfoundland. Trapped on this five year long trip of barbarity, Squanto faced immense cultural shocks and challenges with an admirable knack for adaptation, not least of which entailed learning his captors’ tongue and playing an active role in persuading the English of his value as a guide in the land of his birth, a double edged bid to return home. After his return to a world devastated by sudden epidemics, Squanto vanished from the historical record again before resurfacing in 1620 as a peace broker between the local Pokanokets and the beleaguered settlers recently arrived on their doorstep aboard the Mayflower, betraying dimensions in his personality operating above any crude thirst for revenge on the English, with the ancillary effect of securing a kind of kitschy posterity.
Two documents recently discovered in provincial Spain helps to flesh out and rethink the narrative around Squanto’s stint as a slave, and on the face of it, these appear to be the only new archival discoveries informing the narrative being created in this book. Necessity breeds it’s own brilliance however, and Lipman produces a trenchant synthesis out of the patchwork quilt of primary documents we have on Squanto, complicating everything he touches, and upending the easy generalizations this figure has attracted through the centuries. The lack of sources invites a broader study of Squanto’s world, a penetration into the lives of both his own people and the alien cultures he attempted to build a bridge towards, and the book soars towards this goal on the back of intelligent thinking and an impressive array of interdisciplinary research.
A limpid examination of the interplay between the indigenous tribes on the Eastern seaboard of America and the European sailors repeatedly triggering contact with them, is the other book hidden inside this biography of Squanto; a necessary approach to make any kind of conjectures about his early life and probable psychology, and yet, becoming a beguiling panoply of reflections on that world on it’s own. From explorations into the nature of Wampanoag language and religion, to features of geography and kinship that Squanto would have developed his interiority under; from a study into European contact with tribes neighbouring Squanto’s own, forming a clearer picture of the kinds of pressures to avoid or engage with the aliens pressuring his people, to a description of traditional Patuxet hazing and coming of age ceremonies informing the probable nature Squanto brought to bear profitably on his captors, the book freely dispenses with such nuggets of insight, sometimes reaching rhetorical apotheosis in a passage like:
Tisquantum, that teller of tales, avoided the false certainty of a marker like Plymouth Rock. He preferred a verbally preserved poetic nothingness over a heavy-handed granite somethingness. He knew that in time a forgotten hole [a traditional Wampanoag signifier for any memorable event] would fill on it’s own, so the absence of dirt represented the presence of historians [Wampanoags kept such holes clear of dirt, in memory of the signified event]. It was reminiscent of the absentative suffix in his language, that grammatical convention that let speakers recall a lost person without speaking their name. The missing name in a Wampanoag sentence, like a missing piece of earth alongside a Wampanoag path, demonstrated reverence for those who came before. The search for Squanto’s legacy will always end up at that particular place where his body cannot be found but his memory lives on.
If “[as Squanto knew himself] … an interpreter’s work is never done”, this is a fine rendering of a world often lost in interpretation.
Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi
“Squanto” Review: An Encounter at Plymouth
Squanto traveled the Atlantic long before meeting the Pilgrims. Learning the role of interpreter, he made his language skill an asset.
Melanie Kirkpatrick
Caption
‘Squanto’ Review: An Encounter at Plymouth
Squanto traveled the Atlantic long before meeting the Pilgrims. Learning the role of interpreter, he made his language skill an asset.
By Melanie Kirkpatrick
Sept. 17, 2024 3:07 pm ET
If the name Squanto doesn’t ring a bell, ask an 8-year-old. The story of the Native American who helped the Pilgrims survive their first desperate year in what is now Plymouth, Mass., has become a staple of elementary-school curricula. The laudable objective is to give the Wampanoag people their due in the often-misrepresented Thanksgiving story.
Andrew Lipman accomplishes this task and more in “Squanto: A Native Odyssey,” a captivating, elegantly written biography of the man Plymouth Gov. William Bradford declared “a special instrument sent of God.” Mr. Lipman, who teaches history at Barnard College, reconstructs the remarkable life and times of the Pilgrims’ interpreter, teacher, counselor and diplomatic go-between while drawing a portrait of the Wampanoag culture that shaped him. It appears that “Squanto” is the first book for adult readers on this intriguing figure in early American history.
Squanto’s life was brief and eventful. Born near the end of the 16th century, he grew up in the coastal New England village of Patuxet, which the Pilgrims settled and renamed Plymouth. Kidnapped in 1614 by an English explorer who planned (but failed) to sell him on the slave market in Málaga, Spain, Squanto found his way to London, where he lived in the household of a merchant who had an interest in opening up a fur trade with the indigenous people of Newfoundland. Mr. Lipman speculates that he had a job operating a wherry—rowboat—on the Thames.