As most, if not all, of our readers are aware, this past weekend was the “So Sudden an Alteration” conference hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act.[1] It was the second of three conferences dedicated to rebirthing Revolution studies, hence, the hashtag #RevReborn2. (NB: You can find the immense backchannel coverage of the conference Storified here: Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. You can also find Joseph Adelman’s interactive TAGSExplorer that chronicled the Twitter coverage). This post is not intended to be a standard Junto-type conference recap. Instead, I just want to offer some afterthoughts on the conference, specifically in light of the piece I wrote before the conference, entitled “Have Cultural Historians Lost the Revolution?” as well as numerous other pieces I have written about the historiography of the Revolution and the state of Revolution studies for the blog, particularly before the first #RevReborn conference back in 2013. Continue reading
“Your Most Affectionate Friend…”
Even as nineteenth-century biographers sought to ignore or suppress it, there’s rarely been much shortage of gossip about the sex lives of the Founding Fathers. Cassandra Good’s new book, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (OUP, 2015), offers a warning to readers of eighteenth-century relationships who can be all too ready to embrace the temptations of scandal—these letters might sometimes look like thin veils for a seething sexuality beneath, “but a careful consideration of how people expressed emotion and an openness to the notion that men and women could be friends offers new, more nuanced readings,” Good argues. Scandalizing male-female relationships only serves to place them beyond the purview of ordinary life. Founding Friendships reminds us that women’s presence in the world shouldn’t come as a surprise, and that their roles were never limited to wives, mothers, and sex-objects. Continue reading
Live Coverage of “So Sudden an Alteration” Conference
As you know from last week’s posts by Michael and Ken, this weekend is the second major conference in two years on the American Revolution, So Sudden an Alteration, hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
There have already been a number of great papers, and some hot debates on the meaning of studying the Revolution, with more to come today.
We will have full coverage next week, but in the meantime, you can keep up with the conference on Twitter by following the hashtag, #RevReborn2, or Juntoists at the conference, including me (@jmadelman), Jessica Parr (@ProvAtlantic), Michael Hattem (@MichaelHattem), and Tom Cutterham (@tomcutterham).
You can also follow several friends of the blog: Liz Covart (@lizcovart), John Bell (@Boston1775), and the MHS institutional account (@MHS1791).
UPDATE (4/12, 8pm): Now that the conference is over, you can also check out several summations of the conference.
Michael Hattem created a Storify for each of the three days of the conference:
And there is also a more basic archive of tweets and an interactive explorer.
Interview: Liz Covart of Ben Franklin’s World
Last week, The JuntoCasters—aka Ken Owen, Roy Rogers, and myself— appeared on the new, fast-growing podcast hosted by Liz Covart called Ben Franklin’s World, an interview-based early American history podcast that launched in October 2014. Already, the podcast has a catalogue of twenty-four episodes and a rapidly growing audience. Most episodes feature Liz interviewing a historian/author about a recent book and some of her past guests have included such notable historians as Alan Taylor, François Furstenberg, Claudio Saunt, Joyce Chaplin, and James Green, as well as The Junto’s own Sara Georgini for an episode about John and Abigail Adams and the Adams Papers. Continue reading
Spring Reads
Here’s our seasonal roundup of new and forthcoming titles. Share your finds below! Continue reading
Junto March Madness: Presenting Your 2015 Champion
After a month of narrowing down our field of 64 primary sources on early American history, the results for March Madness are in! Continue reading
No Politics, No Revolution
If there is a current orthodoxy among historians of the American Revolution, it is that the study of the Revolution has lost its focus. In their introduction to the Common-Place edition recapping the McNeil Center’s “The American Revolution Reborn” conference, Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman wrote of “a field that had grown stale” and that was “losing its verve, and worse, its center.” The call for papers for the forthcoming Massachusetts Historical Society conference effectively described the field as being stuck in a historiographical rut. There is a reason that study of the Revolution has lost its center. It has failed to concentrate its focus on politics. Continue reading
Junto March Madness: Final Four Results AND Championship Voting
March is over, but March Madness is still here, and can only survive with the help of your votes! Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!
And by “fairies,” I really mean brackets; you can find the original bracket here.
The championship game promises to be close. Click through for results on the Final Four, and to see you championship matchup.
This Week in Early American History
Welcome to another edition of This Week in Early American History! We wish a safe and healthy holiday to those who are observing Easter this weekend, and a Chag Kasher V’Sameach to those who are celebrating Passover. Now, on to the links….
When Sources Talk Back
How do we select the sources we use? How do we approach those sources once we’ve selected them? What does that process do to the stories we eventually tell about the past? And, what happens when our sources disagree with the choices we’ve made?
That last question is one that historians working on the early modern period rarely have to grapple with – after all, the individuals who wrote the letters, manuscripts, and account books that we read have been dead for a very long time. And, it is an issue that I’ve blithely ignored until I read Manuel Gonzalez Pallano Tinoco’s “Narrative of the Invasion of La Española, Santo Domingo, which the English Attempted in 1655.” It is near the end of Captain Tinoco’s detailed description of the failed English invasion of Spanish Santo Domingo that this long-deceased chronicler called out future historians who would use his narrative on any but his own terms. And, his reasoning was compelling enough to make me question my own methodology in using his history in my work. Continue reading
The Junto 