Today, the Junto features a Q&A with Erik R. Seeman about his new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press). Seeman is professor and chair of the history department at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and the author of three other books on religion and deathways in early America and the Atlantic World. He has also published many articles and essays, including in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of American History, and Church History. Continue reading
Category Archives: Interview
Interview with David Doddington, Author of Contesting Slave Masculinity
David Doddington is a Senior Lecturer in North American History at Cardiff University. His research interests centre on slavery, race, and gender in the antebellum South, with a particular interest in examining resistance, survival, and solidarity within slave communities. Today he speaks with Rachel Herrmann about his new book, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South. Find him on Twitter at @d_doddington. Continue reading
Q&A with Joseph Adelman
Today, The Junto interviews our own Joseph Adelman about his new book Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789. Jordan Taylor’s review of the book appeared yesterday.
Junto: Let’s start off on a hostile note: Why should anyone care about early American newspaper printers?
JMA: Well if you’re going to be hostile, I’m tempted to just say “because I said so.” But assuming that will work about as well here as it does with my kids, let me make the case as best I can. At its core, Revolutionary Networksargues that the material realities of texts matters, and that scholars have tended to elide or simply stipulate their importance. Or, to put it in historiographic terms, we need to integrate book history methods more fully into our understanding of politics in Revolutionary America. So when I started doing research for the book when it was a dissertation, I focused on the production and circulation of texts and the impact those processes had on how American colonists and British officials made political decisions.
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Q&A with Christopher Parsons
Today Rachel Herrmann interviews Christopher Parsons about his book, A Not-So-New World, which Carla Cevasco reviewed yesterday. Parsons is an interdisciplinary historian of science and the environment in the French Atlantic World. He has a longstanding interest in highlighting the contribution of indigenous peoples to the evolution of European and Euro-American environmental sciences. He has published articles in the William & Mary Quarterly, Environmental History, Early American Studies, and several edited collections. He tweets as @cm_parsons.
JUNTO: A Not-So-New World includes a discussion about fraught vocabulary, including the word sauvage and your decision to leave it untranslated. Early Americanists have been thinking for a while now about the language we use when we write about the past, but many of us are just starting to think about the French sources that inform your book. Could you say a little bit more about other word choices you made, and some of the words in translation that non-French Atlanticists might want to use with more care?
Christopher Parsons: Word choice is so important when you are working between subdisciplines such as the history of science and environmental history and across national historiographies such as, here, early Canada and early America. These are such powerful markers of investments in particular fields or the influence of particular works. I was conscious for example, of the Canadian preference for indigenous over native and the familiarity of early Americanists with terms such as the pays d’en haut.
Yet there were real intellectual reasons for leaving key terms untranslated as well. Continue reading
Q&A: Kate Egner Gruber, Curator of “Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia”
Today at The Junto, Philippe Halbert interviews Katherine Egner Gruber, who is Special Exhibition Curator at the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a state agency that operates two living history museums in Virginia. This Q&A focuses on her most recent exhibition, Tenacity: Women in Jamestown and Early Virginia, which opened at Jamestown Settlement in November of 2018 and runs through January of 2020. She was also responsible for content oversight of the Yorktown American Revolution Museum‘s award-winning introductory film, Liberty Fever, and contributed to the development of new galleries that opened there in 2015. Kate earned a bachelor’s degree in historic preservation and classical humanities from the University of Mary Washington and a master’s degree in American history from the College of William and Mary. Continue reading
Interview with Michael McGandy
Michael McGandy is Senior Editor and Editorial Director of the Three Hills imprint at Cornell University Press. He tweets as @michaelmcgandy.
JUNTO: Can you outline the review and production schedule for a first book?
