The Month in Early American History

April 29, 2018 By Sara Georgini in The Month in Early American History Tags: Abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, American history, American Revolution, Archives, Art, Benjamin Franklin, blogs, Civil War, Congress, elections, George Washington, Hamilton, maps, museums, Public History, race, Slavery, TMEAH Leave a comment

Rise and shine, it’s time to relaunch our regular(ish) roundup of breaking news from early America. To the links!

First up, enjoy a walk through life after the American Revolution with this podcast series charting the life and times of William Hamilton of The Woodlands, who “made the estate an architectural and botanical showpiece of early America.” Or put presidential parades in historical context, via Lindsay Chervinsky’s essay on George Washington’s reticence for public pomp and grandeur: “Why, then, did Washington, a man intensely proud of his military service and revered for it, reject the trappings of military honor?” In conference news, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture unveiled the program for next month’s meeting. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, check out John Fea’s reflections on a decade(!) of posting, and what it means to teach “Public History for a Democracy.” Or flip through the newly digitized papers of polymath Benjamin Franklin. Continue reading →

The Reintegration of South Carolina Loyalists after the Revolutionary War

July 7, 2017 By Christopher F. Minty in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: Age of Revolutions, American history, Atlantic World, book review, James Madison University, Loyalism, Loyalist, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Rebecca Brannon, Review, Reviews in American History, South Carolina, was the American revolution a civil war 3 Comments

**Rebecca Brannon, From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (University of South Carolina Press, 2016).**

51rsxcybgfl-_sx312_bo1204203200_ In her award-winning Liberty’s Exiles, Harvard University’s Maya Jasanoff offered a lively account of the Loyalist diaspora, those individuals who left the newly formed United States as a consequence of their Loyalism. In her highly anticipated appendix, Jasanoff stated that over 60,000 Loyalists left in search of a new home—but what of those who stayed? Until recently, the reintegration of some 400,000 Loyalists into American society has been an overlooked topic. As James Madison University’s Rebecca Brannon notes, “Historians of American Loyalism have long favored those who left . . . over those who stayed” (p. 5), and with her well-researched From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), Brannon takes a major step to address this obvious historiographical oversight. Continue reading →

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

April 16, 2017 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Historiography Tags: American history, Battle of Culloden, British Army, General Wolfe, Jacobites, Outlander, Scotland, Scottish history, United States 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 →

Review: The American Revolution Reborn

March 6, 2017 By Christopher F. Minty in Book Review, Conferences Tags: #RevReborn, American history, American Revolution, Civil War, historiography, History, revisionism, was the American revolution a civil war Leave a comment

The American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Between May 30 and June 1, 2013, hundreds of historians, teachers, and students came together in Philadelphia to discuss twenty-first-century perspectives on the American Revolution at a landmark conference, “The American Revolution Reborn.” That conference, which received and receives regular shout-outs here at The Junto, forms the basis for The American Revolution Reborn, an edited collection of essays designed to “upset the patterns of history inquiry that have defined scholarship for the past generation” (3). Much like The Oxford Handbook on the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), The American Revolution Reborn seeks to regenerate interest in the Revolution with “new perspectives” that, the editors and contributors hope, “will produce new interpretations of the past that move our understanding forward in new directions” (5). 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 7 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.

Continue reading →

Review: Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition

June 25, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Book Review, Review / Q&A Tags: academia, American history, American Philosophical Society, American Revolution, book review, Carl Becker, Eric Foner, History, Jessica Roney, Johns Hopkins, Mobilization, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, political culture, Political history, Politics, Richard Ryerson, The Junto, voluntary associations 2 Comments

Jessica Choppin Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Capture In recent years, early American political history has received considerable attention. A range of historians have enriched our understanding of how Americans participated in and contributed to politics in the early republic.[1] Popular politics during the colonial period has received less attention.[2] But in Governed by a Spirit of Opposition, part of Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia, Jessica Choppin Roney focuses on politics in Philadelphia prior to the American Revolution. In so doing, she makes an important contribution to the field of early American history. Continue reading →