Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Jamalin Harp

November 9, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Leave a comment

Harp Headshot 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

November 5, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: Archives, childhood, Civil War, emancipation, youth Leave a 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 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

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 →

Guest Post: Fashion from Japan and France: Nightgowns in Colonial Brazil

October 8, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture Tags: Atlantic World, Brazil, Fashion, History of Fashion, Latin America, material culture, Portugal, South America, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

Le_diner._Les_dèlassemens_d'une_aprés_diner

Jean-Baptiste Debret, “Les dèlassemens d’une aprés diner,” from Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, vol. 2 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frerès, 1835)

Today’s guest post comes from Rachel Zimmerman (Ph.D., University of Delaware), Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She has been studying the art and architecture of the Brazilian town of Minas Gerais since her first trip to the region in 2006. She began examining consumption in colonial Brazil for her dissertation, “Global Luxuries at Home: The Material Possessions of an Elite Family in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” and is continuing research for a book project on elite material culture in the city of Mariana. Follow her work here.

According to the early nineteenth-century English merchant John Luccock, it was customary for Brazilian men to discard stiff outer layers when at home and wear only a cotton shirt, often unbuttoned, knee-length breeches, and clogs.[1] Brazilian standards of decorum permitted informal dress in domestic settings, even when receiving guests. Examination of colonial-era probate inventories from Minas Gerais, the gold mining district, reveals that a small number of educated elite men transformed their state of undress from ordinary to stylish with the addition of a nightgown. Continue reading →

Fragmented Stories: Cloth from the Colonies in a 19th-Century Dress Diary

September 21, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: Britain, Fashion, History of Fashion, women's history Leave a comment

Dear Junto readers, Thank you for joining us for two weeks of all-new scholarship tracing the historical patterns of #ColonialCouture! Read the whole roundtable here.

Today’s #ColonialCouture finale post is by Kate Strasdin, senior lecturer in cultural studies at the Fashion & Textiles Institute, Falmouth University, whose research focus is on 19th- and 20th-century female dress and haute couture. Follow her @kateStrasdin.

A small industrial town in the North West of England in the middle of the 19^th century might seem an unlikely place to start with a narrative concerning dress and the colonies. On September 20 1838, Anne Burton married Adam Sykes in Tyldesley, Lancashire. A small piece of their wedding day is captured on the very first page of a volume that Anne was to keep for almost forty years – a fragment of her wedding dress and the figured silk waistcoat worn by her groom carefully pasted into what was to become her dress diary. Continue reading →

Luxurious Tipping Points in Early Massachusetts

September 20, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: archaeology, Fashion, History of Fashion, Massachusetts, New England, Salem Witch Trials, Silk 1 Comment

Architectural tile, tin-glazed earthenware. Cross Street Back Lot site, Massachusetts Historical Commission.

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Ben Marsh, senior lecturer in history at the University of Kent and author of Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (University of Georgia Press, 2012). His current research project is “Silk and the Atlantic World, c. 1500-1840.” Follow him @MarshBen1.

You can find the strangest things in toilets. When Katherine Wheelwright Nanny Naylor (1630-1716) and her remaining two children filled in a brick-lined privy at the back of their yard in Ann Street, perhaps downsizing in the 1690s after having once run her own business from a fine waterfront lot on the north side of Boston Harbour, they inadvertently left a message preserved in the marine clay. When the site was excavated in the 1990s (at the point of being built over by the city’s Central Artery), it flushed up over a hundred fragments of different textiles.[i] This is tipping point three. Continue reading →

Priscilla Mullins Alden and the Search for a Dress in Pieces

September 19, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: Fashion, History of Fashion, Massachusetts Historical Society, Mayflower, New England 8 Comments

John and Priscilla Alden
Colored Postcard with a Colonial Revival view of the couple

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Kimberly Alexander, professor of museum studies and material culture at the University of New Hampshire and author of Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). She is currently guest curator of “Fashioning the New England Family,” opening at the Massachusetts Historical Society on 5 October 2018. Follow her @SilkDamask.

Bradfords, Brewsters, Aldens, Winslows, Cottons, Winthrops. Throughout the K-12 experience, these names filled the classes and textbooks of the students who now sit before us in college classrooms, crowding out other names, names like Weetamoo and Rondriquez and Tubman. But, through the process of mythologizing that distills and filters facts, the men and women of the Mayflower have come to be somewhat flat and lifeless characters, rather than people who inhabited real bodies in a real space. Consequently, this where even the smallest and seemingly insignificant fragment of material culture can add dimensions that revisit the past as a place of hopes and dreams, struggle and disappointment.[1] Continue reading →

Guest Post: “young appearance”: Assessing Age through Appearance in Early America

September 18, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Childhood & Youth, Guest Posts, Uncategorized Tags: Appearance, childhood, children, Guest Posts, law, youth 1 Comment

Today’s guest post 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.

Children and adolescents are regularly described as big for their age, small for their age, or mature for their age– but what purpose does it serve to judge a person’s age against their appearance? Today, with birth certificates to prove our age it doesn’t actually mean much. But in early America, where no such formalized, institutionally supported forms of record keeping existed, appearing young or old relative to one’s age could have significant ramifications on a person’s life. Continue reading →

On Wednesdays We Wear Prints: Fashion Rules in the African Atlantic

September 18, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: African history, Britain, Fashion, History of Fashion, Sierra Leone, Slavery, women's history 2 Comments

Stella McCartney Spring/Summer 2018 ready-to-wear fashion collection, Paris, Oct. 2, 2017. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Today’s #ColonialCouture post is by Bronwen Everill, lecturer in history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, and author of Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Cambridge Series in Imperial and Post-colonial Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Follow her @BronwenEverill.

In 2017, Stella McCartney ran into trouble during Paris fashion week. Her faux pas was cultural appropriation: using Nigerian Ankara fabrics, reportedly pretending to have “discovered” them, and dressing her almost exclusively white group of models in the fabric.

In 1791, British traveller Anna Maria Falconbridge complained of the failure of her own attempt to promote cultural appropriation of European fashions, while describing her visit to the Temne, in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Spending time with Clara, the wife of the royal secretary, “I endeavoured to persuade her to dress in the European way, but to no purpose; she would tear the clothes off her back immediately after I put them on. Finding no credit could be gained by trying to new fashion this Ethiopian Princess, I got rid of her as soon as possible.”[1] Now, maybe it’s just me, but I always think Anna Maria would have given Gretchen Wieners a run for her money as Regina George’s BFF. Her book, Two Voyages in Sierra Leone, is full of snarky comments about fashion in Sierra Leone, but it comes across as so much posturing. Continue reading →

Yuchi Fashion Week, 1736

September 17, 2018 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables, Uncategorized Tags: Fashion, History of Fashion, Native American, Southeastern 3 Comments

Figure 1: Von Reck, Indian King and Queen Uchi, Senkaitschi, 1736. Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark

Welcome back to week two of our #ColonialCouture roundtable! Today’s post is by Jessica Yirush Stern, associate professor of history at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exchange in the Southeast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

How desperately I wanted to get inside. Historians are like fleas, on ride-alongs with the authors of their sources. My hosts were all males (white traders, agents, travellers), and none of them crossed the threshold of eighteenth-century Southeastern Indian homes or workplaces, with pens in hand, set to record women as they fashioned clothes. Sure, I have access to many of the purchases that preceded those moments of artistry. I have a few drawings of women and men donning the final products of these efforts.[i] But left to my imagination is how Southeastern Indians envisioned themselves as designers. Continue reading →