Recent Scholarship « The Junto

The current issue of the Journal of the Early Republic includes Andrew Cayton’s SHEAR presidential address on the novel’s place in the postrevolutionary Atlantic world: “The Authority of the Imagination in an Age of Wonder.” The essay makes a case for the usefulness of period novels to early-republic historians. Cayton gives us three reasons novels are useful as historical sources:

“The people we study paid attention to them.” Novels were significant parts of people’s lives, and they illuminate “the shifting structure of discourse and discourse communities” in early-nineteenth-century America.
“They challenge our preoccupation with categories.” Novels were experiments in defining and redefining people.
Novels reveal that many people conceived of liberty socially, “as a voluntary location of one’s self within overlapping social networks” (25-26). [1] Continue reading →

Scholarship can come at such a fast clip nowadays that it can be tough to keep up. Actually, scratch that; it is impossible to keep up with the massive amounts of articles that come out at an unrelenting rate. With the number of journals out there publishing quality work in early American history—journals that are both dedicated to our field or just sometimes carry work in our field amongst other periods—there is often an avalanche of new work that one can feel overwhelmed. Whether you receive hard copies of the many journals, use those from your institution’s library, or just get all of the content online (guilty), your reading list is always at such a ridiculous height that it is difficult to just keep track of all the recent articles, let alone read them. Such are the #firstworldproblems of the modern-day academic.

Well, that’s where the Junto comes in. Periodically, we hope to highlight recent articles that we found especially noteworthy. I’ll list a handful in the post (that are, of course, reflective of my own interests), and then we will rely on you, our dear reader, to share other recent articles you found important. Together, perhaps we can slay the beast that is the growing mound of unread articles. Continue reading →