Review: Coll Thrush, Indigenous London

September 16, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Britain, British Empire, cultural history, Dickens, Indigenous, Iroquois, London, Native Americans, Pocahontas, Print Culture, urban history 2 Comments

Review: Coll Thrush, <i>Indigenous London</i>

**Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).**

Wander through the Museum of London’s rich galleries, glowing with relics and rites of Roman Londinium, and you’ll spot scraps of the city’s wall half-strewn along the route. Burned in bits or eaten by age, the red-and-white brick arches splay out like the broken teeth of empire, grinding a crooked grin in today’s cityscape. Amid the tidy exhibits and visitors’ whirl, it’s a graphic reminder of what London was and how it has weathered so many centuries’ toll. But, as Coll Thrush’s Indigenous London asks us, “The audience of a museum is always / another sort of collection…Indigenous objects, Indigenous eyes—/ Who sees and what is being seen?” (p. 135). For the scholar rescuing clues from the built environment, the wall raises a complex set of research queries: Who passed through the city limits, and why? How did diverse travelers experience urban life at a sensory level? What did it mean for indigenous visitors to sample London? And how can we expand the historical canon of voices who tell that story in the early modern era? Continue reading →

IOTAR50: Paper Politics

June 13, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Historiography, IOTAR at 50, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Historical Association, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Benjamin Franklin, cultural history, French Revolution, Harvard, humanities, Jefferson, library, museums, National Archives and Records Administration, pamphlets, Print Culture, Public History, scholarly editing 1 Comment

French Pamphlets, Newberry Library

All praise to the humble pamphlet, upon which *may* rest the ideological origins of the American Revolution. Frequently buried by history as loose “Bundells of Pamphlets in quarto,” it’s a genre that almost shouldn’t be. Printed on flimsy paper and easily battered by salt spray or avid readers, the popular pamphlet became a clutch genre for British and American revolutionaries to send ideas around the Atlantic World. These publications, along with newsbooks, hardened into the “paper bullets,” that, according to scholar Joad Raymond, flew on and off the page in early modern England’s press.

Even as the genre evolved into weekly newspapers, he writes, “readers recognized the rules of the form.” Pamphlet culture, a dynamic arena for anonymous critics to take an eloquent swipe at matters of church and state, quickly blossomed abroad. Unbound and unfettered, pamphlets seeded colonists with a new political consciousness. Whether 10 pages or 50, these slim booklets amplified republican politics and revolutionary prose. Pamphlets, as Robert G. Parkinson observes, became the “lifeblood” of the American Revolution. “They instructed the colonial public that political and personal liberty were in jeopardy because British imperial reformers sought to strip them of their natural rights, especially the right to consent to a government that could hear and understand them,” he writes. Today, let’s look at that instructional aspect of pamphlet culture, and how Bernard Bailyn’s interpretation of revolutionary tracts has reshaped what we do in public history. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Q & A with Laurie Halse Anderson

June 9, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, African-American history, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, Benjamin Franklin, Children's literature, Civil War, Early Republic, Gender, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, iterature, Native American history, Native Americans, Slavery, women, women's history, yellow fever, Young adult literature 2 Comments

Thanks to all of our contributors and commentators who have participated in #FoundingFiction, a series revisiting children’s and young adult literature about early America. Today, Sara Georgini wraps up the roundtable by chatting with Laurie Halse Anderson, prize-winning author of Independent Dames, Fever 1793, Chains, Forge, Ashes, and more. Continue reading →

Roundtable: A Letter to Dear America

June 5, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, American Revolution, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Children's literature, Civil War, Early Republic, fiction, Founding Fiction, Gender, historical fiction, Irish, literature, Native Americans, Navajo, New England, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Publishing, religion, Scholastic, Sioux, South Carolina 2 Comments

Today’s Founding Fiction post is by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her manuscript is titled, “The President’s Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.” Follow her @lmchervinsky.

