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This chapter outlines the Atlantic actor-network approach which aims to contribute to the collective effort to understanding more thoroughly the processes that connected places in Africa, Europe, and America. The chapter also highlights one of the most prominent areas on the map that stretches across Africa and has been a major center of open-range cattle herding for millennia. Several areas of open-range cattle ranching occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century, among them the wetlands known as the Marismas along the lower Guadalquivir River, in Andalusian Spain. Cattle also reached colonial enclaves along the Atlantic coast of South America in the sixteenth century, but not from the Caribbean. Those cattle instead came from Portugal, the Cape Verde Islands, and mainland Africa. Understanding the emergence and particularities of each frontier demands an appreciation of the Atlantic networks that connected them to one another and to Africa and Europe was required.

The treatise known as the Periplous of Pseudo-Skylax survives on 44 pages of a 700-year-old codex in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The manuscript as a whole comprises a set of geographical texts assembled by Markianos of Herakleia, probably in the sixth century AD. The work describes the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, beginning at Gibraltar and proceeding clockwise to return to the same place (and a little way down the Atlantic coast of Africa). We do not know the original name of the work. The introduction examines the history of the manuscript, difficulties of interpretation, and what is known about the author. It addresses date, the debate around the measurements used in the text and what its purpose may have been. Finally it discusses what sort of geography the text offers, its literary features, influences and legacy.

This chapter examines the histories or social relationships indicated at Middle Woodland Swift Creek and Weeden Island burial mounds. Variation in artifact distribution in burial mounds of the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plains are compared and indicate that practices at burial mounds were likely tied to definitions of lineage and kinship. Objects that were deposited at mounds were probably not simply icons that were co-opted by resident kin groups but rather gifts in the sense that they came with obligations and indelible qualities of association; their burial in mounds was the end result of ongoing relationships between lineages or other social groupings. While Swift Creek Complicated Stamped vessels seem likely to have been used to sediment histories of alliance among lineages, east-side caches of vessels in general, and Weeden Island effigy vessels in particular, may require other explanations. Considering mounds as points of social reference, I outline some of the important differences that are apparent among Swift Creek and Weeden Island burial mounds and the types of social interaction that may be indicated with future materials analysis.

This chapter discusses the Atlantic Coast Conference, which was founded in significant part to establish academic integrity and enforce academic standards among its members. One eventual result of those goals was that the ACC decided in 1964 that football and basketball prospects had to score at least 800 on the SAT to qualify for an athletic scholarship. In 1966, it extended this policy to athletes who participated, with or without financial aid, in any intercollegiate sport. During the late 1960s, the 800 rule generated what the Raleigh News and Observer called the “biggest, most controversial, technicality-filled issue in recent league history.” The controversy divided the ACC and threatened to cause its dissolution. After much turmoil, the conference decided to keep the 800 requirement even at the cost of losing one of its charter members, and, consequently, the University of South Carolina withdrew in 1971.

Although a Near Eastern presence had been documented for the “Far West”—namely Portuguese territory—since the nineteenth century, study of the arrival of Eastern Mediterranean populations on the European Atlantic coast expanded considerably in the last twenty years of the twentieth century. In effect, the discovery and excavation of archaeological sites of mostly Mediterranean material culture has almost tripled since the 1980s. Today, the amount of archaeological data concerning the presence of Phoenicians in Portuguese territory is extensive and varying in nature, and we possess finds and architecture that can be analyzed in the context of an Orientalizing Iron Age. This chapter investigates the Phoenician colonization on the Atlantic Coast of the Iberian Peninsula. It analyzes ceramics and their stratigraphic sequences, domestic and funerary architecture, radiocarbon dates, and even the geography of the sites to understand the motives behind Phoenician voyages to Portugal, their chronology, and not only how settlement took place but how means of contact were established between the indigenous peoples and foreign groups of colonists.

This chapter examines the use of fortifications and earthworks by the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, focusing on battle sites such as Big Bethel, First Manassas, Ball's Bluff, Manassas Junction, and Centreville. It also discusses the defenses of Washington, such as Fort Slemmer and Fort Totten, and Richmond, including the forts whose construction was initiated by General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate forces. Furthermore, the chapter describes the fortifications along the Atlantic coast designed to close blockade-running ports. Finally, it considers the comparative ease with which the Federals reduced coastal defenses, forcing the Confederates to evacuate their remaining forts on exposed islands in the winter and spring of 1862.

This chapter discusses writer James K. Paulding's journey through the southern states in which he remarked, “I had heard much of the continued migration from the Atlantic coasts to the regions of the west. . . . I have now had some opportunity of witnessing the magnitude of this mighty wave which knows no retrograde motion, but rolls over the land, never to recoil again.” Indeed, the period following the close of the Creek War was one of massive and continued emigration into the Trans-Appalachian region. In this increasingly agrarian west, the primary enterprises were cultivating staple crops such as cotton, corn, and sugar, and raising hogs and cattle. Nearly all these products were transported on rivers and newly opened roads to and from the market hubs of the south and west, places such as Natchez, New Orleans, and St. Louis.