Roundtable: Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations

January 26, 2015 By Casey Schmitt in Dunn's "A Tale of Two Plantations", Roundtables, Special Features Tags: A Tale of Two Plantations, Antebellum US, Caribbean, Richard S. Dunn, Roundtable review, Slavery 9 Comments

Roundtable: Richard S. Dunn, <i>A Tale of Two Plantations</i>

This week The Junto is dedicated to a roundtable review of Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, Dunn’s previous publications include one of the seminal texts on Caribbean slavery and sugar plantation agriculture, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). Dunn’s newest book is an unflinching study of Afro-Caribbean and antebellum U.S. slavery in the final decades of both systems. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Barton Price on Academic Support in the Survey Course

January 15, 2015 By Christopher Jones in Academia, Guest Posts, Pedagogy Tags: academic support, guest post, pedagogy, teaching 2 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Barton Price. Barton is the Director of the Centers for Academic Success and Achievement at Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). He has taught courses in American history, religious studies, and history of rock and roll at IPFW. Price has a Ph.D. in American religious history from Florida State University. His research interests vary from religion in the American heartland to the scholarship of teaching and learning in religious studies and history. Here he offers some thoughts on teaching the U.S. History survey course gleaned from his administrative experience in an academic support center.

The start of another semester is upon us. It is a new opportunity to teach students about America’s past, to correct longstanding inaccurate assumptions about that past, and to introduce students to the ways of thinking like a historian. It is also an opportunity to foster student academic success. The introductory survey course is a venue for such accomplishments. Continue reading →

Guest Post: What’s in a Name? On Sports Teams and Scalp Bounties

December 22, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Commentary, Guest Posts Tags: guest post, Native Americans, NFL, race, scalping, Washington Redskins 10 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Mairin Odle, a PhD Candidate in Atlantic History at New York University. In 2013-2014, she was a Sawyer Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research investigates cross-cultural body modifications in early America.

As many in the D.C. area can tell you, the Washington NFL franchise—known to thousands of its fans as the Redskins—lost each of the four games they played last month. Is it possible that players were distracted by the protests and controversy over the team’s nickname? The timing is interesting: after all, November was Native American Heritage Month. Continue reading →

Q&A with Dane Morrison, Author of True Yankees

December 18, 2014 By Jessica Parr in Interviews with Historians Tags: 18thCentury, 19th Century, American Revolution, Benjamin Carp, Canton Trade, China Trade, Dane A. Morrison, Edmund Fanning, Eliga H. Gould, Harriett Low, Jacksonian America, Jon Butler, Joyce Appleby, Maritime history, New England, Print Culture, Richard L. Bushman, Tea, True Yankees 1 Comment

The following is an interview with Dane A. Morrison, about his recently-released book, True Yankees: The South Seas & the Discovery of American Identity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Morrison is Professor of History at Salem State University (MA). Continue reading →

A Junto Birthday Party: Whitefield at 300 Roundtable

December 16, 2014 By Jessica Parr in Commentary, Guest Posts Tags: 18th Century, antislavery, church history, George Whitefield, Great Awakening, historical memory, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, religion, Revivalism, Slavery Leave a comment

Today’s guest poster, Thomas S. Kidd, is professor of history at Baylor University and the author, most recently, of George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

A Long Afterlife (Jessica Parr)

Those familiar with the first great awakening will undoubtedly recognize George Whitefield as a key figure of eighteenth century evangelical culture in Britain and its American colonies. Like many associated with the Methodist movement in Whitefield’s time, the prolific preacher and publisher saw himself as an Anglican in discussion with the Church of England about reform and an allowance for a broader religious experience. However, his theology, the new birth doctrine, the gathered church, etc., all alienated Whitefield from the Anglican hierarchy within the first few years of his missionary career.

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Guest Post: Strange Constitutional Bedfellows: The First and Third Amendments in the Mormon Quest for Religious Liberty

December 15, 2014 By Benjamin Park in Guest Posts Tags: Constitution, Mormonism, religion 4 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Spencer W. McBride, who has blogged with us before. Dr. McBride received his PhD at Louisiana State University in 2014 and is now a historian and documentary editor at the Joseph Smith Papers. His research examines the politicization of clergymen during the American Revolution and in the early American republic.

Of the ten amendments that comprise the United States Bill of Rights, the third amendment is arguably the least controversial. Go ahead, think back to your high school civics class and try to remember what rights are protected by the third amendment. Can’t remember? Don’t feel too bad. It is rarely invoked by politicians and political activists, it does not often spark heated debates in the media, and the U.S. Supreme Court has never heard a case in which it was the primary basis. Let’s face it, since the adoption of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, Americans have not been overly concerned that the government will quarter troops in the homes of private citizens without their consent. Continue reading →

Q&A with Kyle T. Bulthuis, Author of Four Steeples over the City Streets

December 12, 2014 By Christopher Jones in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 19th Century, Atlantic World, Early Republic, Interview, interviews with historians, Methodology, race, religion, research, research methodology, social history, writing 1 Comment

The following is an interview with Kyle Bulthuis, an assistant professor of history at Utah State University. Jonathan Wilson’s review of Kyle’s recently-released book, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations, appeared on the blog yesterday. Kyle agreed to sit down and answer a few follow up questions about the book and his future research plans, which we are happy to post today. Continue reading →

Review: Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets

December 11, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Anglicanism, book review, church history, colonial New York, Elizabeth Ann Seton, free people of color, High Church, John Street Methodist Church, Methodism, Mother Zion Church, New York City, St. Philip's Church, Trinity Wall Street 2 Comments

Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

In many respects, Four Steeples over the City Streets is a story about different ways of being Anglican in New York City. It’s also a story about how external social changes influenced and threatened a vision of social order without destroying it. And it’s a story about how different kinds of New Yorkers in the early republic–black and white and male and female–experienced their community in religious terms. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Teaching Toilets in an Age of American Ebola

December 1, 2014 By Jessica Parr in Guest Posts, Pedagogy Tags: 19th Century, colonial history, Early Republic, epidemics, History of Medicine, hospitals, pedagogy, Philadelphia 2 Comments

K.A. Woytonik is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire. In 2013-2014, she was a Research Associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her dissertation is a cultural history of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Early Republic Philadelphia.

A bevy of esteemed scholars across fields have established the devastating effects of early modern epidemics, from Europe’s plagues to the decimation of Native American populations in North America. Epidemics occupied the minds of colonists, who, depending on region and demographics, participated in prevention strategies including quarantine, the destruction of soiled linens belonging to sick individuals, days of fasting and prayer, and immunity-building efforts such as inoculation and changes in diet. In today’s academy, epidemics offer historians avenues of interdisciplinary discussion, as the impact of contagious disease can be read not only in the archive, but in literature, in artwork, and in archaeological findings.

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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 →