Review: Craig Bruce Smith, American Honor

May 18, 2018 By Mark Boonshoft in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Uncategorized Tags: academic publishing, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, book review, Founders, Honor, military history, Political history 1 Comment

Craig Bruce Smith, American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

9781469638836 In American Honor, Craig Bruce Smith places morals, virtue, and ethics at the center of the American Revolution. Smith argues that in the late-colonial period, understandings of honor transformed. Instead of something hereditable, honor became based on merit. That “ethical transformation” helped bring about the Revolution. Independence then allowed Americans to realize its potential. In a phrase, you might say the American Revolution was “made on honor, sold on merit.”[1] Continue reading →

Roundtable: A Proud Taste for Alex & Eliza

June 8, 2017 By Nora Slonimsky in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Alexander Hamilton, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Angelica Schuyler, Children's literature, Eliza Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler, Hamilton, Hamilton: An American Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, literature, medieval, Peggy Schuyler, Philip Schuyler, teaching history, women, women's history Leave a comment

Hilary Mantel recently gave the annual BBC Reith Lecture in which she described why she became a historical novelist. Printed in The Guardian, Mantel argued that culture and genes, history and science, put “our small lives in context.” Mantel’s work is of course separated from the theme of this roundtable by two degrees, as she is neither a writer of YA nor of Early America, but the broader question I think she was trying to answer—why we write about what we do—resonate in a conversation on #FoundingFiction. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Making Teen Girls into Women’s Historians

June 1, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Abigail Adams, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Ann Rinaldi, Boston Massacre, Children's literature, Civil War, fiction, Founding Fiction, Hemings, John Adams, John Brown, literature, Native American history, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Peggy Shippen, Phillis Wheatley, Publishing, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Tecumseh, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia, women, women's history, Young adult literature 11 Comments

Welcome to Founding Fiction, The Junto’s first roundtable exploring how children’s literature and young adult fiction depicts early American history. Between posts, we’ll compile a shelf of favorites to (re)read. Tweet us at #FoundingFiction or comment with your recommendations for Very Early Americanists. Happy summer, let’s dive in!

Today’s post is by Laura Ansley, Ph.D. candidate in history at the College of William & Mary, and managing editor of the Nursing Clio blog. Her dissertation is titled, “Life Problems: Sex Education in the United States, 1890-1930.” Follow her @lmansley.

Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams and Peggy Shippen and Harriet Hemings: all early American women whom I learned about from Ann Rinaldi’s young adult fiction. I have been fascinated by history for as long as I can remember, but Rinaldi was one of many authors who helped me to better understand what the best kind of historical study is. While school classes covering the Civil War may have talked about generals and battles, Rinaldi introduced me to characters like Osceola, stepdaughter of Wilmer McLean, who moved his family away from Manassas when the war came to the quieter Appomattox Courthouse—meaning the war started and ended on their doorstep. With her focus on teenage heroines, Rinaldi showed that history wasn’t only about important men. Young women experienced these historical events too, and their stories were also worth telling.
Continue reading →

13 Revolutions +1

June 22, 2016 By Sara Georgini in Digital History, Interview, Public History Tags: 13 colonies, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st century, academia, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Archives, Atlantic History, Constitution, cultural history, Data, DH, Digital History, digital humanities, digital technology, Early Republic, Founders, Franklin, Gender, Independence, Jefferson, law, museums, pedagogy, Popular History, Print Culture, Public History, Publishing, race, religion, research, science and technology, Slavery, Smithsonian Institution, teaching, Technology, UX, Washington Leave a comment

Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, “Portrait of America,” 1934

When John Adams looked back on the American Revolution (something he liked to do), he reflected that, “The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” The colonists’ drive to independence marked a new era of American history, Adams thought, when “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected.” Scholars have struggled to frame the experience of the Revolution in picture and on the page. How can we use digital tools to curate collections of revolutionary culture and #vastearlyamerica for use in the classroom?

Today, The Junto chats with Darren Milligan, Senior Digital Strategist at the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access, about the Smithsonian Learning Lab, which encourages us to make, use, and share new galleries of history. Continue reading →

James Rivington: Printer, Loyalist, Spy?

April 20, 2016 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Commentary Tags: Alexander McDougall, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Association, Continental Congress, espionage, james rivington, Loyalist, New York, New York City, Print Culture, Royal Coat of Arms, spies, Spy, War of American Independence 4 Comments

A fabulous but somewhat ominous engraving of Rivington hanging in effigy from a tree in New Brunswick, N.J.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the printer of the New-York Journal, John Holt. I focused on his newspaper’s mastheads, arguing that those mastheads were an effective medium through which he could shape political ideas and, subsequently, mobilize support. What I did not fully explain, however, was that he was not the only printer in New York City to change his masthead—James Rivington did it, too.[1] Continue reading →