Q&A: Zachary Hutchins, editor of Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act

May 31, 2016 By Christopher Jones in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Recent Scholarship Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, historiography, interviews with historians, Native Americans, Seven Years' War, Slavery, Stamp Act 1 Comment

Q&A: Zachary Hutchins, editor of <em>Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act</em>

On Sunday, the United States Postal Service introduced a stamp commemorating the 250th anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act. Today we are pleased to present an interview with Zachary Hutchins, editor of a new collection of essays from Dartmouth College Press that challenges traditional understandings of the Stamp Act Crisis as (in the words of the USPS) “setting [the colonists] on a path toward revolution and independence.” Zach is an Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University. In 2014 he published his first book, Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England. A 2016 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Hutchins is currently completing his second monograph, Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Emerging Histories of the French Atlantic

October 23, 2015 By Joseph M. Adelman in Conferences, Guest Posts Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, conferences, French Atlantic, guest post, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture 2 Comments

Robert Taber, a postdoctoral associate with the University of Florida Writing Program, wrote his dissertation on the connection between family life and grassroots politics in colonial Saint-Domingue and is the author of Navigating Haiti’s History: Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution.

12182067_10207193046840010_1433097522_n More than 30 scholars from three continents gathered at the Williamsburg Inn from October 16th through the 18th to present emerging histories of the French Atlantic. Sponsored by the Omohundro Institute, and made possible through considerable labor and financial investment, one hundred scholars were able to enjoy a great conference atmosphere. Three days of panels, workshops, and roundtables pushed for our collective knowledge of the French Atlantic to be wider, deeper, and better integrated, fulfilling a plan first sketched out in the summer of 2010.

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Review: Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders

June 11, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review Tags: Atlantic History, Haitian Revolution, Revolution, transnational 5 Comments

**Janet Polasky, Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

R. R. Palmer’s Age of Democratic Revolutions famously had no room in its two volumes for what many of us now recognise as the most revolutionary of them all—the one in Haiti between 1791 and 1804.[1] Janet Polasky has written a version for our own time, in which black men and white women mingle with the better-known protagonists of American, French, Dutch, and other, less successful revolutions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Revolutions Without Borders is no analytical, comparative account, but an histoire croisée in which people and texts are constantly on the move, interacting with each other in all sorts of ways, setting off unexpected sparks. Continue reading →

The King’s Arms?

May 4, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Research Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, british history, Civil War, George III, history culture, king's college london, military history, monarchy, museums, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Print Culture, Public History, royal, royals, sword, windsor 1 Comment

Paper soldiers on the march, and tin men tilting at swordpoint: these were the first battle ranks that Grenville Howland Norcross, aged 11 in Civil War Boston, led to glory. Between phantom invasions and replays of Antietam with “relics” received as gifts, Norcross gobbled up the military heroics popularized by the era’s dime novels. In a childhood diary that illustrates how “lowbrow” literature grabbed the imagination of a warsick homefront, Norcross chronicled his progress through the antics of Kate Sharp, Old Hal Williams, and Crazy Dan. By 1875, Norcross had outgrown his toy battalions, graduated Harvard, and stepped into a law career. An avid autograph collector, from his Commonwealth Avenue perch Norcross nurtured the city’s flourishing history culture, taking a leading role at the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Bostonian Society. He rose to serve as Cabinet-Keeper for the Massachusetts Historical Society, supervising the intake and cataloguing of major collections including, by April 1920, the library of historian Henry Adams. At the Society’s next meeting, held in the midafternoon of 10 June, Grenville Norcross reported on the Cabinet’s newest curiosity, which has proven a royal mystery ever since:

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A is for “Anthropocene”

April 27, 2015 By Rachel Herrmann in Historiography, Recent Scholarship Tags: Anthropocene, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, environment, environmental history, history of science, interdisciplinary, Jamestown, science and technology 8 Comments

Today I want to pretend that I know how to read science journals, particularly a recent Nature article by scientists Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin entitled “Defining the Anthropocene.”[1] Reading a summary about the article was provocation enough to read the article itself, which in turn sparked a more extended rumination about chronology, interdisciplinarity, and scholarly divides. Continue reading →

Recap: “So Sudden an Alteration” Conference (9-11 April 2015)

April 24, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Conferences Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, academia, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, capitalism, Conference, conferences, Constitution, cultural history, Digital History, Early Republic, Gordon Wood, legal history, Massachusetts Historical Society, Political history, Print Culture, social history, visual culture, Woody Holton 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, 175 historians descended upon the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in Boston for a three-day conference that considered the political, social, economic, and global parameters of the American Revolution. The conference consisted of eight panels (with pre-circulated papers), two keynotes, and some special presentations on digital projects. The conference proceedings were live-tweeted under #RevReborn2, and fellow Juntoist Joseph Adelman provided some live coverage on the blog. The Junto has also had some post-conference commentaries, including “You Say You Want a Revolution” by Joseph Adelman and “The Suddenness of the Alteration: Some Afterthoughts on #RevReborn2” by Michael Hattem.

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Guest Post: Disaster, Death, and Distilleries

April 22, 2015 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in From the Archives, Guest Posts Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Barbados, capitalism, Caribbean, colonial New York, Distilleries, industrialization, Jamaica, labor history, Mount Gay Rum, race, Rum, Slavery 4 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Jordan Smith, a PhD Candidate in Atlantic History at Georgetown University. His dissertation, “The Invention of Rum,” investigates the development and production of rum in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Warning: This post contains graphic accounts of industrial accidents.

On a recent research trip to Barbados, I stopped by the Mount Gay Visitors Center. There, between tastes of a variety of rums, tour guides regaled me with a heroic tale of Barbados’s place in the invention of rum. Afterwards, I was handed a brochure which proclaimed Mount Gay to be “the rum that invented rum.” The reasoning for this marketing strategy is simple enough—Mount Gay is one of many distilleries that makes a financial killing off of linking their product to a happy history of ingenuity and originality. Yet accounts of eighteenth-century distillery disasters suggest that this invention and innovation of rum was often undergirded by shocking violence. Continue reading →

When Sources Talk Back

April 2, 2015 By Casey Schmitt in Uncategorized Tags: Atlantic History, Caribbean, Cromwell's Western Design, Santo Domingo 12 Comments

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 →

Q&A with Stephen R. Berry, Author of A Path in the Mighty Waters

February 24, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, book review, Interview, Lutherans, Maritime history, Methodists, Methodology, Moravians, Presbyterians, Quakers, religious history, Simmons College, Stephen R. Berry 1 Comment

9780300204230 The following is an interview with Stephen R. Berry, an Associate Professor of History at Simmons College. My review of Berry’s recently-released book, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) appeared on the blog yesterday. Today, he agreed to answer some follow-up questions about his book and his future research plans. Continue reading →

Tempests and Tedium in the Transatlantic: Shipboard Life in the 18th Century

February 23, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 18th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, book review, Colonial Georgia, Maritime history, religious history, Simmons College, Stephen R. Berry 3 Comments

**Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life in Atlantic Crossings to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.**

9780300204230 When colonial Georgia was founded in 1732, it carved out a brand new space in the New World. The founders’ intentions were in part for it to serve as a charitable colony, where Britons from overcrowded debtor’s prisons could start anew. It also carved out an English space to serve as a geographic barrier between wealthy South Carolina and rival Spanish Florida. But, as Stephen R. Berry demonstrates in this highly original new study, colonies were not the only spaces that were created and negotiated as the Atlantic World expanded. The ocean, and indeed the ships that carried passengers to and from the New World should also be viewed as spaces in their own right.

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