Guest Post: “Natives of the Woods of America”: Hunting Shirts, Backcountry Culture, and “Playing Indian” in the American Revolution

July 14, 2020 By The Junto Moderator in Guest Posts Tags: American Revolution, clothing, Continental Army, George Washington, material culture, Native Americans, Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, Rayna Green 4 Comments

Photograph in Charles Knowles Bolton, The Private Soldier Under Washington, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902, p. 162 and detail from The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, October 16, 1777, Yale University Art Gallery.

The following post is a guest post from Marta Olmos. Marta Olmos received her BA in History from Cornell University and her MLitt in Scottish History from the University of Glasgow. She works in public history and interpretation at Minute Man National Historic Park in Concord, MA. She is on Twitter @almostmartita

In her 1988 article Rayna Green said that “one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cultural expression… is a ‘performance’ I call ‘playing Indian.’” The Indian, in this context, is an amalgamation of white stereotypes of Native people, and the performance of “playing Indian” is carried out by white bodies, using the Indian to explore their own identities, fears, and cultures.[1] As the American Revolution dawned, the Indian was everywhere. Hunting shirts, the makeshift uniform of the Continental Army, were at the center of a movement around “playing Indian.” By exploring the discourse around the hunting shirt, and the performance of “playing Indian” that accompanied it, we can better understand the role of the Indian, and backcountry culture, in forging an early American military identity during the early 1770s.[2] Continue reading →

Review: Kacy Tillman, Stripped and Script

March 5, 2020 By Emily Yankowitz in Book Review Tags: American Revolution, Loyalists, women's history 3 Comments

Kacy Tillman, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019).

Studies of loyalist women were at the forefront of studies of women in early America and the American Revolution. Scholars including Mary Beth Norton, Janice Potter-MacKinnon, Linda Kerber have examined how women, supporters, neutrals, and opponents alike, experienced and participated in the American Revolution. Contributing to this vibrant area of scholarship, Kacy Tillman’s Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution focuses on loyalist women as writers. While much scholarship on the American Revolution and loyalism examines the rhetoric and war writing in essays, broadsides, and pamphlets typically published by men, Stripped and Script focuses on how women writers used “public, if not published” letters and journals to engage in politics and to craft their own senses of loyalties.^[1] Continue reading →

The 1619 Project and the Work of the Historian

January 23, 2020 By Joseph M. Adelman in Commentary Tags: 1619 Project, American Revolution, historiography, Slavery, Somerset 23 Comments

Yesterday Princeton historian Sean Wilentz published his latest piece opposing the 1619 Project at The Atlantic. In it, Wilentz argues that he—along with the other historians who signed a letter to the editors of the New York Times Magazine questioning the Project’s conclusions—are taking issue as a “matter of facts” that were presented in the 1619 Project, in particular in the essay authored by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead editor for the magazine’s issue, and in the letter of response from the Magazine’s editor, Jack Silverstein.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: In Memoriam: Michal Jan Rozbicki

November 27, 2019 By The Junto Moderator in In Memoriam Tags: American Revolution, cultural history, history of ideas, In Memoriam, intellectual history, liberty, Michal Jan Rozbicki Leave a comment

In today’s guest post, Cho-Chien Feng, a PhD candidate at Saint Louis University, remembers his late advisor, Michal Jan Rozbicki, and his last book, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Before Rozbicki began his twenty-seven tenure at Saint Louis University in 1992, he served as Director of the American Studies Center at Warsaw University. His first book on early America, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America, was published in 1998. He passed away on July 31, 2019.

Professor Michal Jan Rozbicki passed away on July 31, 2019 after retiring from teaching this June. As a student of his, I would like to take this opportunity to revisit his contributions to the early American history and hopefully stimulate some further reflections or conversations. In the summer of 2011, when I went to New York to conduct research for my master’s thesis, I found his book, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, in a bookstore. After reading few pages, I was so attracted by his ideas and viewpoints that I knew I wanted to contact this author and see if I could be his student. That was what I did, and that was how I came to Saint Louis. Continue reading →

CFP Extended Deadline: The Age of Revolutions in the Digital Age (11/15)

November 5, 2019 By Mark Boonshoft in Academia, Calls for Papers, Conferences, Digital History, Uncategorized Tags: Age of Revolutions, American Revolution, Digital History Leave a comment

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Workshop and Anthology
Call for Proposals

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Q&A with Joseph Adelman

September 4, 2019 By Jordan E. Taylor in Interview Tags: American Revolution, newspapers, Print Culture, printers 2 Comments

joe-headshot-cropped Today, The Junto interviews our own Joseph Adelman about his new book Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789. Jordan Taylor’s review of the book appeared yesterday.

Junto: Let’s start off on a hostile note: Why should anyone care about early American newspaper printers?

