Guest Post: Slave Horse: The Narragansett Pacer

August 5, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Guest Posts Tags: 18th Century, 19th, Atlantic World, brown, Caribbean, environmental history, horse, livestock, Massachusetts, Narrangansett, Paul Revere, Plantation, Plymouth, Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island Historical Society, Rum, Slavery, South America, sugar, Suriname 4 Comments

Today, The Junto welcomes guest poster Charlotte Carrington-Farmer, Assistant Professor of History at Roger Williams University. Her current research focuses on framing dissent, deviance, and crime in early America in a wider Atlantic World context.

Image via Ann Holst and Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, Kingston, Rhode Island

Once considered a breed of “no beauty,” the Narragansett Pacer moved fast enough for an 18^th-century rider to cover 50-60 miles a day of rocky New England ground. As a natural pacer, its backbone moved through the air in a straight line without inclining the rider from side to side. Bred in and named for a southern community of coastal Rhode Island, the story of Narragansett Pacer horse is tightly entwined with the history of the early slave trade. Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, these horses were traded for rum, sugar and slaves. Often, the horses were raised by slaves on the plantations of Narragansett, then shipped around the Atlantic World to work on sugar plantations alongside other slaves. Continue reading →

After the Trail

August 4, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Public History Tags: 19th Century, academic publishing, academic v. popular history, American history, American Indians, Antebellum, Anti-Rent, Berkshire, Boston, Canada, colonial history, environmental history, Francis Parkman, Gold Rush, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Indians, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society, material culture, Medford, Montreal, Native Americans, Oregon Trail, Parkman, Popular History, Public History, Publishing, Quebec, research methodology 8 Comments

Oglala Sioux Shield, ca. 1846

Consider the sixth-grader of 1907. Gertrude F. Greene’s syllabus passed over Plato, sidelined Scottish ballads, and resisted the Alaskan derring-do of The Fur-Seal’s Tooth. At the top of her reading list—first to devour on a snowy winter break from the old Belcher School—she ranked Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail (1849). In under a century, Parkman had gone from cliffhanger to canon. Why? What might students learn from a 23-year-old romantic historian’s rambles in the Indian country of 1846? Glints of Parkman’s early artistry shone through, but only when you shook up the story a bit. His sketch of life with the Oglala Sioux melded ethnography and emotion, sense and sensation. His Oregon Trail had been greatly curated, edited, and revised in the retelling. And yet Ms. Greene’s sixth-graders missed out on the juicier bits. What Parkman saw (“a strange variety of characters”), what Parkman heard (“harsh and guttaral” dialects), and what Parkman ate (buffalo, fish, dog) on the road filled his private journals, first made available to readers in the 1940s. There, stashed away in the “no-filter” notebooks that Parkman used to piece together his first blockbuster, lay the real adventure. Continue reading →

Before the Trail

August 3, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Research Tags: 19th Century, academic publishing, academic v. popular history, American history, American Indians, Antebellum, Anti-Rent, Berkshire, Boston, Canada, colonial history, environmental history, Francis Parkman, Gold Rush, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Indians, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society, material culture, Medford, Montreal, Native Americans, Oregon Trail, Parkman, Popular History, Public History, Publishing, Quebec, research methodology 4 Comments

Francis Parkman’s Medicine Chest

Pratt must be paid. There was a route to examine one last time, and three shirts to stuff into a knapsack bulging with flannels and history books, powder and shot. The Berkshire Hills trip was a rush job; he needed to return for graduation in late August, 1844. Into the knapsack went a 4” x 2½” dusky-green journal, with shorthand notes in pencil. After a boyhood spent hunting and riding bareback on the Medford frontier, the blue-eyed Harvard senior, 20, knew how to pack for a research errand into the wilderness. Already, he boasted colorful adventures from past summer forays, fine-tuning the field skills that history professor Jared Sparks did not cover in class. Take July 1841: Scaling his first New Hampshire ravine, the rookie historian slipped and swung free, clawing air. As he “shuddered” and clung to the crag, a hard sheaf of pebbles fell, “clattering hundreds of feet” to the sunny gulf below.

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Digital Pedagogy Roundtable: Your Links

July 31, 2015 By Rachel Herrmann in Digital Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Digital History, digital pedagogy, reader suggestions, roundtables, social media 3 Comments

Over the last week, Joseph Adelman, Ken Owen, Jessica Parr, and I have compiled a four part series of posts describing our attempts to incorporate digital methods into our early American history classes. As all of us are aware, however, we’re not experts–nor do we consider our posts the last word on such assignments. Continue reading →

Digital Pedagogy Roundtable, Part 4: Funeral Trains and Social Media

July 30, 2015 By Ken Owen in Digital History, Digital Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Digital History, pedagogy, Roundtable, social media, twitter 4 Comments

This week, The Junto features a roundtable on digital pedagogy, in which we discuss our different approaches to using digital sources in the classroom. Today, Ken Owen shares his experience of an MA class’s project using social media for public history uses. You can also read Part 1 by Rachel Herrmann on source accesibility, Part 2 by Jessica Parr on teaching digital history to non-majors, and Part 3 by Joseph Adelman about working with students on technical knowledge.

