Keep Calm and R&R

August 6, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Publishing, Research Tags: academic writing, Journal Articles, writing Leave a comment

It’s August, and for academics hoping to get some writing done this summer, it’s go time.

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In conversations with my writing group colleagues, who come from fields as diverse as information sciences, business, community health, and religion, we spend a lot of time discussing ways to respond to a revise and resubmit. Some of us charge right in, addressing comments the day we receive them. Some of us (in the more quantitative fields) make tables of reviewer comments and check them off one by one. Having spent years in the trenches as a writing tutor, and continuing to teach writing, I’m always fascinated by the different methods writers use to approach challenges such as interpreting and implementing reviewer feedback.

In the spirit of the many posts here at the Junto on the nuts and bolts of academic writing, I’ve written up my own process for tackling referee feedback in a revise and resubmit. It’s inspired, in part, by Wendy Laura Belcher’s brilliant Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.

Here’s what I do when a new crop of reader reports lands in my inbox: Continue reading →

Food and Friendship in Early Virginia

June 20, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Food and Hunger, Roundtables, Vast Early America Tags: emotions, food, friendship, Jamestown, Native Americans, vastearlyamerica, violence, Virginia 1 Comment

The final post in the Roundtable on Food and Hunger in Vast Early America is by Rachel Winchcombe, a cultural historian of early modern England and America. She joined the University of Manchester in September 2017 as a Lecturer in Early Modern History. Alongside her teaching, Rachel is currently developing a new research project, provisionally titled ‘Emotional Eating in the Early American Colonies’. This project explores the interplay between diet and emotion in English accounts documenting dietary change in the early American colonies. Our food roundtable began on Monday. You can read Carla Cevasco’s introduction here, Zachary Bennett’s post here, and Bertie Mandelblatt’s here.

A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old nephew earnestly declared, “Rachel, sometimes meat makes me really happy!” Whilst this made me laugh, I could not deny the sincerity of the kid, or the veracity of his statement. After all, we all recognise the power of food to improve our mood and to provide comfort in times of sadness and heartache. For our early modern forebears, I would argue that this emotional aspect of food was no less powerful. In this post I will explore one facet of the emotional power of food, illustrating how it had the potential to irrevocably alter Anglo-Indigenous relations in early Virginia.[1] March 1622 marked a watershed moment in the history of the early Anglo-American settlements. On March 22, the indigenous population launched a devastating attack on the English settlements. In its aftermath, hundreds of English colonists were left dead, and a number of settlements razed to the ground. The attack also, unsurprisingly, resulted in the breakdown of positive emotional relationships between the English and the indigenous population, relationships that I will argue had been constructed around food exchange and commensality in the wake of the First Anglo-Powahatan War of 1609-1614.[2] Continue reading →

Bleds de froment or cassave? Bread in the French Tropics during the Seventeenth Century

June 19, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Food and Hunger, Roundtables, Vast Early America Tags: Caribbean, cassava, food, French Atlantic 2 Comments

Today’s post in the Roundtable on Food and Hunger is from Bertie Mandelblatt, who is the George S. Parker II ’51 Curator of Maps and Prints at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. She is a historical geographer whose research and publications address a number of intersecting questions related to the early Americas, and, in particular, both the early modern Caribbean and French overseas expansion: the geographies of subsistence, plantation slavery, and colonial trade and commodities; and cartography as an imperial practice. Our food roundtable began on Monday. You can read Carla Cevasco’s introduction here, and yesterday’s post, by Zachary Bennett, here.

The economic potential of the trade in foodstuffs destined for France’s colonies in the Lesser Antilles in the eighteenth century—the period of the colonies’ economic pre-eminence—was common knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic. Metropolitan and colonial administrators, merchants and their lobby groups, all understood the profits to be made from the subsistence crises endemic to plantation slavery. This knowledge decisively shaped France’s restrictive trade policies in the decades before and after their formal articulation in law in 1717 and 1727.[1]

But what of earlier periods? How was colonial subsistence both imagined and daily enacted when colonial populations themselves were much less dense and characterized by a kind of demographic diversity and parity in which indigenous Kalinago outnumbered the newcomers (French, other Europeans, and Africans), a diversity which simply didn’t exist in the eighteenth century? Continue reading →

Damming Fish and Indians: Starvation and Dispossession in Colonial Massachusetts

June 18, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Food and Hunger, Roundtables, Vast Early America Tags: environmental history, fish, food history, Land, Native Americans, Technology 14 Comments

Today’s post in the Roundtable on Food and Hunger in Vast Early America is by Zachary M. Bennett, who is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College this autumn. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His dissertation, “Flowing Power: Rivers, Energy, and the Making of New England,” examines the political ecology of waterpower before the industrial revolution.

