Guest Post: Disaster, Death, and Distilleries

April 22, 2015 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in From the Archives, Guest Posts Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Barbados, capitalism, Caribbean, colonial New York, Distilleries, industrialization, Jamaica, labor history, Mount Gay Rum, race, Rum, Slavery 4 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Jordan Smith, a PhD Candidate in Atlantic History at Georgetown University. His dissertation, “The Invention of Rum,” investigates the development and production of rum in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Warning: This post contains graphic accounts of industrial accidents.

On a recent research trip to Barbados, I stopped by the Mount Gay Visitors Center. There, between tastes of a variety of rums, tour guides regaled me with a heroic tale of Barbados’s place in the invention of rum. Afterwards, I was handed a brochure which proclaimed Mount Gay to be “the rum that invented rum.” The reasoning for this marketing strategy is simple enough—Mount Gay is one of many distilleries that makes a financial killing off of linking their product to a happy history of ingenuity and originality. Yet accounts of eighteenth-century distillery disasters suggest that this invention and innovation of rum was often undergirded by shocking violence. Continue reading →

Murder!: Entangled History, String Theory, and Narrative

February 9, 2015 By Casey Schmitt in Commentary, From the Archives Tags: Atlantic World, Caribbean, comparative history, Eliga H. Gould, Entangled History, string theory 1 Comment

On a dark and stormy night in July of 1729, a vicious murder occurred in the port city of Veracruz. Okay, I don’t actually know if it was stormy on that night, nor was the murder particularly vicious but, for narrative effect, bear with me. On the evening in question, a Dominican priest accompanied by an entourage of the town’s residents walked to the trading factory of the British South Sea Company to pay the factors a visit. According to Inquisition records, as the group approached the factory, shots were fired from within the building, and the Dominican priest fell dead. The man who fired the fatal shots—William Booth[1]—claimed that he had not recognized the priest and fired in self-defense. As Booth argued, marauders frequently roamed the streets after dark and he assumed the visitors wanted to rob him. Booth was sentenced to five years hard labor in North Africa—a veritable death sentence—and the South Sea Company’s factory in Veracruz barely survived the incident, which reached the diplomatic tables of Europe.[2] Continue reading →

The Spy Who Came in from the Confederacy

December 23, 2014 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Methodology Tags: 19th Century, Atlantic World, Civil War, Confederate, Early Republic, Media history, Politics, Print Culture, Propaganda, race, Slavery, southern history 2 Comments

1862_LON_14_1862_NPL_P385[SVC1] He was, at first, another young shadow hurrying through Westminster Hall. He carried flimsier credentials than most, papers hastily sent by a new nation called the Confederate States of America. It was November 1862, and, since spring, he had stretched expenses to accommodate the bare $750 granted to fund his secretive mission. Still, regular sightings of the worn, 29 year-old Swiss-American stranger, who had shipped to London via the fiery newsrooms of Richmond and Mobile, caused a flutter of concern among British peers. Within weeks, the constant American shadow near Parliament became a very real worry. “He is but a private gentleman, it is true,” one M.P. fretted, “yet he may leave his card at the Foreign Office, and possibly find his way upstairs.” Continue reading →

The Great Moose Massacre

December 8, 2014 By Mark Boonshoft in From the Archives Tags: Animals, colonial history, Georgia, New England, Print Culture, violence 1 Comment

Southern Connecticut is not exactly moose country. So I had to hide my disbelief when one day my boss claimed that he sat in traffic after a car hit a moose on the Merritt Parkway. How lost would a moose have to be to find itself in suburban Connecticut? Turns out, my boss told the truth. I welcomed any distraction from that boring summer job and followed this story pretty intently. It was a sad story—the moose had to be put down after the accident—but also a memorable one. I thought so at least. (Anytime I give someone directions to take the Merritt, I still warn them to watch for moose). The accident received a bit of coverage in local newspapers, while some outlets reprinted the AP coverage.[1] Every so often a reporter discovers the story when they learn that Connecticut is home to a sizable moose population.[2] Mostly, though, the story is forgotten. Continue reading →

The Problem of Southern Indians’ Allegiance in the American Revolution

December 5, 2014 By Rachel Herrmann in From the Archives, Historiography Tags: American Revolution, Cherokees, Creeks, Deep South, Native Americans, violence 2 Comments