Back in April, I had a rather surreal teaching experience. A class project, focusing on tweeting the assassination and funeral train of Abraham Lincoln, attracted a good deal of media attention in central Illinois. My class ended up appearancing in local newspapers, radio, and even with a featured spot on the local news channel. I even had a waiter in a local restaurant recognize me as the ‘Lincoln and twitter professor’. Continue reading →

Digital Pedagogy Roundtable, Part 3: Technical Knowledge

July 29, 2015 By Joseph M. Adelman in Digital History, Digital Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Digital History, Excel, pedagogy, slave trade 3 Comments

This week, The Junto features a roundtable on digital pedagogy, in which we discuss our different approaches to using digital sources in the classroom. Today, Joseph Adelman talks about working with students on technical knowledge. You can also read Part 1 by Rachel Herrmann on source accesibility, and Part 2 by Jessica Parr on teaching digital history to non-majors.

I’m always both impressed and intimidated when I see a digital history project pop up in my social media channels. Faculty are doing some amazing work getting students to create work using sophisticated software, apps, and other programs. They create websites, run statistical analyses, markup text using TEI … and I have no idea how to replicate it in my classroom either for myself or my students. To be fair, I have not yet taught a course on digital history specifically (nor do I plan to in the near future). So I’d like to focus instead on some practical thoughts about integrated digital history methods into the classroom in topical upper-level courses.

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Digital Pedagogy Roundtable, Part 2: Pitching Courses for Non-Majors

July 28, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Digital Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Digital History, digital humanities, pedagogy 3 Comments

This week, The Junto features a roundtable on digital pedagogy, in which we discuss our different approaches to using digital sources in the classroom. Today, Joseph Adelman talks about working with students on technical knowledge. You can also read Part 1 by Rachel Herrmann on source accesibility, and Part 3 by Joseph Adelman on the role of technical knowledge in digital pedagogy.

mor In her kick off of this week’s roundtable on Digital Pedagogy, Rachel talked about the shades of Digital History, noting Lincoln Mullen’s 2010 post “Digital Humanities Spectrum; or, We’re all Digital Humanists Now.” I have written on spatial humanities approaches to religious history, and I do have some experience with text mining and coding. (XML, CSS, as well as some rudimentary Perl and Python.) By virtue of my library science background, I also have some training and experience in digitization, metadata, and digital stewardship. I am not a coder in the sense that true digital scholars like Mullen are, but I can speak techie and navigate that world with relative ease. Continue reading →

Digital Pedagogy Roundtable, Part 1: Students’ Access to Sources

July 27, 2015 By Rachel Herrmann in Digital Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Revolution, digital archives, digital humanities, Early Republic, graduate education, pandering, research, research databases, research methodology, teaching, war department 11 Comments

This week, The Junto will feature a roundtable on digital pedagogy, in which we discuss our different approaches to using digital sources in the classroom. Today, Rachel Herrmann talks about the challenge of access. Jessica Parr, Joseph Adelman, and Ken Owen will also contribute.

A Wordle made from sources my undergraduates located for our in-class source-finding competition

Let me preface this post by saying that I’d hesitate to call myself a digital humanist; I don’t code or map or mine texts. As Lincoln Mullen pointed out a while back, however, digital practices exist on a spectrum. There are some things I do for my own research and in the classroom—tweeting, running my department’s social media accounts, using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature to chase up a footnote so as not to use up one of my precious Interlibrary Loan requests, and of course, blogging for The Junto—that digital humanists also do. These approaches have been helpful in my teaching for three problems related to access to sources. Continue reading →

SHEAR 2015: Conference Recap

July 24, 2015 By Michael Blaakman in Conferences Tags: American Revolution, capitalism, empire, Gender, Native Americans, SHEAR2015, Slavery, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, women's history Leave a comment

Ann Fabian’s SHEAR Presidential Address

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic enjoyed three energizing days in Raleigh, North Carolina, last weekend. Lightbulbs went off—and, sometimes, sparks flew—in sessions centered on a vast range of questions about what Ann Fabian called the “complex and unmade world” of the early republic. The book exhibit was abuzz with talk of projects newly published and still in the works. And each evening, the sidewalks thronged with surprisingly large crowds of carousing local youths; we can only assume they were so lively because they knew that the early Americanists had brought the party to town. Continue reading →

Remembering C. Dallett Hemphill

July 23, 2015 By Sara Damiano in In Memoriam Tags: C. Dallett Hemphill, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Gender, In Memoriam, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Philadelphia, women's history 3 Comments

Today’s post was jointly produced by Sara Damiano and Joseph Adelman.

The commu 275_dallett nity of early Americanists is relatively small and close-knit within the larger historical profession. That made it all the more shocking and painful when we learned a few weeks ago of the passing of Dallett Hemphill.