Guest Post: Lowell & the Executive

August 22, 2014 By Sara Georgini in Guest Posts Tags: Adams, Antebellum, economic history, federal, Industrial Revolution, industrialization, Lowell, manufacturing, Massachusetts, Peru, Spain, tariff, Tudor, waltham 8 Comments

Today’s guest post is from Lindsay Schakenbach, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Brown University. Her dissertation, “Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry 1790-1840,” explores the development of the arms and textile industries in the context of national security, diplomacy, and territorial expansion.

Look through any opinion section of The Wall Street Journal and you’ll almost certainly find condemnations of government intervention in business or a lambasting of the inefficiencies of bureaucratic meddling. Too much government, these commentators say, is bad for the economy. A reexamination of America’s origins as an industrial superpower, however, suggests a different mantra. Take the founding of Lowell, Massachusetts, for example. Even if we debate the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution–Pawtucket, Rhode Island?, Patterson, New Jersey?–the fact remains that Lowell was the site of the first large-scale integrated factory system in the United States and stands as a symbol of the birth of industrial capitalism. And its rise to prominence depended on federal meddling. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “A Display of Folly and Show”: Joseph Smith’s Impressions of Congress

August 20, 2014 By Benjamin Park in Guest Posts Tags: government, Guest Posts, religion 13 Comments

Today’s guest poster, Spencer 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.

In my work at The Joseph Smith Papers, I have recently been examining dozens of documents surrounding the trip Joseph Smith made to Washington D.C. in 1839. As I have prepared these documents for publication in one of the project’s future volumes, they have drawn my mind to the way men and women living in rural America during the nineteenth century perceived the federal government and what they thought occurred in its different branches. Though Smith’s experience in this regard is but one example, I think that it is a telling one. Continue reading →

Junto Summer Book Club: Interview with Kathleen Brown

August 15, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Interview, Summer Book Club Tags: Class, Gender, interviews with historians, Junto Summer Book Club, race, Slavery, teaching, women's history 6 Comments

We at The Junto would like to thank everyone who read along with us for the Junto Summer Book Club. To bring the book club to a close, we caught up with Kathleen Brown, the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs, via email. Brown is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.

In our interview, Brown reflects on Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs eighteen years after its publication, assesses the state of women’s history and gender history, and shares her current project. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Thomas Jefferson and Public Historiography

August 12, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in Guest Posts, Public History Tags: Archives, Edward Edwards, Guest Posts, law, libraries, Thomas Jefferson 4 Comments

I’m pleased to introduce today’s guest poster, Matthew Crow, a regular commenter here at The Junto, who received his PhD at UCLA in 2011 and now teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York.

In his compendium of global archival practices, Memoirs of Libraries, Edward Edwards developed a history of how various peoples had organized their relationship to their pasts. For Edwards, political emancipation in the wake of the great revolutions required broadening public availability of the historical documents archived by the state. Continue reading →

Summer Book Club, Week 6

August 8, 2014 By Joseph M. Adelman in Summer Book Club Tags: Good Wives, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs, patriarchy, Slavery, Virginia 2 Comments

Brown GWNW And so we’ve come to the end of the road, a consideration today of the final chapter of Kathy Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs (the full set of posts is available here). We’ve enjoyed working through the book over the past several weeks, and look forward to a healthy conversation about the final chapter.

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Summer Book Club, Week 5

August 1, 2014 By Sara Georgini in Summer Book Club Tags: Class, Gender, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, race, Slavery, Virginia Leave a comment

Welcome to the semifinal edition of the Junto Summer Book Club! Before we head into the closing week, let’s pause at Chapters 8 and 9 of Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, to remember the ladies—and gentlemen—who invested in creating Virginian society. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Teaching and the Problem with Parties in the Early Republic

July 30, 2014 By Mark Boonshoft in Commentary, Guest Posts, Pedagogy Tags: Early Republic, Guest Posts, pedagogy, Politics, teaching 14 Comments

Mark Boonshoft is a PhD candidate at Ohio State University. His work focuses on colleges and academies, especially the networks forged in them, and their role in the formation of revolutionary political culture.