JMA: Well if you’re going to be hostile, I’m tempted to just say “because I said so.” But assuming that will work about as well here as it does with my kids, let me make the case as best I can. At its core, Revolutionary Networksargues that the material realities of texts matters, and that scholars have tended to elide or simply stipulate their importance. Or, to put it in historiographic terms, we need to integrate book history methods more fully into our understanding of politics in Revolutionary America. So when I started doing research for the book when it was a dissertation, I focused on the production and circulation of texts and the impact those processes had on how American colonists and British officials made political decisions.
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Review: Adelman, Revolutionary Networks

September 3, 2019 By Jordan E. Taylor in Book Review Tags: American Revolution, newspapers, Print Culture, printers 1 Comment

Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Historians often rely on a pair of archetypes to think about early American newspaper printers. First, in colonial British North America, printers evaded regulators by pretending to be “meer mechanics” who simply passed along information as it came to them. When he published the Pennsylvania Gazette in the early eighteenth century, for example, Benjamin Franklin famously protested that “Printers naturally acquire a vast Unconcernedness as to the right or wrong Opinions contain’d in what they print.” Second, historians of the American Revolution and the early U.S. republic often valorize printers as ideologically-driven leaders whose presses pushed forward political causes. Beginning with Isaiah Thomas’s history of printing and David Ramsey’s history of the American Revolution, scholars have often been inclined to treat printers as central heroes of the revolutionary era. Continue reading →

CFP: The Age of Revolutions in the Digital Age

August 23, 2019 By Mark Boonshoft in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Digital History, Uncategorized Tags: American Revolution, Digital History 1 Comment

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Workshop and Anthology
Call for Proposals

Continue reading →

Review, Rebecca Brannon and Joseph Moore, eds. The Consequences of Loyalism

April 22, 2019 By Emily Yankowitz in Review / Q&A Tags: American Revolution, book review, Edited collections, Eighteenth Century, historiography, Interdisciplinarity, Loyalists, Recent scholarship, University of South Carolina Press 1 Comment

Brannon, Rebecca, and Joseph S. Moore, eds. The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019).

If you are studying or researching Loyalists in some way, Robert M. Calhoon’s name is bound to come up. The “dean of American Loyalist studies,” as Joseph Moore terms him, is a well-esteemed scholar, writer, and mentor who has been the leading voice in American Loyalists historiography for decades.”[1] By engaging Loyalists in a multi-dimensional fashion, Calhoon’s work elucidated the now-incontrovertible inference: that Loyalists were multi-dimensional figures who were not too different from their revolutionary counterparts. In fact, the irrefutability of this idea is no doubt due in part to his work. In honor of him, Rebecca Brannon and Joseph Moore edited a Festschrift titled The Consequences of Loyalism. Continue reading →

Q&A with Sari Altschuler, Author of The Medical Imagination

September 27, 2018 By Rachel Herrmann in Interview Tags: American Revolution, Anthropologists, Benjamin Rush, Brian Connolly, Carrie Hyde, Cathy Kelly, Cholera, Civil War, Contagionist-climatist debate, Cristobal Silva, dissertations, Ed White, Editing, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Epistemic crises, Epistemological humility, Eric slauter, fiction, First Books, Genre, Gnomes, Gothic, Health, Health crises, Historians, Imaginative experimentation, Joe Rezek, John Kearsley Mitchell, Literary Scholars, Medical humanities, Medicine, Michael Drexler, musicology, Paul Erickson, Picaresque, poetry, religious studies, S. Weir Mitchell, Satire, sentimentalism, Theater studies, Trade gap 2 Comments

Sari Altschuler is an assistant professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of the minor in Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. Her book The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States was recently published with the University of Pennsylvania Press (2018), and her work has appeared in leading literary journals, including American Literature, American Literary History, and PMLA, as well as the Journal of the Early Republic and the medical journal the Lancet. She serves on the advisory board of American Quarterly and the editorial board of Early American Literature and recently coedited a special of Early American Literature (2017) on early American disability studies with Cristobal Silva.

JUNTO: As you know, The Junto is always interested in the experiences of junior scholars who have turned their dissertations into first books. How did your project and theorization of imaginative experimentation change over time?

SARI ALTSCHULER: Great question! This book is very different from my dissertation—but I had to write the dissertation in order to even begin to understand what was going on. The dissertation was about the collaborations of specific doctors and writers in Philadelphia. It was, in some ways, a very narrow and defined topic, which was good for a dissertation. But, when I started to think about what The Medical Imagination might be as a book, I wanted to do something more ambitious. In the dissertation I figured out that these doctors and writers were working together—in conversation—but for the book I wanted to understand the broader intellectual practice in which they were engaging. That’s how imaginative experimentation came to be at the center of the project. It’s an idea I only really began to think about as I finished the dissertation. Continue reading →