Tennessee

June 1, 2021

1 June 2021

Tennessee, the name of a river and of the state, is taken from the name of a Cherokee (Iroquoian) village, tă´năsī´ or tănsĭ´, that was located along what is now called the Little Tennessee River. The meaning and etymology of the Cherokee word is unknown. Various speculations about the name’s meaning have been put forth, none with solid evidence behind them. But it is likely that the Cherokee village is the namesake of an older Coosa village located near the junction of the French Broad River and the Pigeon River in what is now eastern Tennessee

Spanish explorer Juan Pardo encountered that Coosa village on 6 October 1567. From the journal of Juan de la Bandera, a member of his expedition recorded its name as Tanasqui:

Despues desto En presencia de mi El dho Juan de la vandera escrivano El dho señor capitan Juan pardo prosiguiendo la dha jornada En seis dias del dho mes de otubre del dho año de mill E quinientos y sesenta E siete años llego a un lugar que se disze tanasqui El qual Estaba situado En cierta parte de tierra fuerte a manera de ysla zercada de agua.
(After this in the presence of me, Juan de la Bandera, notary, the captain, Juan Pardo, continuing the journey on the sixth day of the month of October, 1567, arrived at a place which is called Tanasqui, which was situated on a certain piece of solid ground, like an island surrounded by water.)

English use of the name likely dates to the early eighteenth century, but I haven’t found any examples prior to 1765, when it appears in the memoirs of Henry Timberlake, a British officer who fought in the Anglo-Cherokee and French and Indian (Seven Years) Wars. In the “Draught of the Cherokee Country” map that accompanies his memoir, Timberlake records the name of the Cherokee village and river as Tennessee. And in the memoirs themselves, he records this event from December 1761, at the end of the Anglo-Cherokee War:

Next morning we had the pleasure of finding the ice entirely gone, thawed, probably, by a hard rain that fell over-night, so that about two o'clock we found ourselves in Broad River, which being very high, we went the two following days at the rate of ten miles an hour, till we came within a mile of Tennessee river, when, running under the shore, we on a sudden discovered a party of ten or twelve Indians, standing with their pieces presented on the bank. Finding it impossible to resist or escape, we ran the canoe ashore towards them, thinking it more eligible to surrender immediately, which might entitle us to better treatment, than resist or fly, in either of which death seemed inevitable, from their presented guns, or, their pursuit. We now imagined our death, or, what was worse, a miserable captivity, almost certain, when the headman of the party agreeably surprized us, by asking, in the Cherokee language, to what town we belonged? To which our interpreter replied, To the English camp; that the English and Cherokees having made a peace, I was then carrying the articles to their countrymen. On this the old warrior, commonly called the Slave Catcher of Tennessee, invited us to his camp, treated us with dried venison, homminy, and boiled corn.

In the 1790s, the then Southwest Territory of the United States began pushing for statehood, and in 1796 the territory created a constitution under the name Tennessee. As recorded in the American Minerva of 9 March 1796:

The convention of the South Western Territory have formed a constitution for that District which has received the name of TENNESSEE.

Tennessee became the sixteenth state to join the union on 1 June 1796.

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Sources:

American Minerva (New York), 9 March 1796, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Hudson, Charles. The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566–68. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990, 36, 220, 267. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Timberlake, Henry. The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake. London: 1765, 27–28. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Vogel, Virgil J. Indian Place Names in Illinois. Illinois State Historical Society, Pamphlet Series No. 4. Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1963, 146–147. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Henry Timberlake, Memoirs (1765). Public domain image.

Kentucky

June 1, 2021

Detail of a 1755 map showing the Kentucke River — Detail of a 1755 map showing the *Kentucke River*

1 June 2021

Kentucky is another of those North American place names that comes from an indigenous word but which word and what it means is uncertain. There seem to be two leading possibilities. The first is that it was the name of a Shawnee (Algonquian) village in what is now Clark County, Kentucky, Eskippakithiki. The second is that it is a Wyandot (Iroquoian) word meaning “plain, meadowland.” The Wyandot word in question was likely similar to the Seneca (another Iroquoian language) gȩdá’geh, pronounced /kẽtaʔkeh/ and meaning “at the field.”

