Where Historians Work: Q&A with Anne Petersen of Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation

July 6, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in Public History, Where Historians Work Tags: architecture, chinese america, food history, historic preservation, jobs, museums, Public History, SBTHP, Spanish America, Theater Leave a comment

“I went on to the doctorate because I didn’t want a ceiling on what I could achieve as a historian.” ~ Dr. Anne Petersen, Executive Director, Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation

Welcome back to the latest installment of “Where Historians Work: The View from Early America.” Today, we venture westward to California to feature a Q&A with Dr. Anne Petersen, the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. Katy and Anne discuss the dynamic history interpretation taking place at SBTHP, which focuses on the diverse cultures and communities that have called Santa Barbara home for centuries. The pair also consider the complexities of navigating a “dual identity” in graduate school when choosing to pursue an array of history careers. Continue reading →

Where Historians Work: Q&A with David Gary of the American Philosophical Society

June 29, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in From the Archives, Interview, Special Features, Where Historians Work Tags: American Philosophical Society, curation, library science, Print Culture, teaching Leave a comment

“During graduate school, you have to be very focused on a topic. But in libraries you’re a generalist in many ways. In all the jobs I’ve had, I’ve had to learn new skills and topics.” ~ Dr. David Gary, the American Philosophical Society

Good morning, Junto readers! As we head into July 4th weekend, what better city to visit than Philadelphia? Today, we discuss the exciting intellectual opportunities that accompany the curation of printed collections, with Dr. David Gary, Curator of Printed Materials at the American Philosophical Society.

Dave’s story highlights the vibrancy and variety of the history profession, as well as the many paths scholars can take, both during and after graduate school, to find themselves in fulfilling occupations. Continue reading →

Q&A: Ernesto Bassi, author of An Aqueous Territory

June 28, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Age of Revolution, Atlantic World, Caribbean, historiography, Interview, New Granada, vastearlyamerica 2 Comments

Following up on James Hill’s review of Ernesto Bassi’s An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), we’re pleased to post this Q&A with Ernesto about his book and future research. Bassi is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. He is a historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions, whose work transgresses conventionally defined geographic units of analysis. Ernesto can be reached at eb577@cornell.edu. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Review of Bassi, An Aqueous Territory

June 27, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Caribbean, empire, imperial history, Maritime history, New Granada, Sailors 1 Comment

Today’s review is by James Hill, who received his Ph.D. from the College of William & Mary in 2016 and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of the Bahamas. He has published articles in Early American Studies (Winter 2014) and the Florida Historical Quarterly (Fall 2014). His dissertation, “Muskogee Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763-1818,” analyzes Creek and Seminole diplomacy. This will be followed tomorrow by a Q&A with the author.

**Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).**

For decades, the historiographies of the Caribbean and the mainland Americas largely remained separate, with the modern constructions of nation-states influencing how scholars have framed the geographical parameters of their works, with some notable exceptions (New Spain, Guyana, Suriname). In recent years this has begun to change in the case of North America’s early modern ties to the Caribbean. Scholars such as Jane Landers, J. R. McNeil, and Shannon Lee Dawdy have emphasized transnational and transimperial connections between various Caribbean islands and the territories that eventually encompass the United States. Continue reading →

Where Historians Work: Q&A with Margaret Bendroth of the Congregational Library and Archives

June 23, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in From the Archives, Public History, Special Features, Where Historians Work Tags: Archives, career diversity, congregational archives, libraries, religious history 1 Comment

“I’ve learned so much about how historians talk to the general public … If you tell a good story you can get people to hang in and keep listening.” ~ Dr. Margaret Bendroth, Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives.

For today’s “Where Historians Work: The View from Early America,” Katy chats with Dr. Margaret Bendroth, the Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston, Massachusetts. They discuss the importance of story telling and having an “entrepreneurial” frame of mind, when it comes to a vibrant career in history.

Continue reading →

Where Historians Work: Q&A with Valerie Paley of N-YHS

June 20, 2017 By Katy Lasdow in Interview, Public History, Roundtables, Special Features, Where Historians Work Tags: Interview, museums, New-York Historical Society, Public History, Where Historians Work, women's history 2 Comments

“The work I do is true to our training [as historians] and representative of what that training can be for the public.” ~ Dr. Valerie Paley, Vice President, Chief Historian, and Director of the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical Society.

VALERIE PALEY 2015 (1) After a brief break to make room for the fantastic “Founding Fiction” roundtable series about children’s and young adult literature, “Where Historians Work: The View from Early America” is back! We’re excited to feature two interviews today and tomorrow.

