Following up yesterday’s review by Lindsay Keiter, today The Junto interviews James Parisot, author of How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West (Pluto, 2019). James teaches in the Department of Sociology at Drexel University, and received his PhD at SUNY Binghamton, home of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. Continue reading
Category Archives: Interviews with Historians
Q&A: Edward Rugemer, author of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World
Today at The Junto, we’re featuring an interview with Ed Rugemer about his new book, of Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, which Casey Schmitt reviewed yesterday. Ed Rugemer is an Associate Professor of History and African American Studies and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of History at Yale University. A historian of slavery and abolition, Rugemer’s first book The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War was published by Louisiana State University Press and his work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Slavery and Abolition, and the Journal of the Civil War Era.
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
Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Bianca Premo
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 Randy M. Browne, author of Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean
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 Christopher Grasso, author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War
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: Jeremi Suri, author of The Impossible Presidency
The question of whether the office of the Presidency is too unwieldy with its ever-expanding duties has once again engaged pundits. Most recently, journalist Scott Dickerson’s article raised the issue, a piece which includes the recent study by Jeremi Suri, The Impossible Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 2017). Presidents often used similar rhetorical messages–from Washington to Franklin D.Roosevelt. Suri views one of the mounting obstacles to the presidency as being a discursive problem. Interestingly, the use of language, so central to the presidency, with its surprisingly similar messaging overtime, produced unintended, and often times, inverted outcomes in its collision with capitalism and technology. Suri is currently Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs and Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at University of Texas, Austin. Continue reading
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