Review: Kacy Tillman, Stripped and Script

March 5, 2020 By Emily Yankowitz in Book Review Tags: American Revolution, Loyalists, women's history 3 Comments

Kacy Tillman, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).

Studies of loyalist women were at the forefront of studies of women in early America and the American Revolution. Scholars including Mary Beth Norton, Janice Potter-MacKinnon, Linda Kerber have examined how women, supporters, neutrals, and opponents alike, experienced and participated in the American Revolution. Contributing to this vibrant area of scholarship, Kacy Tillman’s Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution focuses on loyalist women as writers. While much scholarship on the American Revolution and loyalism examines the rhetoric and war writing in essays, broadsides, and pamphlets typically published by men, Stripped and Script focuses on how women writers used “public, if not published” letters and journals to engage in politics and to craft their own senses of loyalties.^[1] Continue reading →

Review, Rebecca Brannon and Joseph Moore, eds. The Consequences of Loyalism

April 22, 2019 By Emily Yankowitz in Review / Q&A Tags: American Revolution, book review, Edited collections, Eighteenth Century, historiography, Interdisciplinarity, Loyalists, Recent scholarship, University of South Carolina Press 1 Comment

Brannon, Rebecca, and Joseph S. Moore, eds. The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019).

If you are studying or researching Loyalists in some way, Robert M. Calhoon’s name is bound to come up. The “dean of American Loyalist studies,” as Joseph Moore terms him, is a well-esteemed scholar, writer, and mentor who has been the leading voice in American Loyalists historiography for decades.”[1] By engaging Loyalists in a multi-dimensional fashion, Calhoon’s work elucidated the now-incontrovertible inference: that Loyalists were multi-dimensional figures who were not too different from their revolutionary counterparts. In fact, the irrefutability of this idea is no doubt due in part to his work. In honor of him, Rebecca Brannon and Joseph Moore edited a Festschrift titled The Consequences of Loyalism. Continue reading →

Q&A: Edward Rugemer, author of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World

January 15, 2019 By Emily Yankowitz in Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic World, Caribbean, Edward Rugemer, legal history, Slavery Leave a comment

picture-155-1357242582

Today at The Junto, we’re featuring an interview with Ed Rugemer about his new book, of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, which Casey Schmitt reviewed yesterday. Ed Rugemer is an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of History at Yale University. A historian of slavery and abolition, Rugemer’s first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War was published by Louisiana State University Press and his work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

Continue reading →

Review: Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania

September 24, 2018 By Emily Yankowitz in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: book review, migration, Pennsylvania, Scots Irish, teaching history 1 Comment

**Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).**

Judith Ridner opens The Scots Irish of Pennsylvania: A Varied People by asking, “Who are the Scots Irish?” Ridner suggests that popular and scholarly answers to this deceptively simple question tend to fall into one of two categories. One response conjures a mythic image of the Scots Irish as a “desperately poor” community that rose from “rags to riches” in America through hard work, individualism, and pragmatism. The other offers a more pejorative image of the Scots Irish as “hillbillies” living in abject poverty.^[1] In classic historian form, Ridner suggests that the answer is far more complex than either conventional answer. Continue reading →

Interpreting US History in the UK: The American Museum in Britain

July 9, 2018 By Emily Yankowitz in Public History Tags: Britain, material culture, museums, Native Americans, Public History, Textiles 1 Comment

As an American studying American history in the UK, my response to the question of “What are you studying?” often inspires wry smiles, wrinkled brows, and variations of “Why here?” Although I am now fairly adept at justifying my decision, I remain fascinated by the concept of studying a nation’s history beyond its geographic boundaries. With my time in Britain near its end, I traveled to Bath to visit The American Museum in Britain, a place all too familiar with this topic. The Museum is located in Claverton Manor, a nineteenth-century English country manor on 125 acres of land, and also features a Folk-Art Gallery, an exhibit hall, and gardens.[1] Continue reading →