Guest Post: Spencer McBride, Benjamin Rush and the Divine Right of Republics

January 13, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Commentary, Recent Scholarship Tags: American Revolution, Benjamin Rush, clergy, Constitution, Politics, Ratification, religion 6 Comments

We are thrilled to have another guest post from Spencer McBride, a historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project. You can read Spencer’s previous two posts here and here. More importantly, you can order his hot-off-the-press book, Pulpit & Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (UVA Press) h ere. You can look forward to a review and Q&A later this month. -BP

pulpit-and-nation In researching and writing my book, Pulpit & Nation, I became keenly interested in the religious language employed by participants in the ratification debates of 1787-88. Not only did it illuminate the role of religion and clergymen in the politics of Revolutionary America, but it seemed particularly relevant to the almost canonical way in which so many twenty-first century politicians and pundits view the Constitution. Of course, when—or if—these individuals ever consult that document’s history, they rarely bother to question what political motivations drove so many of the seemingly religious expressions made by early national leaders. And there are many such statements. Yet, amid the numerous examples of Federalists and Anti-Federalists employing (and exploiting) providential language and Old Testament Biblicism in arguing for ratification, one example stands out as particularly complex in its motives and implications: the argument Benjamin Rush made for ratification in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Candace Jackson Gray interviews Paul Finkelman

December 27, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Academia, Interview, Interviews with Historians, Special Features Tags: Interview, legal history, Paul Finkelman, race, Slavery 1 Comment

Photo is courtesy of Keydron K. Guinn, Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Morgan State University

Paul Finkelman is currently the John E. Murray Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law and a seminar on the law of slavery. He received his PhD in U.S. history from the University of Chicago and his BA in American Studies from Syracuse University. He specializes in American legal history, slavery and the Founders, American slave law, modern human trafficking, the Civil War era, U.S. Constitutional history and law, the legal history of race relations, the history of Civil Liberties, the history of the electoral college, Constitution and firearms regulation, and Baseball and Law. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than forty books. His next book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery and America’s Highest Court, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2017. His work on legal history and constitutional law has been cited four times by the United States Supreme Court, numerous other courts, and in many appellate briefs. He was an expert witness in the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument Case and in the law suit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball. He has also recently worked with HeinOnline to create a free database called Slavery In America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, which he discusses below. This interview was conducted by Candace Jackson Gray at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD on November 30 and December 1, 2016. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Echoes of Revolution: Resistance, Hip Hop, and the Black Atlantic

December 16, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Roundtables Tags: A Tribe Called Quest, Black Atlantic, Caribbean, Caribbean Studies, Hip Hop, historiography, Jeff Chang, Music, N.W.A., Paul Gilroy, Public Enemy, rap, Robin Kelley Leave a comment

This is the fifth and final post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey, the second was by Mark J. Dixon, the third was by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, and the fourth was by D. S. Battistoli. Ryan Reft is a Historian of Modern America in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. He also writes for KCET in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in journals such as Souls, Southern California Quarterly, California History, and the Journal of Urban History, and the anthologies, Barack Obama and African American Empowerment and Asian American Sporting Culture.

When A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ) dropped its final album We Got It From Here . . . Thanks 4 Your Service, for a generation of Americans who attended college in the 1990s, it hearkened back to Clintonian multiculturalism, Afrocentric rap groups of the Native Tongues movement (De La Soul, Black Sheep, Jungle Brothers, and ATCQ), and hazy apartment parties carried by the rhythms of hip hop and its variants. Though a thoroughly modern creation, hip hop like that of ATCQ results from the accretion of political, social, and cultural forms arising from the Black Atlantic; the transnational culture created by the intersection of European empires, slavery, and colonization from the 1600s forward. Birthed and nurtured by the Black Atlantic, hip hop is our countermemory to American exceptionalism and chauvinistic nationalism. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Resistance and Adjustment in Suriname: A Durable Eighteenth-Century Cultural Schism

December 15, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Roundtables Tags: Atlantic Creoles, Black Atlantic, Cynthia McLeod, Emancipated blacks, Hoe Duur Was De Suiker, Maroons, Rebels, Runaways, Suriname 1 Comment

This is the fourth post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey, the second was by Mark J. Dixon, and the third was by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan. D. S. Battistoli is a rural development practitioner, working in West Africa and the Caribbean. He holds a B.A. in English literature from Binghamton University, and, since 2011, has more than a thousand days’ field experience among the Saamaka Maroons of Suriname, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and later independently.

Cynthia McLeod’s Hoe Duur Was De Suiker, published in 1987 in the middle of Suriname’s Interior War, was the country’s first bestselling novel and a sort of foundational myth for the Creole population of the country.[1] The book takes its name from Voltaire’s famous rejoinder from Candide, “C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe.”[2] The plantation colonies of the Caribbean took turns being the richest, and also the most violent and exploitative toward the blacks who produced the wealth; for much of the eighteenth century, the distinction belonged to Suriname. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Historical Narratives, Contemporary Tools

December 14, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Roundtables Tags: Black Atlantic, Delaware, Haiti, indentured servants, indentured servitude, Philadelphia, Poor laws, Poverty, Public History, Roundtable, Slavery, Welfare 2 Comments

This is the third post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey, and the second was by Mark J. Dixon. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan holds a PhD in early American history from the University of Leicester and is Coordinator and Instructor of Public History at Rutgers University. She is currently completing a manuscript on vagrancy and indigent transiency in the early nineteenth century US.