The earliest English-language use of Kentucky that I have found hints at the Shawnee origin, although it places the location at some distance from the Shawnee settlement. From the Pennsylvania Gazette, 10 May 1753:

By Letters from Virginia, dated the 10th of April, we have the following Advice, viz. “That an armed Company of Indians, consisting of Ottowawas, and Connywagas, headed by one of the Six Nations, and a white Man, met with some Pennsylvania Traders, at a place called Kentucky, about 150 Miles from the Shawnese Town, on this side of the Allegheny River, and took eight Prisoners, five belonging to Mr. Groghan, the other three to Mr. Lowry, and with them Goods to the Value of upwards of Three Hundred Pounds.

Kentucky is also the name of a river, and this is first recorded in English in 1755 in a description and map of the middle British colonies by Lewis Evans and published by Benjamin Franklin:

KENTUCKE || is larger than the foregoing, has high Clay Banks, abounds in Cane and Buffaloes, and has also some very large Salt Springs. It has no Limestone yet discovered, but some other fit for building. Its Navigation is interrupted with some Shoals, but passable with Canoes to the Gap, where the War Path goes through the Ouasioto Mountain. This Gap § I point out in the Map, as a very important Pass; and it is truly so, by Reason of its being the only Way passable with Horses from Ohio Southward for 3 or 400 Miles Extent. And if the Government has a Mind to preserve the Country back of Carolina, it should be looked to in Time.

We get references to Kentucky as a place settled by white people by 1776. A notice placed in the Virginia Gazette on 23 August 1776 says the following:

KENTUCK, August 21, 1776.
WHEREAS, in consequence of an agreement made between myself and mr. John Floyd of this settlement, about a piece of land, I gave the said Floyd my bond for 20 l. I therefore give this publick notice, that I will not pay but half the same, and that whoever may take an assignment of the said bond for more than 10 l. will certainly be disappointed of their expectations therein.
1 || JOHN MAXWELL.

Kentucky was incorporated as a county of Virginia in December 1776. Petitions for statehood began in 1778, and on 1 June 1792 Kentucky became the fifteenth state of the United States.

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Sources:

Advertisement, Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), 23 August 1776, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Evans, Lewis. Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays. The First Containing an Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America. Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1755, 29, 37. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

McCafferty, Michael. Native American Place Names of Indiana. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2008, 250. Google Books.

“Philadelphia, May 10.” Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), 10 May 1753, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Lewis Evans, 1755, Map of the Middle British Colonies in North America. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

woke

May 31, 2021

A 7 July 2016 protest over the police shooting of Philando Castile, a Black man, during a routine traffic stop the previous day. Two women among a crowd of protesters hold up a sign that reads “#JusticeForPhilando” and has an image of a fist rising out the state of Minnesota.

31 May 2021

Woke is an adjective, originating in Black slang, meaning being alert to racism and racial discrimination. It has been circulating for decades, but in recent years it has been taken up by white speakers, and the contexts in which it is used has expanded to other areas of injustice and discrimination. This adjectival use of woke is clearly documented from the early 1960s, but it is possible that it is older in oral use.

The adjective comes, of course, from the past participle of the verb to wake. The verb can be traced back to the Old English verb wæcnan. Originally in Black English, the adjective was used literally, to mean awake, as opposed to being asleep. The earliest example I can find is in the 1891 Joel Chandler Harris’s short story “Balaam and His Master”:

An’ den, when I git my belly full, I sot in de sun an’ went right fast ter sleep. I ’spec’ I tuck a right smart nap, kaze when some un hollered at me an’ woke me up de sun wuz gwine down de hill right smartly. I jumped up on my feet, I did, an’ I say, ‘Who dat callin’ me?’ Somebody ’low, ‘Yo’marster want you.’ Den I bawl out, ‘Is Marse Berry come?’ De n[——]s all laugh, an’ one un ‘em say, Dat n[——] man dreamin’, mon. He ain’t woke good yit.’

