Roundtable: The History of Childhood & Youth: Ben Davidson

November 5, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Interview, Interviews with Historians, The History of Childhood & Youth, Vast Early America Tags: Archives, childhood, Civil War, emancipation, youth Leave a comment

If you missed previous posts in our new roundtable series on the history of childhood and youth, click here. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next few weeks, stop by to read about challenges and realities of researching and teaching childhood and youth across vast early America.

Today’s interview is with Ben Davidson, a James Smithson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He recently completed his PhD in United States history at New York University. His book manuscript, “Freedom’s Generation: Coming of Age in the Era of Emancipation,” traces the lives of the generation of black and white children, in the North, South, and West, who grew up during the Civil War era. This project explores how young people across the nation learned persistent lessons, carried into adulthood, about complexities inherent in ideas and experiences of emancipation, assessing and interpreting how these lessons were transformed in memory well into the twentieth century. 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 →

Sarah Parker Remond: Black Abolitionist Diplomat

July 13, 2018 By Adam McNeil in Black Atlantic, Uncategorized Tags: Abolitionism, Black Atlantic, Black Politics, Black Women's Intellectual History, British Isles, Civil War, Politics, women, women's history 1 Comment

The meaning of the American Civil War has been, and still is, one of the most contentious issues facing the United States today. An aspect of the war that seems to be less spoken about though, was the role of Black women internationally during the Civil War. Wars of the scale of the American Civil War rarely lack an internationalist component. For the already internationalist American abolitionist movement, when the Civil War began in 1861, the abolitionist struggle shifted south with the work of women like Harriet Tubman and Charlotte Forten, but there were still important battles being waged internationally over the war and its meaning.

The Black woman who took the international abolitionist stage during the Civil War was Salem, Massachusetts’ Sarah Parker Remond. After having been in the British Isles for almost two years prior to the war, Remond’s abolitionist tour expressed a stronger sense of urgency, as the war provided a tangible arena for potential ending of slavery. While doing so, she developed notions of performative citizenship. Performative citizenship was an aspirational basis of struggle for realized citizenship based on Black abolitionist women’s proclamations of African-American identities. Those identities were based on economic and intellectual analyses of the central role their race’s plunder played in American economic growth. Continue reading →

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 →

Roundtable: Q & A with Laurie Halse Anderson

June 9, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, African-American history, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, Benjamin Franklin, Children's literature, Civil War, Early Republic, Gender, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, iterature, Native American history, Native Americans, Slavery, women, women's history, yellow fever, Young adult literature 2 Comments

Thanks to all of our contributors and commentators who have participated in #FoundingFiction, a series revisiting children’s and young adult literature about early America. Today, Sara Georgini wraps up the roundtable by chatting with Laurie Halse Anderson, prize-winning author of Independent Dames, Fever 1793, Chains, Forge, Ashes, and more. Continue reading →

Roundtable: A Letter to Dear America

June 5, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, American Revolution, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Children's literature, Civil War, Early Republic, fiction, Founding Fiction, Gender, historical fiction, Irish, literature, Native Americans, Navajo, New England, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Publishing, religion, Scholastic, Sioux, South Carolina 2 Comments

Today’s Founding Fiction post is by Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Her manuscript is titled, “The President’s Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.” Follow her @lmchervinsky.

Each book in the Dear America series portrays a diary of a young fictional woman that explores her experience during one specific year in American history. The first-person account shares observations of well-known events or places, as well as the daily struggles of an “average” girl’s life. A number of these diaries take place in #VastEarlyAmerica. A few examples include A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, which tells the story of the Mayflower crossing in 1620; The Winter of Red Snow: The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart, which shares one woman’s experience in Valley Forge in 1777; and Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, which examines the struggles of a French slave girl in the New York Colony in 1763. The series was discontinued in 2004, but Scholastic republished many of the originals in 2010 and continues to produce new volumes today. 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 →

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 →

Slavery’s Civil War?

October 21, 2016 By Tom Cutterham in Book Review, Slavery's Capitalism Tags: capitalism, Civil War, Slavery 14 Comments

Closing our week-long forum on Slavery’s Capitalism, today’s post is courtesy of Kevin Waite, a Lecturer in Modern American History at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He was recently awarded his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania with a thesis entitled “The Slave South in the Far West: California, the Pacific and Proslavery Visions of Empire.”

Slavery's Capitalism No one could possibly read the fourteen essays that comprise Slavery’s Capitalism and conclude that human bondage was not absolutely central to American, and indeed global, economic development during the nineteenth century. [1] But it’s one of the corollary aims of the book—to move beyond the regionalism that has characterized much of the scholarship on slavery—that seems to me a more provocative, more novel, and perhaps more fraught intervention.

The long tentacles of slavery stretched across the globe and reached into a staggering array of institutions – educational, legal, financial, and political.This becomes especially clear by the final section of the book, “National Institutions and Natural Boundaries.” Compelling essays by Craig Steven Wilder, Andrew Shankman, Alfred L. Brophy and John Majewski provide a fitting capstone to a geographically and conceptually wide-ranging book. This is a history of slavery that catapults us far beyond the slave South. Continue reading →

Men of La Mancha

September 29, 2016 By Sara Georgini in Commentary, From the Archives, Uncategorized Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Revolution, Atlantic, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Benjamin Franklin, Civil War, Early Republic, History, iterature, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, literature, New England, Print Culture, vastearlyamerica, Washington 2 Comments

don-quixote-book-cover In a certain village of vast early America, whose name I do not recall, a book fell open. Then another. And another. By 1860, many generations’ worth of American readers had imbibed the two-volume work of Spain’s early modern master, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote, or, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha (1605). Cervantes’ metafiction of a mad knight-errant, often hailed as the first Western novel, bustled and blistered with originality. Continue reading →