Last week, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies hosted the Early American Literature and Material Texts Workshop, generously sponsored for the fifth time by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Led this year by Meredith McGill, the workshop offers a chance each summer for some material-texts scholars to get together and talk about their work and reflect on what attention to the material conditions of texts can bring to the study of, primarily, history and literature. This year there was a particular focus on materiality as it relates to how we think about form and genre–we had great sessions on nineteenth-century autobiography as a genre, P.T. Barnum, the print transmission of colonial media narratives, and the meaning of format from manuscript to magazine to mp3. It’s always humbling and exciting to glimpse the high level on which other scholars are thinking about some of the things I’m interested in. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Guilty Pleasures: 1776
It’s the middle of the summer, so most of us are hard at work on drafting new syllabi, writing and revising articles, dissertations, book manuscripts (or sometimes all three simultaneously), catching up on reading, and all sorts of myriad tasks that aren’t possible during the academic year.
A PhD Student’s Case for Embargoes
Note: I welcome this opportunity to expound more fully on a few quotes from me in a New York Times piece about the AHA statement. You can find my Storify of the debates on Twitter and in the blogosphere related to the statement here. It is also worth reminding readers that the opinions in our pieces are those of the author and not of the blog as a whole.
A recent policy recommendation by the AHA on the embargoing of dissertations—i.e., limiting online access and distribution for a specified period of time—has created quite a stir in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Many are criticizing the AHA for a reactionary policy that concedes the status quo, i.e., the undue influence and interest of university presses in hiring and tenure decisions and the profession’s overall laxity in adapting to the digital revolution.
Let me be clear from the outset: I am not defending the AHA’s statement, per se. It does indeed ignore the broader issue of what the AHA intends to do about the long-term, systemic problem of the profession’s transition into the digital era, more generally. I am, however, going to defend the policy of allowing students the option to embargo. Continue reading
The Week in Early American History
Last week, we heard the news that Mitch Daniels, formerly governor of Indiana and now president of Purdue University, apparently tried to keep “terrible anti-American academic” Howard Zinn’s People’s History out of Indiana’s schools and universities. This week, Indiana University’s Carl Weinberg revealed how he actually used Zinn’s text in a training course for Indiana high school teachers. Continue reading
Guest Post: Teaching with Legal Sources: The Case of Ann Hibbens
Today’s guest poster is Sara Damiano, a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation is entitled, “Gender, Law, and the Culture of Credit in New England, 1730-1790.”
As we plunge into syllabus-writing season, I would like to contribute to The Junto’s ongoing conversation on teaching with primary sources. (Joseph Adelman and Glenda Goodman have previously written on favorite sources in the survey and on music in the classroom, respectively.) I’m a historian of gender and law, so I would like to make the argument for including legal sources in our syllabi, even for courses that aren’t explicitly focused on legal history. By way of illustration, I would also like to recommend one of my favorite legal history sources for teaching: the 1640 trial of Ann Hibbens before the First Church of Boston.
History by Freehand: Drawing Your Research
Chances are, if you’ve ever sat next to me during a seminar, lecture, colloquium, workshop, conference, or dinner, you’ve seen me scribbling away on something. Stylus or pen in hand, I’ll create landscapes of crudely drawn people or mountains or ships, encircled and dissected by wavering arrows and question marks.
It’s about time I admit it. I’m a doodler. Continue reading
SHEAR 2013: Conference Recap
Last weekend, historians of the early Republic convened in St Louis for the SHEAR annual meeting. As is normal for a meeting that takes place each year in mid-July, the heat and humidity during the day was rather intense (I somehow suspect this is a deliberate design to make the air-conditioned conference rooms a welcome solace!). As with Tom’s post covering the Omohundro conference last month, I can’t possibly hope to give complete coverage. As ever, the number of panels I wanted to attend was greater than the number of panels I could physically attend—the sign of an invigorating conference, for sure, but also a conference whose scope can’t be summed up in 1000 words. If you attended, please add your own reflections in the comments. Continue reading
Beyond the Valley of Mexico
Expanding the boundaries of early America has been a hot topic of conversation this summer. At both the Omohundro Institute conference last month, and at SHEAR last weekend, plenary sessions discussed a broader view of the past. Having internalized the Atlantic turn, scholars are now turning their energies toward the interior, asking how we should integrate the trans-Appalachian and trans-Mississippian West into our stories and interpretations.
The Week in Early American History
Let’s cool off with some early American history headlines. To the links! Continue reading
SHEAR 2013: Presidential Plenary Session
This post comes to you from the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in St Louis. If you’re at the conference, please come and say hello!
The SHEAR Annual Meeting kicked off this year with the Presidential Plenary session, “Missouri: Crossroads of the Early Republic?” Using the conference’s location as a jumping-off point for discussions of the diverse and multifaceted history of the early nineteenth century, four distinguished historians offered reflections as if located in Missouri, looking across the North American continent in different directions. Walter Johnson then concluded the roundtable with the notional title “Looking Forward,” but calling attention to some ways in which the session might profitably be used by historians looking to introduce new themes and stories into their teaching. Continue reading
The Junto 