Harris was, of course, white and recording/imitating Black speech. I cannot find an early example by a Black writer. The search is complicated because relatively few outlets of the day published Black slang, and sifting out the slang adjectival uses from the much more common uses of the verb is an almost hopeless task.

This literal sense of the adjective woke appears in a 19 April 1928 piece syndicated to white newspapers. Its inclusion in a gossip column about the goings-on in Manhattan is, perhaps, intended to make fun of Black dialect. The usage is literal in that the event goes on all night long and the attendees literally stay awake, but one wonders if it also reflects a metaphorical sense that may have been current in slang at the time:

The Harlem Black Belt this week offered gaudy posters reading: The Stay Woke Ball—open from 5 o'clock p.m. until 5 a.m. the next morning.

The transition from the literal to the metaphorical meaning can be seen in this 13 March 1943 article in the Norfolk Journal and Guide that quotes Black writer and educator J. Saunders Redding. Redding’s use here is a deliberate metaphor, likening becoming aware of racism and white supremacy to that of waking from sleep. Again, this is not quite the adjectival use, but it is either a precursor to that or Redding could be reflecting an existing slang usage in more a formal style:

These lessons mean that the Negro is coming to have “a faith in organized labor as a force for social justice. They mean what a United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: Let me tell you buddy, Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer,” he said.

Clear use of the metaphorical woke itself is recorded by Black novelist William Melvin Kelley in the New York Times on 20 May 1962. Kelley wrote an article on Black slang with the title “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” Accompanying the article is a short glossary of slang terms that includes this entry:

woke (adj.): well-informed, up-to-date (“Man, I’m woke”).

Kelley didn’t explicitly define woke in terms of injustice or racism, but one can certainly infer that is the intended context.

Ten years later, the connection of woke to racial injustice is clear when Black playwright Barry Beckham includes this line in the prologue to his 1972 play Garvey Lives!:

I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk.

Woke moves out of the province of American Black speech and starts appearing with great frequency in English-language publications around 2015. And it is around this time that the word starts being used in contexts other than racism in the United States. For example, this passage appears in the South African Mail & Guardian Thought Leader in a 23 October 2015 article about women protesting increases in university tuition and fees:

This time around women are woke to this (as the cool kids say) and refuse to be silenced, refuse history to repeat itself. At Wits women who were told they could not lead the songs, went and sang their own. And online, women were challenging the “behind-the-scenes” narrative with hashtags such as #MbokodoLead.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“Deep Changes in Thinking Bringing Dread to White South—Redding.” Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia), 13 March 1943, A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. woke, adj.

Harris, Joel Chandler. “Balaam and His Master.” Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kelley, William Melvin. “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “‘Saying Something Lexicon.’” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

McIntyre, O.O. “New York Day By Day.” Portsmouth Daily Times, 19 April 1928, 20. NewspaperArchive.com.

Mugo, Kagure. “#FeesMustFall: You Cannot Ask Women to Be Vocal in Public and Silent in Private.” Mail & Guardian Thought Leader, 23 October 2015.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. woke, adj.2.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue, 2016. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Wisconsin

May 28, 2021

28 May 2021

[Edit, 9 June 2021: corrected a fact regarding Marquette’s death.]

The origin of the name Wisconsin is a mystery. Not only is its original meaning uncertain—a rather common occurrence with indigenous placenames—but which language it comes from is also in doubt—all a result of the casual disregard that early European explorers and colonists had for indigenous languages.

We do know that the name was first applied to the Wisconsin River. Many sources point to an Ojibwa (Chippewa) origin, but Michael McCafferty contends that the name is from the Miami-Illinois meeskohsinki meaning “it lies red,” probably a reference to the red sandstone banks along portions of the river. Other hypotheses about the original meaning include “gathering place of the waters.”

