Andrew C. Lipman

Biography

Andrew Lipman is a historian of Early America who 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, received several honors, including the Bancroft Prize in American History. 

Lipman’s work has appeared in Common-place, Early American Studies, Reviews in American History, and The William and Mary Quarterly and he’s contributed pieces 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, John Carter Brown Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, and the New-York Historical Society. He has also served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the Museum of the City of New York, and he is an elected fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

At Barnard, Lipman teaches a variety of courses, including “Survey of American Civilization to the Civil War,” “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 also leads graduate seminars at Columbia on Early American History and Native American History. 

Publications: 

The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.

• Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, Finalist for the New England Society Book Award, Honorable Mention for the PROSE Award in U.S. History.

• Excerpted as “Masters of the Atlantic: The Forgotten Contest Between Colonists and Seafaring Indians For Control of the American Coast,” Slate Magazine, November 24, 2015. 

“No More Middle Grounds?” Reviews in American History 44.1 (March 2016): 24-30.

“Buying and Selling Staten Island: The Curious Case of the 1670 Deed to Aquehonga Manacknong,” Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early America 15.2 (Winter 2015).

• Republished as “A Hard Bargain: Native Americans Sold Staten Island Under Duress—But Not Before New York Made Surprising Concessions,” Slate Magazine, April 28, 2015.  

“Murder on the Saltwater Frontier: The Death of John Oldham,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9.2 (May 2011): 268-294.   
 
“‘A meanes to knitt them togeather’: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65.1 (January 2008): 3-28.