So you know what’s hilarious? Trying to revise your dissertation into a book during the semester. I will admit that I am in the middle of editing my worst dissertation chapter, and am yelling out of a metaphorical pit of despair that’s been dug by a combination of bad prose and end-of-the-semester angst. Part of these struggles have to do with the fact that even after writing the chapter, submitting it, and defending it, I’m still not really sure what this chapter’s argument needs to say. This problem is directly tied to the fact that I found (and continue to find) myself befuddled by late-eighteenth-century Southern Indian affairs. So many factions! So much switching of sides! So many different ways I manage to mis-type Scots-Creek go-between Alexander McGillivray’s last name![1] Continue reading →

Contested Rites

November 27, 2014 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic World, British Empire, Civil War, Early Republic, holidays, Native Americans, New England, Puritan, religion, Thanksgiving 3 Comments

continental_prayer Joseph Yesurun Pinto, a 31 year-old Anglo-Dutch émigré in the autumn of 1760, had led New York’s Shearith Israel synagogue for barely a year when the second notice appeared in the papers. To re-commemorate the British conquest of Canada, all “Christian societies” and “houses of worship” would celebrate a day of thanksgiving on Thursday, October 23d. Over the past decade, New Englanders and their neighbors had held at least 50 fast days, many to lament God’s judgments against America, or to reform their wayward behavior. The proclamation of a thanksgiving day likely brought some measure of relief and joy.

Continue reading →

The Story of “Evacuation Day”

November 25, 2014 By Michael D. Hattem in Commentary, From the Archives Tags: American Revolution, Evacuation Day, historical memory, holidays, Narrative History, New York City 16 Comments

A century after the end of the War for Independence, New Yorkers continued to celebrate a holiday known as “Evacuation Day,” commemorating the leaving of the last British troops from New York City on November 25, 1783. It marked the end of a seven-year occupation by the British army who used the city as the headquarters for its North American operations during the war. But it also marked the beginning of a holiday that would be enthusiastically celebrated by New Yorkers for a century to come. On this anniversary, I offer the following narrative account of a day that played a large role in the city’s historical memory of the Revolution for more than a century, but was eventually displaced when it became incompatible with contemporary circumstances. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Keeping the “Human” in the Humanities

November 20, 2014 By Hannah Bailey in From the Archives, Guest Posts, Methodology Tags: Africa, Archives, Atlantic World, France, Methodology, race, Slavery 4 Comments

Hannah Bailey is a PhD candidate in History at the College of William & Mary, where her research examines the interconnectivity between developing notions of race and the expansion of the African slave trade in the early modern French Atlantic. This is her second guest post at The Junto. Be sure and read her earlier post on French archives and entangled histories here.

As someone who is also leaping into an entirely new historiography in preparation for dissertation writing, I could commiserate with Casey Schmitt’s brilliantly astute post on the costs and benefits of comparative projects. It can be terrifying to move from a historiography with which one is relatively comfortable to, as she puts it, “a [new] field where innumerable scholars have dedicated entire careers.” I took one undergraduate class on West African history (which was a survey course that occurred five years ago), and yet my dissertation focuses heavily on early modern histories of West Africa and the Atlantic networks of knowledge (and ignorance) that shaped them. The body of exemplary secondary source material on West Africa is vast, and working with it for the first time is more than a little daunting. Continue reading →

Decoding Diplomacy

October 6, 2014 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Public History Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Revolution, Archives, Benjamin Franklin, cryptography, Digital History, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, documentary editing, Early Republic, Founders, Thomas Jefferson 1 Comment

John Adams, Codename: “Steady”

Ciphers, codes, and keys—plus reflections on how to encrypt sensitive developments in early American diplomacy—run through the papers of two generations in the Adams family’s saga of public service. So how did they use secrecy in statecraft? Continue reading →

Making the Adams Papers

September 26, 2014 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Public History Tags: American Revolution, Archives, cultural history, Digital History, documentary editing, Early Republic, Gender, John Adams, Methodology, Print Culture, scholarly editing 18 Comments

Nearly a quarter of a million manuscript pages, and almost fifty volumes to show for it: As we mark the 60^th anniversary of production at the Adams Papers editorial project, here’s an inside look at our process, from manuscript to volume. Continue reading →