The first Europeans to record the name were Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673. A translation of their travel narrative from the French reads:

The river on which we embarked is called Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult. It is full of islands covered with vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversified with woods, prairies, and hills. There are oak, walnut, and basswood trees; and another kind, whose branches are armed with long thorns. We saw there neither feathered game nor fish, but many deer, and a large number of cattle.

Marquette died before he could return to Quebec, but Jolliet took the name Meskousing back with him. There René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle mistook Marquette’s and Jolliet’s <M> to be an <Ou> and rendered the name as Ouisconsing. Others followed Cavelier’s lead. That spelling was later Anglicized to <W> and the final <g> dropped.

The name appears in English by 1698 in Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America:

No Rivers, as I have already said, run into the Meschasipi between the river of the Illinois and the Fall of St. Anthony, from the Westward, but the River Ottenta, and another which falls into it within eight Leagues of the said Fall: But on the Eastward we met with a pretty large River, call'd Ouisconsin or Misconsin, which comes from the Northward. This River is near as large as that of the Illinois; but I cannot give an exact account of the length of its Course, for we left it about sixty Leagues from its Mouth, to make a Portage into another River, which runs into the Bay of Puans, as I shall observe when I come to speak of our return from Issati into Canada. This River Ouisconsin runs into the Meschasipi about 100 Leagues above that of the Illinois.

The area that would become the state of Wisconsin was acquired by the United States by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The area was called by various names until the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on 39 May 1848.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America Extending Above Four Thousand Miles Between New France and New Mexico. London: Printed for M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 180–181. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Marquette, Jacques and Louis Jolliet. “The Mississippi Voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, 1673.” Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699. Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917, 235–36.

McCafferty, Michael. Native American Place-Names of Indiana. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2008, 190n.

———. “On Wisconsin: the Derivation and Referent of an Old Puzzle in American Placenames.” Onoma, 38, 2003, 39–56.

Image credit: Map of the North Western and Michigan Territories. Fielding Lucas and Bartholomew Welch, c.1819. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Rhode Island / Aquidneck

May 28, 2021

28 May 2021

The origin of the name Rhode Island is uncertain. Not only is it the name of the state, but Rhode Island is a name for a large island at the mouth of Narragansett Bay whose indigenous name is Aquidneck. Aquidneck is an Algonquian word, probably Narragansett, meaning “on the island.”

The English colony there was founded by Roger Williams in 1636 after he was banished from Massachusetts Bay for his political opinions, which included complete separation from the Church of England, religious freedom, and equitable dealings with the indigenous population.

There are two competing explanations for the origin of the name Rhode Island that are commonly put forth, and both have similar problems that cast doubt on their being correct.

The first is that in 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano sighted what is now called Block Island, an island off the coast of and now belonging to the state and likened it to the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean. A translation of a 1524 letter from Verrazzanno to King Francis I of France, who funded his expedition, reads:

The anchor raised, sailing toward the east, as thus the land turned, having traveled LXXX leagues always in sight of it, we discovered an island triangular in form, distant ten leagues from the continent, in size like the island of Rhodes, full of hills, covered with trees, much populated by the continuous fires along all the surrounding shore which we saw they made. We baptized it in the name of your most illustrious mother [i.e., Louise of Savoy]; not anchoring there on account of the unfavorableness of the weather.

Note that Verrazzano did not name the island Rhodes; he just noted a similarity in size and position along the coast. While it is possible that Williams or one of his fellow colonists was aware of this reference and mistook the sighting of Block Island for Aquidneck, there is no evidence that directly links this offhand comment by the Florentine explorer to the English colonists who dubbed Aquidneck Rhode Island.