The early modern Atlantic Ocean was traversed by countless seafarers with varying degrees of maritime experience, in varying degrees of (un)freedom. People used mobility, including travel by sea, to negotiate new identities for themselves, however precarious. Continue reading →

Guest Post: German Pietism and the Black Atlantic

December 13, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Guest Posts, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Black Atlantic, Christianity, German History, guest post, race, religion, Roundtable 5 Comments

This is the second post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey. Mark Dixon is a PhD candidate in Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary writing a dissertation on the interaction and exchange between German Pietists and enslaved Africans in colonial South Carolina. He spent the past year (2015-16) as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow researching in Pietist archives in Halle and Herrnhut, Germany. He produces Church History Chat, a podcast featuring interviews with historians of Christianity, which will begin publishing episodes in February 2017.

A painting depicting the first Moravian converts. Johann Valentin Haidt, “First Fruits” (1747). Source.

If it sounds strange to speak of a German Atlantic in the first place, it must sound even stranger in a conversation dedicated to new scholarship and understandings of the Black Atlantic. After all, Germany was not an Atlantic colonial power, and German speakers were not as deeply involved in the slave trade as their British, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish neighbors. Indeed, Aaron Fogleman’s 2015 keynote lecture, “A German Atlantic, or Germans in the Atlantic?” delivered at the McNeil Center’s spring workshop, questioned the label’s usefulness for historians.[1] I want simply to assert the reality of the German Atlantic, and more importantly speak to its surprising utility for scholars interested in the experiences of Africans and people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. In particular, the activities of German Pietists (and their surviving sources) can enrich Black Atlantic studies. Continue reading →

Guest Post: A View from the Past: The Contingencies of Racialization in 15th- and 16th-Century Iberia

December 12, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Guest Posts, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Black Atlantic, guest post, race, Roundtable, Spanish Empire 6 Comments

When Paul Gilroy wrote his now-classic critique of cultural nationalism in 1995, he conceived a Black Atlantic that was a geo-political amalgamation of Africa, America, the Caribbean, and Europe. Gilroy was particularly interested in the construction of a modern, post-colonial cultural space in which slavery remained a part of modern black consciousness. His book is particularly noted for the introduction of race as a critical consideration in exploring the Black Atlantic.

It is fitting then, that we kick off our week-long discussion of the Black Atlantic with a post by Marley-Vincent Lindsey, which explores considerations of race in the Iberian Atlantic. Subsequent posts will consider Black responses to freedom (and unfreedom), historical narrative, race, and of course, power. Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a PhD student at Brown University. He is interested in writing the history of a Medieval Atlantic, tracing connections of land and labor grants between fourteenth-century Iberia and sixteenth-century New Spain. He also writes about history and the web with Cyborgology, and can sometimes be found tweeting @MarleyVincentL.

An early image of an African conquistador during Cortes’s invasion of Tenochtitlan. While the associated text makes no specific mention of Juan Garrido, historians have often associated this image with Garrido, one of the few known early black conquistadors. Fray Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e Islas de la Tierra Firme (1581), 413. Image credit: People of Color in European Art History.

Juan Garrido was a typical conquistador: arriving in Hispaniola by 1508, Garrido accompanied Juan Ponce de León in his invasion of Puerto Rico, and was later found with Hernan Cortés in Mexico City. Yet his proofs of service, a portion of which was printed by Francisco Icaza in a collection of autobiographies by the conquistadors and settlers of New Spain, made a unique note: de color negro, or “of Black color.”[1] Continue reading →

Call for Guest Contributors on the Black Atlantic, c. 1400-1860

October 30, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Administrative Tags: Atlantic History, Black Atlantic, Call for contributors, Call for Papers, Diaspora, Guest Posts, historical memory, memory, Public History, Recent scholarship, Slavery, teaching, violence 1 Comment

Calling all contributors!

December 12-16, 2016. The Junto will host an online roundtable on new scholarship and historical themes that enhance our understanding of slavery and the Black Atlantic, c. 1400-1860. We welcome posts that approach these topics through a focus including—but not limited to—recent scholarship, teaching, public history, or historical memory. Continue reading →

Q&A with Steve Pincus, author of The Heart of the Declaration

October 11, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Book Review, Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, British Empire, Declaration of Independence, political economy, state formation, Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration, Yale University Press 5 Comments

Following on from Ken Owen’s review of Steve Pincus’s The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), we continue our Review/Q&A format with an interview with the author. Steve Pincus is the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University and author of 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009) and Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (1996), editor of England’s Glorious Revolution 1688-1689: A Brief History with Documents (2005), and co-editor of A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration (2001) and The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2007). Continue reading →

Guest Post: Michelle Orihel, “A Pamphlet War In Song: Teaching Revolutionary Print Culture with the Musical, Hamilton“

May 12, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Pedagogy, Public History Tags: Alexander Hamilton, American Revolution, Hamilton: An American Musical, pedagogy, Public History, Samuel Seabury 7 Comments

We are pleased to share this guest post from Michelle Orihel, an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Utah University. Dr. Orihel received her doctorate from Syracuse University and is currently working on a book manuscript about Democratic-Republican Societies in the post-revolutionary period.

When I first listened to the Hamilton soundtrack last fall, the song “Farmer Refuted” caught my attention. The song stages a pamphlet war that began in November 1774 between Samuel Seabury, an Anglican minister in Westchester County, New York, and Alexander Hamilton, then an upstart New York college student. Their war of words over the First Continental Congress carried on for nearly four months and encompassed several tracts.[1] Continue reading →