Compared to other Native Americans in southern New England, the Ninnimissinuok community of Natick, Massachusetts seemed to have secure footing going into the eighteenth century. Located only fifteen miles outside of Boston on the Charles River, Natick was the largest community of Native American converts to Christianity—or “Praying Indians”—in mainland New England with a population exceeding two hundred persons. These Praying Indians owned their land in corporation to safeguard their enclave against land hungry colonists. To passersby, Natick residents farmed like their English neighbors, dressed like them, and even worshipped like them too. Yet, in contrast to their English neighbors, this community steadily declined over the course of the eighteenth century. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Food and Hunger in Vast Early America

June 17, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Food and Hunger, Roundtables, Vast Early America Tags: Caribbean, food history, Hunger, Massachusetts, Native Americans, Slavery, vastearlyamerica, Virginia 5 Comments

Dams that powered grain mills but choked off fish migrations. Cassava bread that replaced wheat. A breakfast that turned into an ambush. The lenses of food and scarcity can transform our views of familiar places in early American history—Massachusetts, Virginia, the Caribbean. Continue reading →

Review: Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World

May 28, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Uncategorized Tags: environmental history, French Atlantic, history of science, Native American history, settler colonialism 2 Comments

**Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).**

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Today, Carla Cevasco reviews A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America by Christopher M. Parsons, Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. Tomorrow, the author will discuss the book in a Q&A with Rachel Herrmann.

When the French first invaded northeastern North America in the seventeenth century, they aspired to make wine from the indigenous grapes of the region. By the eighteenth century, however, they faced the disappointing reality that wine produced with French techniques from these grapes was acrid and viscous, and, moreover, that wine grapes native to France did not necessarily thrive in such a cold climate. The dream of Canadian wine proved a failure to early French colonists.[1]

Continue reading →

Frogs and Cats, or, Access and Privilege

September 5, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Academia, Opinion Tags: Geography, Jamestown, Job Market, material culture, research travel, resource access, sensory history, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

I have never heard anything like those frogs. I was crunching along the gravel walkway from Historic Jamestowne back to the bus after the final reception of the Omohundro Institute conference in June. As I walked through the woods, the James River at my back, the calls of frogs and insects hammered at the air, drowning out the chatter of other attendees and the crunch of my own footsteps.

An hour before, I had gazed down into the archaeological dig of a kitchen site, in which researchers had discovered what they argue are cannibalized human remains in 2012. All the hairs on my neck stood up. Continue reading →

Do Objects Lie? A New Video for Teaching About Material Evidence

May 31, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Pedagogy, Public History Tags: Archives, cultural memory, digital humanities, historical memory, material culture, museums, teaching 3 Comments

Is material culture as inherently untrustworthy? I was once at a conference roundtable where one attendee claimed that “Material culture is so elitist, just rich people’s stuff in museums.” Fortunately, a historical archaeologist in the room begged to differ, arguing that archaeology offered a rich record of people who did not necessarily leave written sources behind. When I recently required my students to analyze both a material and a textual source, they concluded that material sources were inherently more difficult to work with than their written counterparts. “Once I describe the object, there’s nothing left to say about it,” one student complained.

I’ve been hearing variations of this argument my entire academic life. As a scholar who both studies and teaches with material culture, I find this reasoning both fascinating and frustrating. Why do so many people, from scholars to students, consider material culture somehow a lesser form of evidence than the written word? Continue reading →

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Presentism

April 18, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Commentary, Pedagogy Tags: academia, cultural memory, current events, historical memory, Presentism, teaching, teaching history 7 Comments

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I’m trained as an early American historian, so I never anticipated that one day I’d teach a current-events course. And yet, in Fall 2017, I debuted a course called “Learning from the Past: Early America in the 21^st Century.” New to my department, I had to market an early American studies course that would draw enrollments, and the best method I could think of was to convince students that the early American past had relevance to their lives. In graduate school, some of my professors argued that historians should not engage in presentism—that it would make our work seem dated to future generations of scholars. But our own political moment—I started teaching two weeks after far-right protests converged around Confederate monuments in Charlottesville—felt too urgent not to let our own moment into our discussions of the past. Instead of keeping the present in the subtext of my class, I brought it into the text. Continue reading →