As an undergraduate, I found the political history of the early republic to be fascinating. As a graduate student, I find teaching the subject to be utterly frustrating. This surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. I was already interested in early American history when I got to college. Most of my students don’t share that proclivity, to say the least.[1] Generally, they assume that the policy debates of the founding era and beyond—especially about banks, internal improvements, and federalism—are downright dry. That said, our students live in an era of rampant partisanship and government paralysis, punctuated by politicians’ ill-conceived attempts to claim the legacy of ‘the founders.’ The emergence of American party politics is pretty relevant to our students’ lives. So with many of us gearing up to get back into the classroom, I thought this would be a good time to start a discussion about teaching the history of early national party formation. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Seneca Village Memory: The Problem of Forgetting

July 28, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Guest Posts, Methodology Tags: Central Park, free people of color, historical markers, historical memory, housing, memory, New York City, Public History, Seneca Village, urban history 14 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Alexander Manevitz (@historicities), a Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University.

When I started my doctoral program, “memory studies” struck me as more of a trend than a field. Something everyone talked about doing but couldn’t really define. After all, isn’t all history sort of a study of memories and how they’re made and used? Well, as with all things trendy, I was late to the party.[1] My first year of graduate school, I read Michele-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and David Blight’s Race and Reunion within a few weeks of one another, and I realized how wrong I’d been, and my interest has only grown from there.[2] I have since turned to questions of memory and amnesia in my own scholarship.

My work focuses on Seneca Village, a once-vibrant community in upper Manhattan where community activism and urban development collided when the city evicted the residents to clear land for Central Park in 1857. Despite its significant role in the development of African-American social activism in the early republic and its place in relation to one of the young nation’s largest urban development projects, Seneca Village has been almost entirely forgotten in popular and scholarly memory.[3]

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Guest Post: The Decline of Barbers? Or, the Risks and Rewards of Quantitative Analysis

July 23, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Guest Posts, Methodology Tags: capitalism, cultural history, Early Republic, Gender, men's grooming, Methodology, quantitative analysis, race 6 Comments

Today’s guest post is authored by Sean Trainor, a historian of the early American republic with an interest in the intersection of labor, popular culture, and the body. He is a PhD candidate in History and Women’s Studies and Pennsylvania State University, where his dissertation examines the history of men’s grooming in the urban United States between the turn of the nineteenth century and the American Civil War.

A few weeks ago, I finished compiling a database, long in the works, containing the names and addresses of all of the barbers in the cities of Boston, Cincinnati, and New Orleans between 1800 and 1860. Thrilling, I know, but the project has broader implications for historians interested in the intersection of quantitative and cultural history which, if you’ll bear with a brief exposition, I’ll discuss below.

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Guest Post: The Revolutions in the Margins of AMC’s “Turn”

July 15, 2014 By Michael Blaakman in Film, Guest Posts Tags: AMC, Culper, Loyalists, patriots, Revolutionary War, spies, TURИ, Turn 3 Comments

Don Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Northwestern University. His work explores how ordinary Americans experienced the major political and military events of the Revolutionary era in the course of their everyday lives, and how those experiences shaped actions and changed world-views going forward. Don’s dissertation, now nearing completion, examines the social dynamics of six port cities occupied by the British army during the Revolutionary War.

Turn The AMC series Turn ended its first season last month with mixed reviews. The consensus seems to be that the series, which tells the story of the Culper spy ring during the American Revolution, has a strong cast, good production values, and promising subject matter but ultimately fails both as a drama and as an accurate representation of history. Popular reviews have mostly found the narrative arc slow and frustrating, while the show’s numerous departures from the historical record have inspired an entire blog devoted to separating fact from fiction. As The Junto’s Roy Rogers put it in his review of the first three episodes back in April, these narrative and historical failings made the series in large part “just another morality play—The Patriot in the guise of Mad Men.”

While Turn‘s main storyline falls far short of doing justice to the fascinating story of the Culper spies, in its background characters and neglected subplots lie many of the complex and diverse experiences of ordinary Americans. Continue reading →