Guest Post: Report from RAAC 2013

June 17, 2013 By Roy Rogers in Conferences, Guest Posts Tags: conferences, Guest Posts, RAAC 2013 Leave a comment

Today’s guest poster, Charlie McCrary, is a PhD student in American religious history at Florida State. His MA thesis is about 19th-century Methodist circuit riders’ autobiographies. He is now researching religion, secularism, and public education in the early republic. Here, he reports on the Conference on Religion and American Culture earlier this month.

RAAC The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI held its Third Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis over June 6th through 9th (see the program here; see also #RAAC2013) The conference, a relatively small affair—made to feel smaller and more intimate by its democratizing conference-in-the-round spatial arrangement—brought together scholars, from esteemed pillars of the field to graduate students, to discuss and debate the present and future of the study of American religions. Many of the presentations focused on case studies from the recent past and/or broader methodological issues, but pre–1865 topics received some explicit mention as well. In this brief report, I have compiled a highlight reel of scenes most interesting to the Junto’s readers. Continue reading →

More Pre-Conference Highlights for #SHEAR13

June 15, 2013 By Rachel Herrmann in Conferences, Guest Posts Leave a comment

As you may have read, the Junto is cross-posting some of the pre-conference highlights for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s (SHEAR’s) upcoming July conference in Saint Louis. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Locating Gender in the Stacks

June 14, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Digital History, Guest Posts Tags: Digital History, Early Republic, Gender in the Stacks, New York City, New York Society Library 2 Comments

Today’s guest poster is Aaron M. Brunmeier, a PhD student focusing on early American and Atlantic world history at Loyola University Chicago. Aaron is currently finishing up his role as the new media assistant for Common-place Journal and will work next on an AHRC-funded project on Atlantic world library history.

Network analysis for the 11 women and all the texts they borrowed from the NYSL from 1789 to 1792.

I must confess that when it comes to digital history, I am very much a novice. My introduction into this brave new world occurred last semester in Dr. Kyle Roberts’ undergraduate digital history class that I was able to take for grad credit at Loyola University Chicago. The end goal of the course was to create our own collaborative digital history project. I teamed up with two smart, hardworking, and creative undergrads whose backgrounds weren’t even in history and what we produced was Gender in the Stacks (which I should point out is currently a prototype and definitely a work-in-progress). Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Good Newes from ye olde World”

June 12, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Academia, Guest Posts Tags: British Group in Early American History, conferences, EEASA, Réseau pour le Développement Européen de l’Histoire de la Jeune Amérique, REDEHJA 2 Comments

Here at The Junto, we like to hear from early Americanists at work around the world. Today’s guest post comes from Lauric Henneton, Associate Professor at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin and Vice Président of the Réseau pour le Développement Européen de l’Histoire de la Jeune Amérique (REDEHJA).

In case the honorable readers of The Junto were wondering, we do Early American and Atlantic history in the “Old World” and not just in good old “Blighty.” This post is about how the Réseau pour le Développement Européen de l’Histoire de la Jeune Amérique (REDEHJA) came together and what we’ve done over the last few years. This is the story of a group of friends/colleagues who decided to come together institutionally after a few years holding small-scale events in and around Paris. Continue reading →

Science, Meet Slavery: “River of Dark Dreams” and the Future of Slavery Scholarship

June 8, 2013 By eherschthal in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Antebellum South, columbia, Harvard, Harvard University Press, history of science, Presentism, Review, River of Dark Dreams, science and technology, Slavery, Walter Johnson 2 Comments

04b0c-johnson I bet few graduate students these days haven’t read, or at least seen referenced, Walter Johnson’s essay “On Agency.” Published a decade ago, the essay was prompted by what had become hackneyed trope in slavery scholarship. Everyone seemed to ascribe slaves a role in shaping their lives—“agency”—despite the power asymmetries inherent in the slave-master relationship. Johnson famously called for an end to this kind of writing. But one of his subtler points may have been lost amid his overarching argument. It wasn’t that slave agency was unimportant, but that it had lost its contemporary relevance. Finding agency mattered in the Civil Rights Era, the years in which the scholarship flourished, because it bolstered African Americans’ claims on the nation’s past, and thus its future. Continue reading →

At River’s End

June 7, 2013 By Sara Georgini in Book Review, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: capitalism, Slavery, South, Walter Johnson 1 Comment

On the Riverwalk, New Orleans (Jan. 2013)

Last week, the Mississippi River surged against the levees, finally shattering restraints near St. Louis. Up and down the waterway, authorities hurried to secure hometowns, farmlands, and highways against the potential breach. “It could be anytime,” the Rivers Pointe fire chief told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The hope is to keep Highway 94 open.” Even now, watching the water flow higher and faster still, it is worth thinking about how or why Americans have chosen to embrace life along the river: the shifting networks of politics and profit, the deep imprint of slavery on the region’s past, and the legacy of a South that may or may not have grown closer to the world, in the many ways that the Confederates or others have intended over time. This conscious construction of a river culture—as it was made and understood by the region’s black and white nineteenth-century predecessors, men and women who were also sensitive to sudden danger, but eager to maintain the dense traffic of the cotton trade—permeates Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams and guides his expert analysis through their winding stories. Continue reading →

A View from Beyond the Valley

June 6, 2013 By Joseph M. Adelman in Book Review, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Antebellum, pedagogy, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtable, Slavery 1 Comment

35817-johnson Ben, Mandy, Matt, and Roy have done a marvelous job so far this week summarizing the arguments, the strengths, and a few of the (few) weaknesses of River of Dark Dreams. I therefore want to confine myself to just a few general thoughts, and then focus in on the area where my expertise lies: what this book means for the non-expert in slavery studies. Continue reading →

Intersections upon a Dark River

June 5, 2013 By Roy Rogers in Book Review, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: cultural history, economic history, global history, history of capitalism, religious history, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtable, Slavery, Walter Johnson 2 Comments

Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is the best big book on slavery I have ever encountered. This is not faint praise; there is some about the subject that causes its best historians—Eugene Genovese, Winthrop Jordan, Kenneth Stampp and more—to write in at bullet-stopping length. Johnson’s volume stands out due to his ability to seamlessly place the history of antebellum slavery at the intersection of three of the nineteenth century’s key themes—imperialism, capitalism, and technological development. He does this, as other contributors to this roundtable have noted, at the sweeping level of the very geography of Mississippi River Valley and at the much more intimate level of the lived experience of enslaved laborers. Continue reading →

Pre-Conference Highlights for #SHEAR13

June 5, 2013 By Rachel Herrmann in Conferences, Guest Posts Leave a comment

The Junto is pleased to announce that we will be cross-posting some of the pre-conference highlights for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s (SHEAR’s) upcoming July conference in Saint Louis. Continue reading →

To See The World In A Bale of Cotton

June 4, 2013 By Matt Karp in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Antebellum, capitalism, global history, imperialism, Slavery 3 Comments

The promise of a tie between the local and the global—a thread to join the dense fiber of individual life to the vast patterns of human interaction—has long lingered at the edge of the historian’s vision. “The hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours,” wrote Emerson in “History.” “Each new fact in . . . private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done.” Even the less Transcendental among us are lured by a link between the intimate and the infinite: every globalist, no matter how ambitious, must find their ground-level characters and illustrative anecdotes; the best microhistorians train their lenses to reveal not just cell particles but a whole cosmos. Few recent works in early American history, however, are so explicit in their equal pursuit of the local and the global, the hours and the ages, as Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Continue reading →