Introduction: New Directions in the Study of New World Knowledge Making

house's account of the 1622 Powhatan Uprising, the attack on the Virginia colony by members of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom that claimed the lives of 347 English settlers and forcefully repudiated their encroachments into the southern Algonquian homelands of Tsenacommacah.Noting that the Powhatans had "carried away" several of the colonists' "Peeces [guns] with munition (the use whereof they know not)," Waterhouse (1622: 21) reports that their "King," Opechancanough, successor of the chiefdom's eponymous leader and architect of the uprising, "caused the most part of the Gunpowder by him surprized [captured], to bee sowne, to draw therefrom the like increase, as of his Maize or Corne, in Harvest next." 1 Apparently regarding the human-made chemical explosive and quintessential colonizer technology of gunpowder as a seed, the Indigenous ruler attempts, in Waterhouse's telling, to multiply this unfamiliar substanceand the tactical advantage it affordsthrough a familiar technique of proliferation: he plants it in the ground in the hope that it will grow. 2 The story receives no further elaboration in Waterhouse's text, but its complexities (which I return to below) evoke a burgeoning area of academic inquiry: the investigation of what people in the past knew and how they came to know it.This special issue of American Literature takes stock of a major trend in the field centered on these concerns, the wealth of recent work on New World knowledge production that my coeditor Ralph Bauer and I call the "epistemological turn" in early American literary studies.Over the past two decades, early Americanists have set their sights on knowledge.