Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Holly N.S. White

November 2, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: age, childhood, law, nineteenth century, youth 1 Comment

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 comes from Holly N.S. White (Ph.D., College of William & Mary) who is an assistant editor of Publications and Digital Projects at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and an assistant producer of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast about Early American History. She specializes in the history of age, childhood, and youth as well as the histories of gender, family, and law in the early America. Her research focuses on the definition and negotiability of age in early American law and society, which is the subject of her forthcoming first book, Negotiating American Youth: Age, Law, and Culture in the Early Nineteenth Century. Be sure to check out Holly’s Junto piece from last month, ““young appearance”: Assessing Age through Appearance in Early America!” Continue reading →

Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Vanessa Holden

October 31, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Slavery, The History of Childhood & Youth Tags: chlidhood, Rebellion, Roundtable, slave resist, Slavery, youth 2 Comments

If you missed the first two 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.

We are thrilled to have The Junto’s very own Dr. Vanessa M Holden join the roundtable today to discuss her work on African American children, free and enslaved. Dr. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, tentatively titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender, Community, Resistance and Survival During the Southampton Rebellion of 1831(University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion of 1831, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives. In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery. Follow her on Twitter @drvholden Continue reading →

Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Crystal Webster

October 29, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Slavery, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: childhood, emancipation, interviews, Roundtable, roundtables, Slavery, youth 2 Comments

If you missed our first post on Friday in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth with Bianca Premo, 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, Dr. Crystal Lynn Webster joins us to discuss her work on nineteenth-century African American women and children. Dr. Webster is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received her PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and was previously a long-term Mellon dissertation fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2016-17) program in African American history. Her current book project, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: Northern African American Children’s Cultural and Political Resistance, examines the lives of Black children in the antebellum North and their experiences in juvenile reformatories, orphanages, schools, as well as their role in emerging social movements concerning race and childhood. Her research has been funded by the Library Company of Philadelphia, American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she has received first place writing awards from the National Council for Black Studies and the Association of Black Women Historians. Continue reading →

Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Bianca Premo

October 26, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, The History of Childhood & Youth, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Photo - 1 (4) The history of childhood and youth in vast early America is a nascent but burgeoning field of inquiry that brings together historians of politics, society, slavery, race, and gender. Over the next three weeks, The Junto will feature a roundtable series with some of the most prominent historians of childhood and youth around the Atlantic as well as emerging scholars in the field. We’ll discuss the challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.

Today, we are kicking off this roundtable series with an interview of Bianca Premo, a pioneer in the study of children as actors in historical processes. Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami, Dr. Premo is the author of the Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017), Children of the Father King, Youth, Adult Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and co-editor of Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (University of New Mexico, 2007). She has also written various articles and chapters on children in Latin American history. In addition to a longstanding fascination with childhood and the law, she is increasingly interested in twentieth-century notions of medical subjectivity and age. Continue reading →

Q&A with L.H. Roper

October 4, 2018 By Casey Schmitt in Academia, Commentary, Interview, Methodology, Publishing, Recent Scholarship Tags: Advancing Empire, Colonialism, English Empire, imperialism Leave a comment

Today at The Junto, L.H. Roper, professor of history at the State University of New York at New Paltz and coeditor in chief of the Journal of Early American History, joins us to discuss his new book, Advancing Empire: English Interest in Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688. In the book, Roper explores the role of private interest in the establishment of a global English empire during the seventeenth century. With chapters that span America, Africa, and Asia, Roper’s work challenges us to think more critically about state versus individual initiative and emphasizes continuity across a wide geographic scope. The book came out last year and has received attention and praise in several notable reviews, which can be found here, here, and here. Continue reading →

Q&A with Sari Altschuler, Author of The Medical Imagination

September 27, 2018 By Rachel Herrmann in Interview Tags: American Revolution, Anthropologists, Benjamin Rush, Brian Connolly, Carrie Hyde, Cathy Kelly, Cholera, Civil War, Contagionist-climatist debate, Cristobal Silva, dissertations, Ed White, Editing, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Epistemic crises, Epistemological humility, Eric slauter, fiction, First Books, Genre, Gnomes, Gothic, Health, Health crises, Historians, Imaginative experimentation, Joe Rezek, John Kearsley Mitchell, Literary Scholars, Medical humanities, Medicine, Michael Drexler, musicology, Paul Erickson, Picaresque, poetry, religious studies, S. Weir Mitchell, Satire, sentimentalism, Theater studies, Trade gap 2 Comments