Today, we bring you a conversation between The Junto’s Katy Lasdow and Dr. Valerie Paley, Vice President, Chief Historian, and Director of the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical Society. Continue reading →

IOTAR 50: Ideology, Power, and Thrill

June 16, 2017 By The Junto Moderator in Historiography, IOTAR at 50, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: #IOTAR50, American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, ideology, Politics, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 1 Comment

Today, we conclude “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution at 50″ roundtable with a guest post from Eran Zelnik. Zelnik is a PhD candidate at UC-Davis where he is writing “The Comical Style in America: Humor, Settler Colonialism, and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1740-1840,” a dissertation that traces the rise of common white men to cultural dominance in early America.

In his classic study, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton captured what to me has always seemed as the moment when cultural or intellectual history becomes truly thrilling: “when you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel its meaning.” Fifty years later, Bernard Bailyn’s classic The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution still stands out in my mind as one of the prime examples of such a moment in the historiography of early America. His writing in that piece exudes the intellectual rush Bailyn and many of his students felt as they fleshed out a new promising analysis of what later came to be known as “republican” thought. Leafing through the book one can still feel the sense of excitement Bailyn shares with the reader as he explores the significance of hitherto little-understood intellectual traditions. It might seem counter intuitive for a junior historian with unambiguous leftist tendencies, but it is one of those few books that keep reminding me that history can be exciting. Continue reading →

IOTAR50: Intellectual History from the Undistinguished

June 15, 2017 By Jonathan Wilson in Historiography, IOTAR at 50, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, intellectual history, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, undergraduates 1 Comment

We continue “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution at 50,” our joint roundtable with the S-USIH blog. Today’s post is by Jonathan Wilson, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Scranton and Marywood University. He studies ways that intellectuals—elite and otherwise—articulated American national identity in eastern cities during the early nineteenth century.

Upon first reading The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I found it liberating. (That places me alongside Michael and Sara more than Ken this week.) True, Bernard Bailyn’s book was yet another attempt to credit elite white men for an idealistic national founding. From my perspective at the time, however, it modeled a way to study the ideas of relatively ordinary people. Bailyn depicted revolutionary thoughts as the work of communities, not individuals. He showed me that the life of the mind can encompass the inarticulate, the half-said, even the irrational, in ways that historians can analyze. This was powerful.

Continue reading →

IOTAR50: Teaching Bailyn’s Ideological Origins

June 14, 2017 By Ken Owen in Historiography, IOTAR at 50, Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, historiography, pedagogy, teaching, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 4 Comments

Today, we continue “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution at 50,” our joint roundtable with the S-USIH blog with a post by Kenneth Owen, an Assistant Professor of Early American History at the University of Illinois Springfield, whose research interests focus on political mobilization and organization in the revolutionary and early national eras.

It took me a long time to warm to The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. I don’t think this is an uncommon experience for an early Americanist. Fifty years after its publication, Bailyn’s seminal work still features prominently on graduate and undergraduate reading lists. Yet it is hard to say that the book is beloved. Often, simply mentioning Bailyn’s name can be a pejorative shorthand—an outmoded view of the past that celebrates elites at the expense of the darker underbelly of the Revolution. As an undergraduate, I too railed against the book. How far, I asked with youthful bluster, were minutemen really inspired by the cautionary tale of seventeenth-century Denmark? And yet, like the profession itself, I have found it hard to shake Bailyn’s shadow. How is it that a book that is often only grudgingly admired still occupies such a large part of the field’s mental imagination? Continue reading →

IOTAR50: Paper Politics

June 13, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Historiography, IOTAR at 50, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Historical Association, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Benjamin Franklin, cultural history, French Revolution, Harvard, humanities, Jefferson, library, museums, National Archives and Records Administration, pamphlets, Print Culture, Public History, scholarly editing 1 Comment

French Pamphlets, Newberry Library

All praise to the humble pamphlet, upon which *may* rest the ideological origins of the American Revolution. Frequently buried by history as loose “Bundells of Pamphlets in quarto,” it’s a genre that almost shouldn’t be. Printed on flimsy paper and easily battered by salt spray or avid readers, the popular pamphlet became a clutch genre for British and American revolutionaries to send ideas around the Atlantic World. These publications, along with newsbooks, hardened into the “paper bullets,” that, according to scholar Joad Raymond, flew on and off the page in early modern England’s press.

Even as the genre evolved into weekly newspapers, he writes, “readers recognized the rules of the form.” Pamphlet culture, a dynamic arena for anonymous critics to take an eloquent swipe at matters of church and state, quickly blossomed abroad. Unbound and unfettered, pamphlets seeded colonists with a new political consciousness. Whether 10 pages or 50, these slim booklets amplified republican politics and revolutionary prose. Pamphlets, as Robert G. Parkinson observes, became the “lifeblood” of the American Revolution. “They instructed the colonial public that political and personal liberty were in jeopardy because British imperial reformers sought to strip them of their natural rights, especially the right to consent to a government that could hear and understand them,” he writes. Today, let’s look at that instructional aspect of pamphlet culture, and how Bernard Bailyn’s interpretation of revolutionary tracts has reshaped what we do in public history. Continue reading →