The Junto Enters the Terrible Twos!

I acknowledge the generous help of Michael Hattem in gathering all the statistics and relevant information for this post. And just as he is the real puppeteer behind the curtain of the post, he serves a similar function for the entire blog in general; appreciation is herein expressed, once again, to him.

Two years ago today, The Junto announced its entrance into the academic blogging world. When I originally conceived of the idea for the blog and pitched it to three fellow grad students (Michael Blaakman, Katy Lasdow, and Eric Herschthal) in an uptown Manhattan coffee shop in September(ish) 2012, I merely wanted to come up with a small community that could alleviate my alone-ness of studying American history while living in the UK. A few months later, the blog was born; two years later, our empire expands. It is becoming fairly common to meet people at an academic conference and, after I share my name, the person replies, “Oh, you’re Ben Park from The Junto?” It makes me smile every. single. time. I could have hardly conceived of where the blog has gone since our humble beginnings. Yet here we are. What follows is a general report of what has taken place since we last celebrated our blog’s birthday. Continue reading →

Teaching Hipster History: Ending the Semester on an Ironic Note

December 9, 2014 By Michael Blaakman in Pedagogy Tags: Edmund Morgan, hipster, hipsters, historical writing, irony, Jill Lepore, students, teaching history 16 Comments

Conclusions are hard, I find, and no less so in teaching than in writing. Both at the end of a book and at the end of a course, really great endings add a bit of spice—something just new or unexpected enough to cast what’s come before in a different light, something that makes it exciting to reflect back across the material you’ve just learned.

I aim for student-driven discussions, and at semester’s end in previous seminars and discussion sections, I’ve struggled to coax students into producing the final chord that resonates in all registers of a course’s architecture. I’ve had students free-write (and then discuss) to summarize, as succinctly as possible, the change over time they’ve learned about in the course, and I’ve asked students to identify what one idea from the class they hope they’ll remember forty years from now. Both exercises have produced good-enough results. But since they didn’t ask students to see the courses’ material anew in any way, I’ve found myself wanting more.

But my students’ final discussion this semester was so invigorating that I just had to write a blog post about it. Continue reading →

The Great Moose Massacre

December 8, 2014 By Mark Boonshoft in From the Archives Tags: Animals, colonial history, Georgia, New England, Print Culture, violence 1 Comment

Southern Connecticut is not exactly moose country. So I had to hide my disbelief when one day my boss claimed that he sat in traffic after a car hit a moose on the Merritt Parkway. How lost would a moose have to be to find itself in suburban Connecticut? Turns out, my boss told the truth. I welcomed any distraction from that boring summer job and followed this story pretty intently. It was a sad story—the moose had to be put down after the accident—but also a memorable one. I thought so at least. (Anytime I give someone directions to take the Merritt, I still warn them to watch for moose). The accident received a bit of coverage in local newspapers, while some outlets reprinted the AP coverage.[1] Every so often a reporter discovers the story when they learn that Connecticut is home to a sizable moose population.[2] Mostly, though, the story is forgotten. Continue reading →

The Week in Early American History

December 7, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in The Week in Early American History 3 Comments

Welcome to another Week in Early American History, wherein I try to catch us up from last week’s post-Thanksgiving lapse. We’ve got drunk New Yorkers, scholarly young ladies, and an entrepreneurial George Washington for you this week, along with Jill Lepore, Albert Einstein, Moses, and many more! Continue reading →

The Problem of Southern Indians’ Allegiance in the American Revolution

December 5, 2014 By Rachel Herrmann in From the Archives, Historiography Tags: American Revolution, Cherokees, Creeks, Deep South, Native Americans, violence 2 Comments

So you know what’s hilarious? Trying to revise your dissertation into a book during the semester. I will admit that I am in the middle of editing my worst dissertation chapter, and am yelling out of a metaphorical pit of despair that’s been dug by a combination of bad prose and end-of-the-semester angst. Part of these struggles have to do with the fact that even after writing the chapter, submitting it, and defending it, I’m still not really sure what this chapter’s argument needs to say. This problem is directly tied to the fact that I found (and continue to find) myself befuddled by late-eighteenth-century Southern Indian affairs. So many factions! So much switching of sides! So many different ways I manage to mis-type Scots-Creek go-between Alexander McGillivray’s last name![1] Continue reading →

Winter Reads

December 3, 2014 By Sara Georgini in News, Recent Scholarship, Uncategorized Tags: 19th Century, Abraham Lincoln, American Revolution, Atlantic World, capitalism, Civil War, Constitution, cultural history, Early Republic, Gender, George Washington, Native Americans, Politics, Popular History, Print Culture, Publishing, race, religion, Slavery 8 Comments

Just in time for your holiday shopping list, here’s our preview of new titles—share your finds in the comments! Continue reading →

The Value of Storytelling: Recap

December 2, 2014 By Casey Schmitt in Pedagogy, Technology Tags: audiobooks, Benito Cereno, Librivox.org, pedagogy 1 Comment

With just days left in the semester and students scrambling to finish papers and prepare for exams, I thought it would be a perfect time to reflect on an idea I raised in my first post here at The Junto. Back in September, I declared my intentions to assign the Librivox.org recording of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. The prospects of assigning audio content in a classroom situation seemed the ideal solution to unrealistic weekly reading word counts while doing to double duty of engaging students in early American history through storytelling. And then I got cold feet. Could I really make it mandatory for 37 students to sit back and listen to several hours worth of recordings simply for the pedagogical payoff of connecting them in a more real way to the nineteenth-century world inhabited by the slave ship Tryal and Captain Amasa Delano? As the semester wore on, and more and more students realized how long the recordings would take to listen to, my trepidation only increased. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Teaching Toilets in an Age of American Ebola

December 1, 2014 By Jessica Parr in Guest Posts, Pedagogy Tags: 19th Century, colonial history, Early Republic, epidemics, History of Medicine, hospitals, pedagogy, Philadelphia 2 Comments

K.A. Woytonik is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire. In 2013-2014, she was a Research Associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her dissertation is a cultural history of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Early Republic Philadelphia.

A bevy of esteemed scholars across fields have established the devastating effects of early modern epidemics, from Europe’s plagues to the decimation of Native American populations in North America. Epidemics occupied the minds of colonists, who, depending on region and demographics, participated in prevention strategies including quarantine, the destruction of soiled linens belonging to sick individuals, days of fasting and prayer, and immunity-building efforts such as inoculation and changes in diet. In today’s academy, epidemics offer historians avenues of interdisciplinary discussion, as the impact of contagious disease can be read not only in the archive, but in literature, in artwork, and in archaeological findings.