Review: Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition

June 25, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Book Review, Review / Q&A Tags: academia, American history, American Philosophical Society, American Revolution, book review, Carl Becker, Eric Foner, History, Jessica Roney, Johns Hopkins, Mobilization, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, political culture, Political history, Politics, Richard Ryerson, The Junto, voluntary associations 2 Comments

Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Capture In recent years, early American political history has received considerable attention. A range of historians have enriched our understanding of how Americans participated in and contributed to politics in the early republic.[1] Popular politics during the colonial period has received less attention.[2] But in Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, part of Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia, Jessica Choppin Roney focuses on politics in Philadelphia prior to the American Revolution. In so doing, she makes an important contribution to the field of early American history. Continue reading →

Review: Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders

June 11, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review Tags: Atlantic History, Haitian Revolution, Revolution, transnational 5 Comments

**Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

R. R. Palmer’s Age of Democratic Revolutions famously had no room in its two volumes for what many of us now recognise as the most revolutionary of them all—the one in Haiti between 1791 and 1804.[1] Janet Polasky has written a version for our own time, in which black men and white women mingle with the better-known protagonists of American, French, Dutch, and other, less successful revolutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Revolutions Without Borders is no analytical, comparative account, but an histoire croisée in which people and texts are constantly on the move, interacting with each other in all sorts of ways, setting off unexpected sparks. Continue reading →

Review: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 6, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, capitalism, indentured servitude, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell, Royal African Company, Slavery 1 Comment

**Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).**

There have been some fantastic new contributions of late that explore connections between slavery, economics, and empire. In his 2008 analysis of the American political economy, economic historian Gavin Wright concluded that the dependence on slave labor came not because of any institutional efficiency on the part of plantations, but rather, that no other form of coerced labor could have been made to meet the labor demands. Sven Beckart’s Bancroft Prize-winning book, Empire of Cotton, analyzes connections between cotton, and the slave labor behind it, and the rise of modern capitalism. Ed Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, explores slavery’s role in the making of American capitalism.

Continue reading →

Review: Andrew Beaumont, Colonial America & the Earl of Halifax, 1748-1761

April 21, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Book Review, Guest Posts Tags: American Revolution, Andrew Beaumont, Board of Trade and Plantations, book review, British Empire, colonial America, Guest Posts, imperial history, imperial reform, Political history, The Earl of Halifax 3 Comments

**Andrew D. M. Beaumont, Colonial America & the Earl of Halifax, 1748–1761. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.**

Andrew Beaumont has written a provoking biography of George Montagu Dunk, second earl of Halifax (1716–1771) that covers the crucial period between 1748 and 1761. This book offers a re-evaluation of how we understand colonial American politics and, by implication, it forces us to reconsider the origins of the American Revolution.It also reorients our understanding of British figures who wanted to centralize the Empire during the eighteenth century. For Beaumont, we should look less at the familiar cast of characters: George Grenville; the Earl of Bute; William Pitt, later Lord Chatham; and Lord North. There are others, of course. But, we are familiar with these men. We know their stories. We know their contributions. Beaumont does not argue that we should look away from these men. Rather, he argues that we should look at other “ambitious men” and how they affected the British Empire. In this book, Beaumont examines the “Father of the Colonies,” the Earl of Halifax. Continue reading →

“Your Most Affectionate Friend…”

April 13, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review Tags: Cassandra Good, Founding Fathers, Gender, women's history 2 Comments

Even as nineteenth-century biographers sought to ignore or suppress it, there’s rarely been much shortage of gossip about the sex lives of the Founding Fathers. Cassandra Good’s new book, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (OUP, 2015), offers a warning to readers of eighteenth-century relationships who can be all too ready to embrace the temptations of scandal—these letters might sometimes look like thin veils for a seething sexuality beneath, “but a careful consideration of how people expressed emotion and an openness to the notion that men and women could be friends offers new, more nuanced readings,” Good argues. Scandalizing male-female relationships only serves to place them beyond the purview of ordinary life. Founding Friendships reminds us that women’s presence in the world shouldn’t come as a surprise, and that their roles were never limited to wives, mothers, and sex-objects. Continue reading →

Review: Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers

February 27, 2015 By Seth in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: 19th Century, book review, Early Republic, New England, religion Leave a comment

**Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.**

Rally the Scattered Believers At the beginning of February, Wake Forest University hosted a symposium marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press). The list of participants was a “who’s-who” of American religious history: Catherine Brekus, Sylvester Johnson, Mark Noll, Amanda Porterfield, Harry Stout, Grant Wacker (on more of a “who’s-that?” note, I was there, too, feeling honored but absurdly under-credentialed in that company). Each offered reflections on the book’s influence and reach, on his or her personal experience with it, on how its arguments have aged. Hatch, now the president of Wake Forest, offered an eloquent response. (Video of the event is available here.) Continue reading →

Tempests and Tedium in the Transatlantic: Shipboard Life in the 18th Century

February 23, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 18th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, book review, Colonial Georgia, Maritime history, religious history, Simmons College, Stephen R. Berry 3 Comments

**Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life in Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

9780300204230 When colonial Georgia was founded in 1732, it carved out a brand new space in the New World. The founders’ intentions were in part for it to serve as a charitable colony, where Britons from overcrowded debtor’s prisons could start anew. It also carved out an English space to serve as a geographic barrier between wealthy South Carolina and rival Spanish Florida. But, as Stephen R. Berry demonstrates in this highly original new study, colonies were not the only spaces that were created and negotiated as the Atlantic World expanded. The ocean, and indeed the ships that carried passengers to and from the New World should also be viewed as spaces in their own right.

Continue reading →

Bernard Bailyn’s Last Act?: An Interview with the Harvard Historian on His New Book

February 6, 2015 By eherschthal in Book Review, Interview Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic World, Bernard Bailyn, historiography, Slavery 8 Comments

Bernard Bailyn’s contribution to our understanding of early American history is so vast that it’s easy to forget he’s still publishing books. His writings on the American Revolution, begun in the 1960s, remain required reading for any doctoral student studying for orals. And even since retiring from Harvard a quarter century ago, he’s continued to influence the field, perhaps nowhere more than through his promotion of Atlantic history.

Yet even at 92, Bailyn isn’t finished. His new book, Sometimes An Art: Nine Essays on History (Knopf), can be read in a number of ways: as an introduction to his vast corpus of work; a chance to respond to his critics; a reflection on the meaning of history; and, perhaps, a summing up of sorts. “It reflects some of my own work over the years,” Bailyn told me during an interview from Boston. The essays he’s chosen to include, dating from 1954 to 2007, have only appeared in either obscure publications or dated back issues of prominent journals. But in one way or another, he said, they “concentrate on certain major themes” in all his work. Continue reading →

Reading the Field from a Book: Some Thoughts on Eric Nelson’s The Royalist Revolution

January 12, 2015 By Michael D. Hattem in Book Review, Commentary Tags: American Revolution, Constitution, Eric Nelson, historical memory, Imperial Crisis, patriot royalism, The Royalist Revolution 18 Comments

Eric Nelson’s The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding is, to put it simply, an important book. It is perhaps, the most important book on the Revolution in almost a decade. Yet, at the same time, its argument, methodology, and importance are indicative of (one might say, testament to) the long-standing stasis in which Revolution political studies has been mired for a very long time. This post is less reviewing the book itself than exploring its relationship with its historiographical context regarding political studies of the Revolution, particularly, its origins and causes.[1] Continue reading →

Review: Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets

December 11, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Anglicanism, book review, church history, colonial New York, Elizabeth Ann Seton, free people of color, High Church, John Street Methodist Church, Methodism, Mother Zion Church, New York City, St. Philip's Church, Trinity Wall Street 2 Comments

Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

In many respects, Four Steeples over the City Streets is a story about different ways of being Anglican in New York City. It’s also a story about how external social changes influenced and threatened a vision of social order without destroying it. And it’s a story about how different kinds of New Yorkers in the early republic–black and white and male and female–experienced their community in religious terms. Continue reading →

The Junto

A Group Blog on Early American History

Category Archives: Book Review

Review: Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition

Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Review: Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders

**Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

Review: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

**Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).**

Review: Andrew Beaumont, Colonial America & the Earl of Halifax, 1748-1761

**Andrew D. M. Beaumont, Colonial America & the Earl of Halifax, 1748–1761. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.**

“Your Most Affectionate Friend…”

Review: Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers

**Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.**

Tempests and Tedium in the Transatlantic: Shipboard Life in the 18th Century

**Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life in Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

Bernard Bailyn’s Last Act?: An Interview with the Harvard Historian on His New Book

Reading the Field from a Book: Some Thoughts on Eric Nelson’s The Royalist Revolution

Review: Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets

Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

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Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

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Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life in Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

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Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

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**Shelby M. Balik, Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.**

**Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life in Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**