Each book in the Dear America series portrays a diary of a young fictional woman that explores her experience during one specific year in American history. The first-person account shares observations of well-known events or places, as well as the daily struggles of an “average” girl’s life. A number of these diaries take place in #VastEarlyAmerica. A few examples include A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, which tells the story of the Mayflower crossing in 1620; The Winter of Red Snow: The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, which shares one woman’s experience in Valley Forge in 1777; and Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, which examines the struggles of a French slave girl in the New York Colony in 1763. The series was discontinued in 2004, but Scholastic republished many of the originals in 2010 and continues to produce new volumes today. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Telling the Story of the Declaration

June 2, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, Archives, Benjamin Franklin, Children's literature, Declaration of Independence, George III, Hancock, John Adams, literature, manuscripts, Mary Katherine Goddard, National Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Print Culture, Thomas Jefferson, Warren 1 Comment

Today’s Founding Fiction post is by Emily Sneff, Research Manager of the Declaration Resources Project at Harvard University. The mission of the Declaration Resources Project is to create innovative and informative resources about the Declaration of Independence. To learn more, follow @declarationres.

How do we get kids to read and comprehend the Declaration of Independence? Great authors and illustrators can transform the characters, events, and text of the Declaration (which, as you may expect, registers at about a 12th grade reading level) into true stories that are both entertaining and educational for younger readers. On the Declaration Resources Project’s blog, Course of Human Events, we recently interviewed authors Barbara Kerley (Those Rebels, John & Tom), Steve Sheinkin (King George: What Was His Problem? The Whole Hilarious Story of the American Revolution), and Gretchen Woelfle (Answering the Cry for Freedom: Stories of African Americans and the American Revolution). Their books, and a few other favorites, form an exciting non-fiction reading list for children and young adults. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Making Teen Girls into Women’s Historians

June 1, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Abigail Adams, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Ann Rinaldi, Boston Massacre, Children's literature, Civil War, fiction, Founding Fiction, Hemings, John Adams, John Brown, literature, Native American history, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Peggy Shippen, Phillis Wheatley, Publishing, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Tecumseh, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia, women, women's history, Young adult literature 11 Comments

Welcome to Founding Fiction, The Junto’s first roundtable exploring how children’s literature and young adult fiction depicts early American history. Between posts, we’ll compile a shelf of favorites to (re)read. Tweet us at #FoundingFiction or comment with your recommendations for Very Early Americanists. Happy summer, let’s dive in!

Today’s post is by Laura Ansley, Ph.D. candidate in history at the College of William & Mary, and managing editor of the Nursing Clio blog. Her dissertation is titled, “Life Problems: Sex Education in the United States, 1890-1930.” Follow her @lmansley.

Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams and Peggy Shippen and Harriet Hemings: all early American women whom I learned about from Ann Rinaldi’s young adult fiction. I have been fascinated by history for as long as I can remember, but Rinaldi was one of many authors who helped me to better understand what the best kind of historical study is. While school classes covering the Civil War may have talked about generals and battles, Rinaldi introduced me to characters like Osceola, stepdaughter of Wilmer McLean, who moved his family away from Manassas when the war came to the quieter Appomattox Courthouse—meaning the war started and ended on their doorstep. With her focus on teenage heroines, Rinaldi showed that history wasn’t only about important men. Young women experienced these historical events too, and their stories were also worth telling.
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Guest Post: French Imposters, Diplomatic Double Speak, and Buried Archival Treasures

April 10, 2017 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Guest Posts, Recent Scholarship Tags: Archives, Britain, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, documentary editing, documents, Early Republic, France, James Monroe, military history, Navy, newspapers, Politics, Print Culture, scholarly editing, Scotland, War of 1812 Leave a comment

Today’s guest post is by Cassandra Good, Associate Editor of The Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington, and author of Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Women and Men in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Follow her @CassAGood.