The second common explanation is that in 1614 Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, for whom Block Island is named, sighted an island in the mouth of Narragansett Bay and commented on its reddish color. Johannes de Laet’s 1625 Nieuvve Wereldt contains a detailed description of Narragansett Bay and references Aquidneck, noting its shores appeared red in color:

daer legt een rodlich Eylandeken dicht by.
(there lies a reddish island close by)

According to this explanation, the English name is an Anglicization of the Dutch Roodt Eylandt. But again, Block did not name the island Roodt Eylandt, and while it is more likely that the English colonists were familiar with de Laet’s book than with Verrazzanno’s letter (early colonists often read what accounts of the Americas that they could get their hands on), there is still no evidence that directly connects Block’s observation about the island’s color with the later English name. Wikipedia claims, without citation, that some Dutch maps from 1659 onward use the name Roodt Eylandt. But these maps, if they exist, postdate the English name.

One might also guess that the name comes from a person named Rhode or Rhodes, but no suitable candidate by that name exists in the records.

All we know is that by 1637 Williams and his fellow colonists were calling Aquidneck Rhode Island. From a 1 May 1637 letter from Williams to the governors of the Massachusetts Bay colony:

They also conceive it easy for the English, that the provisions and munition ﬁrst arrive at Aquednetick, called by us Rode-Island, at the Nanhiggontick’s mouth, and then a messenger may be despatched hither, and so to the [Massachusetts] bay, for the soldiers to march up by land to the vessels, who otherwise might spend long time about the cape and ﬁll more vessels than needs.

The island was officially named Rhode Island on 13 April 1644. From a court record of the colony of that date:

It is ordered by this Court, that the ysland commonly called Aquethneck, shall be from henceforth called the Isle of Rhodes or RHODE ISLAND.

In 1663, King Charles I of granted the colony a charter officially declaring its name as the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations:

And accordingly our will and pleasure is, and of our especial grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, we have ordained, constituted and declared, and by these presents, for us, our heirs and successors, do ordain, constitute and declare: That they [...] are, or hereafter shall be, admitted and made free of the company and society of our colony of Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay, in New England, shall be, from time to time, and forever hereafter, a body corporate and politic, in fact and name, by the name of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America.

(I’ve omitted the long list of names of the company stockholders from the above.)

With the exception of changing colony to state, until 2020 the official name of the state had remained the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, giving the smallest state in the union the longest name. But in that year voters amended the state constitution, dropping the and Providence Plantations from the name, making the official name the State of Rhode Island. The impetus behind the change was unpleasant association of the word plantation with slavery. While we today commonly associate slavery with the southern states, those in the north were deeply implicated in the institution as well. Not only did northern states have slaves too, albeit in smaller numbers, but their economies were firmly enmeshed in the slave trade. For Rhode Island in particular, despite a short-lived 1652 law banning slavery in the colony, the colony and state had large numbers of slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the number declined precipitously in the nineteenth. Slavery in the state was not officially and finally abolished until 1842, and the ports of Rhode Island were important hubs in the transatlantic slave trade.

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Sources:

Bartlett, John Russell, ed. “At the General Court of Election held at Nuport on the 13th of the first month, 1644.” Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 1 of 10. Providence: Crawford Greene and Brother, 1856, 127. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dezenski, Lauren. “Rhode Island Voters Approve Removing ‘Plantations’ from State’s Official Name over Concerns About the Word’s History.” CNN, 5 November 2020.

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Rhode Island, Block Island. Oxfordreference.com.

Laet, Johannes de. Nieuvve Wereldt (New World). Leiden: Isaack Elzevier, 1625, 85. ProQuest Early European Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, Rhode Island, n., Rhode Islander, n.

“Rhode Island’s Royal Charter” (1663). Rhode Island Department of State.

Verrazanno, Giovanni da. “Selections from a Letter of the Navigator Giovanni da Verrazano to the King of France, Francis I” (1524). Verrazano’s Voyage Along the Atlantic Coast of North America. Albany: U of the State of New York, 1916, 10. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Williams, Roger. Letter to Governor Henry Vane and Deputy Governor John Winthrop, 1 May 1637. The Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. 1 of 2. Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed. Hanover, New Hampshire: Brown UP/UP of New England for the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988, 73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Library of Congress, Thomas Kitchin, 1758. Public domain image.