Sari Altschuler is an assistant professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of the minor in Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. Her book The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States was recently published with the University of Pennsylvania Press (2018), and her work has appeared in leading literary journals, including American Literature, American Literary History, and PMLA, as well as the Journal of the Early Republic and the medical journal the Lancet. She serves on the advisory board of American Quarterly and the editorial board of Early American Literature and recently coedited a special of Early American Literature (2017) on early American disability studies with Cristobal Silva.

JUNTO: As you know, The Junto is always interested in the experiences of junior scholars who have turned their dissertations into first books. How did your project and theorization of imaginative experimentation change over time?

SARI ALTSCHULER: Great question! This book is very different from my dissertation—but I had to write the dissertation in order to even begin to understand what was going on. The dissertation was about the collaborations of specific doctors and writers in Philadelphia. It was, in some ways, a very narrow and defined topic, which was good for a dissertation. But, when I started to think about what The Medical Imagination might be as a book, I wanted to do something more ambitious. In the dissertation I figured out that these doctors and writers were working together—in conversation—but for the book I wanted to understand the broader intellectual practice in which they were engaging. That’s how imaginative experimentation came to be at the center of the project. It’s an idea I only really began to think about as I finished the dissertation. Continue reading →

Q&A with Randy M. Browne, author of Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean

August 24, 2018 By Jessica Parr in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship, Uncategorized Tags: Atlantic World, Caribbean, Slavery 4 Comments

Randy M. Browne is a historian of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world, especially the Caribbean. He is an Associate Professor of History at Xaverian University (Cincinnati). Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean is his first book and he discusses it here with Jessica Parr. Continue reading →

Q&A with Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History, 2nd Edition

July 17, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic World, comparative history, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, historiography, New Edition, Review, Revolution, Spanish America, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

9781479857173_full When Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History was published in 2009, it was one of the first monographs to bring together the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions in a single English-language volume. Revolutions in the Atlantic World quickly became a seminal text, finding its way on many Atlantic history syllabi, comprehensive exam reading lists, and on researchers’ shelves. In January 2018, New York University Press released a second edition that incorporates historiography from the past nine years, including scholarship on indigenous peoples and privateers. Tomorrow, Jordan Taylor will have his review of this second edition. Today, The Junto’s Julia M. Gossard interviews Klooster about the book’s second edition, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions.

Continue reading →

Q&A with Christopher Grasso, author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War

July 10, 2018 By Christopher Jones in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship Tags: doubt, Faith, religion, religious history, Skepticism 2 Comments

Christopher Grasso earned his PhD from Yale in 1992, taught at St. Olaf College, and came to William and Mary in 1999. From 2000 to 2013 he served as the Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (OIEAHC/UNC Press, 1999) and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017). His most recent book, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War, was just published by Oxford University Press earlier this month. Dr. Grasso generously agreed to answer a few questions about the book. Continue reading →

Q&A: Erin M. Greenwald, author of New Orleans, the Founding Era

May 14, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Interview Tags: 18th Century, French, French Atlantic, Louisiana, material culture, museums, Native Americans, New Orleans, Public History, Slavery 1 Comment

Greenwald_2017 Today at The Junto, Philippe Halbert interviews Erin M. Greenwald about her exhibition, New Orleans, the Founding Era, on view at The Historic New Orleans Collection through the 27 of May. Edited by Greenwald, the accompanying English-French publication features interdisciplinary essays by eight leading scholars and an illustrated catalogue. Before beginning as Curator of Programs at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2017, Greenwald was senior curator and historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection, where she curated exhibitions including Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865, a traveling exhibition funded by the NEH and awarded the AASLH Leadership in History Award of Merit. Her first monograph, Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World, was published by LSU Press in 2016. Greenwald also chairs the New Orleans Slave Trade Marker and App Project, an initiative of the 2018 Tricentennial Commission, which anticipates placing six interpretive markers designating sites in New Orleans with direct links to the slave trade this summer.