Michael McGandy: If I am talking to a scholar who has just wrapped up his or her dissertation and is prepared to move on to developing the book, I state as a reliable truism that the bound book is four years off. And that presumes all goes well and smoothly! The work of revising the dissertation to make it into a book manuscript is indeterminate and the further work that will need to be done in response to reader reports and then the acquiring editor’s direction is also indeterminate. Those are, as I tend to say, the x-factors. What is pretty well fixed is that external review, in-house processing through Editorial and Faculty Boards, and contracting requires four months. What is also fixed is that producing the book and getting it out into the world on its publication date (the date when it goes live for sale, which is typically four weeks after the bound book is in the warehouse) is 11 months. So, even before a person considers the time needed for new research, revising existing chapters, and adding new material, 15 months are tied up with process. (Now “tied up” is an unkind phrase for key elements of making a book both excellent and saleable! But I know that that is how people scheduling out their early professional calendars tend to think.) When one considers that fact and then all the work that needs to go into developing a manuscript—even as one pays the bills and occasionally takes a break to have some non-scholarly fun—four years go very quickly and often turn out to be barely enough time.
Reflecting on that and taking the opportunity to editorialize, I do think that the well-reviewed first book as the non-negotiable standard for professional success in a tenure-track framework (on the standard six-year schedule) needs to be rethought. Four to six years do fly by, especially when we consider all the other important and engrossing things that usually come with these first years after the PhD (first jobs, new homes in new places, family, etc.). I am not going to name names or institutions, but in this context I think of the positive examples of some recent authors of mine who were tenured without first books and who were given the extra time to work on their book projects. Their research and writing were augmented because the tenure pressure was off and the projects were transformed (for the better) because the authors had six or seven years to make the book excellent. On the whole, I do not think that the schedule for tenure matches very well with the time needed for great scholarship. Filling out the CV sometimes becomes the driving concern and to the detriment of the work itself. Continue reading
Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Anna Mae Duane
Today is our final post in the roundtable series on the History of Childhood & Youth. If you missed previous posts click here. Thank you to each of our invited scholars for generously sharing tidbits of their research and their perspectives on this growing and dynamic field.
Dr. Anna Mae Duane, cited by several of our roundtable participants, rounds up this series. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her scholarship focuses on children and race in a variety of constellations, including children as both victims and political actors in Puritan trial proceedings, antebellum literature, pre-and post-emancipation slave narratives, contemporary children’s literature, modern anti-slavery materials, and adult popular culture. Her current project, Educated for Freedom: Two Black Schoolmates who Changed a Slave Nation (forthcoming, NYU) focuses on the role of childhood—their own and others—shaped the political imagination of two of antebellum America’s most influential Black abolitionists. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (UGeorgia, 2010) and editor of The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies in the Humanities (UGeorgia, 2013), and Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (Cambridge, 2017). She is co-editor, with Kate Capshaw, of Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900. (UMinnesota, 2017). Her work has been published in several scholarly journals, as well as public forums including Slate, Salon and Avidly.
Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson
If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. Stop by Wednesday for the finale of this roundtable series!
Today we welcome Dr. Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, expert in nineteenth-century U.S. religious history and childhood. She completed her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2016. Her dissertation, “Perfect Child, Perfect Faith: Raising Children in Nineteenth-Century Communities,” is a study of how four religious communities raised their children in an effort to embed their differing goals and identity in future generations. The United Society of Believers (better know as Shakers), Oneida Perfectionists, Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Berea abolitionists all created specific communities grounded in their unique interpretations of Christianity in an effort to reform and improve American life through challenging rural and bourgeois notions of family, gender, and race. She is currently working on expanding her research on Berea, exploring the role of children in the community’s goals of integrating education in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dr. Gudgeirsson is a lecturer in the History Department at Santa Clara University, teaching courses on nineteenth and twentieth-century US, California History, and World History. Continue reading
Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Jamalin Harp
If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.
Jamalin R. Harp is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She earned her PhD from Texas Christian University in 2017. Dr. Harp specializes in Early American history, focusing on social history in the nineteenth century. Her research and teaching interests include women’s history, the history of childhood, the history of reform, and political history. Her current research is on the Washington City Orphan Asylum, the first orphanage opened in the District of Columbia. Continue reading
Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Ben Davidson
If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.
Today’s interview is with Ben Davidson, a James Smithson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He recently completed his PhD in United States history at New York University. His book manuscript, “Freedom’s Generation: Coming of Age in the Era of Emancipation,” traces the lives of the generation of black and white children, in the North, South, and West, who grew up during the Civil War era. This project explores how young people across the nation learned persistent lessons, carried into adulthood, about complexities inherent in ideas and experiences of emancipation, assessing and interpreting how these lessons were transformed in memory well into the twentieth century. Continue reading
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