“Meditations on Archival Fragments”: Review of Dispossessed Lives

April 26, 2017 By in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: , , , 3 Comments
“Meditations on Archival Fragments”: Review of <i>Dispossessed Lives</i>

FuentesIt should go without saying that the historical profession depends on archives. Near or far, we need those repositories to craft historical narratives about past worlds. There is also no shortage of books and articles critical of the construction of colonial archives, perhaps the most famous among them being historian Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain. Despite the popularity of that book, however, historians still rarely discuss their archival methodology. Monographs always provide a list of consulted repositories, which for early American history can often read like a top ten greatest hits of national and state archives. And yet, try looking for the word “archive” or “archival knowledge” in the index of most books and the result might be surprising. Continue reading →

“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing

April 20, 2017 By in Uncategorized 4 Comments

The following post has been cross-posted from an ongoing series about diet and nutrition over at Nursing Clio. I am grateful for permission to re-post it here; if you have time, definitely go read the other blog posts!

In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people, such as Frederick Douglass, because hunger gave them greater control over people of African descent. Historian Alan Taylor has written about periods of famine after the American Revolution. During some of these years of food shortages that Taylor describes, Iroquois clan mothers pressured other Native Americans into ceding land because they wanted “peace and food relief,” as they did in 1785 at Fort Herkimer.[1] Hunger has been, and continues to be, a key facet of power relations. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Finding an Agent

April 18, 2017 By in Academia, Publishing Tags: , Leave a comment

Jennifer Goloboy is a literary agent at Red Sofa Literary in St. Paul, MN. She has a PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University, and has published articles on merchants and the early American middle class. Her book, Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era, was published by University of Georgia Press on October 10.

jennie-goloboy-2014As an agent and historian, I’m here to explain the process of finding an agent. Don’t worry—you can do this!

Before you initiate contact with agents, you need to collect the materials that an agent will likely request. If you’ve written a novel, you need to have the manuscript completely finished. Many agents will also want to read a synopsis of the novel. On the other hand, if you’ve written a work of non-fiction, all you’ll need are a book proposal and the first three chapters. The book proposal will compare your book to other books in the field, explain your plans for marketing the book, and outline the full manuscript. (You might consider writing a proposal for your novel, too—it never hurts to have a well-thought-out plan for publicizing your book.) Continue reading →

SPECIAL WEEKEND EDITION: Guest Post, The Influence of the Scottish Highlands on the British Army in early America

April 16, 2017 By in Academia, Historiography Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Today’s SPECIAL WEEKEND EDITION comes from Nicola Martin, a third-year, AHRC-funded Ph.D. candidate at the University of Dundee and the University of Stirling. Nicola holds a B.A. and MSc. from the University of Strathclyde, and is currently working with Colin Nicolson and Matthew Ward. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “The Cultural Paradigms of British Imperialism in the Militarisation of Scotland and North America, 1715–1776.” Her research investigates how warfare and pacification affected eighteenth-century British imperialism, and she can be found @NicolaMartin14. This is her first post for The Junto, a fitting occasion—it commemorates the Battle of Culloden (April 16, 1745).

“An incident in the rebellion of 1745,” by David Morier

On April 16, 1746, the British army defeated its much smaller Jacobite counterpart in a battle on Culloden Moor, Scotland. The conflict lasted less than half an hour, but it left over 1,500 Jacobites dead. In the days and weeks following the battle, hundreds of Highlanders were killed as the British army, under the orders of the Duke of Cumberland, implemented draconian measures to punish those who they held responsible for the rising. Shortly thereafter, the British imperial elite embarked on a systematic pacification of the region that lasted for decades and evolved over time from punishment toward measures designed to civilize the “barbarous” Highlanders and assimilate them more closely within the British state and empire. Continue reading →

Guest Post: French Imposters, Diplomatic Double Speak, and Buried Archival Treasures

April 10, 2017 By in From the Archives, Guest Posts, Recent Scholarship Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Guest Post: French Imposters, Diplomatic Double Speak, and Buried Archival Treasures

Today’s guest post is by Cassandra Good, Associate Editor of The Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington, and author of Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Women and Men in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Follow her @CassAGood. 

Monroe 1The latest volume of The Papers of James Monroe covers a short but important period in Monroe’s life and career: April 1811 to March 1814. Monroe became Secretary of State in April 1811 and was tasked with trying to repair relations with both Great Britain and France. After war with Britain began in June 1812, his focus broadened to military affairs and included a stint as interim Secretary of War. The bulk of the volume, then, is focused on the War of 1812. However, there are a number of other stories revealed here that will be of interest to a range of historians. Continue reading →

A Pedagogical Ode to Google Docs

March 28, 2017 By in Pedagogy Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Well team, I’ve made it to Easter Break after my first post-sabbatical return to teaching, and if my silence on the blog has been any indication, it’s been busy. The sabbatical was obviously good for thinking about research and book stuff, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that the end of my sabbatical would also push me to reassess the ways that I teach. More specifically, it prompted a reexamination of the preparatory work that I do before seminars, and raised questions about the relationship between the amount of time I spend prepping and the extent to which my students benefit from my prep. Lately, I’ve been doing less prep myself and using various types of Google tools—Docs, Forms, and Sheets, mostly—to make students more responsible for their learning. Here’s how and why: Continue reading →