The latest volume of The Papers of James Monroe covers a short but important period in Monroe’s life and career: April 1811 to March 1814. Monroe became Secretary of State in April 1811 and was tasked with trying to repair relations with both Great Britain and France. After war with Britain began in June 1812, his focus broadened to military affairs and included a stint as interim Secretary of War. The bulk of the volume, then, is focused on the War of 1812. However, there are a number of other stories revealed here that will be of interest to a range of historians. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Crafting Protest, Fashioning Politics: DIY Lessons from the American Revolution

February 16, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: American Revolution, Art, art history, Benjamin Franklin, clothing, Copley, economic history, Fashion, France, Harvard University, History of Fashion, Iroquois, material culture, Patrick Henry, Political history, Teen Vogue, Virginia, Vogue, women, women's history, Women's March 3 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by Zara Anishanslin, assistant professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware. Her latest book is Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). Follow her @ZaraAnishanslin.

Homespun, Thomas Eakins, 1881, Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Please, sisters, back away from the pink.”

So women planning to attend the January 2017 Women’s Marches were urged by the writer of an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “Sorry knitters,” she continued, but making and wearing things like pink pussycat hats “undercuts the message that the march is trying to send….We need to be remembered for our passion and purpose, not our pink pussycat hats.” To back up her point, the author opined that “bra burning” dominated—and thus damaged—popular (mis)conceptions of women’s rights protests in the 1960s. Please, ladies, she exhorted, don’t repeat the mistakes we made in the ‘60s by bringing fashion into politics. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Of Records and Rituals: Native Americans and the Textile Trade

February 15, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: Art, art history, British, clothing, Dutch, economic history, Fashion, French, Historic New England, History of Fashion, material culture, museums, Native American history, Native Americans, South, southern history, Spanish, Textiles, trade, Winterthur 3 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by Laura E. Johnson, associate curator at Historic New England. The exhibition Mementos: Jewelry of Life and Love from Historic New England, which she curated, will open at the Eustis Estate Museum in Milton, Massachusetts, in May 2017.

“Echatillons Etouffes d’angleterre a l’usage des Espagnolesen Europe y en Amerique,” (Samples of English stuffs in use by the Spanish in Europe and America), Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Museum and Library

I’d like to build on Kimberly Alexander’s question from last week, “How can we write history when we do not have the original object?” There are many ways to examine a textile and its context without the physical object, as she demonstrated so ably. Much of my research on Native peoples, identity construction, and the Atlantic textile trade is based by necessity on a combination of archival resources, rare portraits, and archaeological evidence. Trade records, price lists, descriptions of treaty meetings, and other archival sources offer a wide range of evidence about textiles and how Natives consumed them, even in the absence of the pieces themselves.

Textiles were among the most lucrative and desirable of imported objects in the early Atlantic economy.[1] The French, Dutch, and British all relied heavily on textile production for a substantial portion of their national revenue. Woolens and linens raised, spun, woven and finished in these areas drove international commerce from the 13th century.[2] Native Americans presented an enormous potential market for their products as the domestic market became increasingly saturated. As one scholar has stated, it could have been termed the “cloth trade as easily as the deerskin trade.”[3] Continue reading →

Roundtable: Ambassador in a Hat: The Sartorial Power of Benjamin Franklin’s Fur Cap

February 15, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: 18th Century, American Revolution, Art, art history, Benjamin Franklin, clothing, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, Early America, France, fur, History, History of Fashion 2 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by guest contributor Joanna M. Gohmann, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in 18th– and 19th-Century Art, at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Benjamin Franklin (Augustin de Saint Aubin after Charles Nicholas Cochin, 1777, private collection)

While acting as the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin wore a fur hat to express his American status. The French enthusiastically accepted Franklin’s use of the topper, seeing it as an embodiment of the ambassador and a symbol of America and the American cause. When he first came to France in 1767, Franklin wore the clothes of a polite, fashionable Frenchman—a fine European suit and powdered wig—as a way to show respect to the French court. When he returned in 1776, he abandoned all the decorum of French dress and instead wore a simple, homespun brown suit, spectacles, and a large fur hat. He cleverly adopted this style as a way to garner attention and appeal to the French for support of the American cause.[1]

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