Abstract
From our earliest colonial beginnings as the settler-conquerors of indigenous nations through the nineteenth century’s adventurism abroad, the history of the United States has mapped an uninterrupted course of expansionism and empire building. As future president and then-governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, declared in April 1899, two months after the Senate ratified the treaty with Spain that concluded the Spanish-American War and effectively established the Philippines as a colony of the United States, his countrymen were “stern men with empire in their brains” (qtd. in Moore 3). Yet despite this entrenched masculinist discourse, one extraordinary woman has also worn the face of empire: the Icelander, Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir, an eager participant in Europe’s first documented colonizing venture in North America and the first European woman known to have borne a child here. Unfortunately, because we have no written record from Gudrid herself, we know her only through the fashionings of others. The how and the why of those many refashionings is the subject of this chapter.
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Kolodny, A. (2016). Gudrid Thorbjornsdöttir: First Foremother of American Empire. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_2
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