At the postgraduate conference “Forme e linguaggi della comunicazione storica, dall’antichità all’epoca contemporanea” in 2019 I delivered a paper drawing on Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1727, 1747) to reflect on textual genealogies and translations in the late-modern Nord Atlantic.
In this research I came across quite a few significant loci in which the history of American “savages” became a competing ground between English and French authors, and the Indian eloquence a fascinating topic for Eighteenth-century travellers and writers to argue the status of American societies as instances of humanity in its infancy.
The conference was organized by some colleagues from the PhD course in Historical Studies at the University of Florence. They did an amazing job putting together a programme across disciplinary boundaries.

voyages) (London, 1703) vol. II, title page. Copy at John Carter Brown Library via Internet Archive. No known restriction for scholarly use.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Giulia Iannuzzi (May 8, 2019). “I suspect our Interpreters may not have done Justice to the Indian Eloquence”. Geographies of Time. Retrieved June 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/prxx