Early American Women Unmasked

May 5, 2020 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture, Vast Early America Tags: Antigua, art history, Atlantic World, Black Atlantic, Caribbean, colonial America, Fashion, free people of color, Jamaica, Manners, Massachusetts, material culture, New England, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica, women's history 2 Comments

A special edition of #ColonialCouture, a Junto roundtable on fashion as history in early American life.

The Antigua-born Penelope Royall Vassall (masked and socially distanced), Joseph Blackburn, circa 1755, Massachusetts Historical Society

Protective face coverings have emerged as a potent, multifaceted metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite inconsistent examples set by elected leaders and conflicting recommendations made by public health officials, unisex masks have steadily assumed a greater role in social distancing measures and become mandatory in certain settings outside the home. Options range from standard blue and white surgical masks to creative DIY improvisations and “Corona Couture.” Some museums are looking to add homemade masks to their collections as a way to document the crisis. Worn for slightly different reasons and more implicitly gendered, the masks owned by early American women and even children were no less symbolic in terms of practical use, commodification, or controversy.

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Review: Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets

December 11, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Anglicanism, book review, church history, colonial New York, Elizabeth Ann Seton, free people of color, High Church, John Street Methodist Church, Methodism, Mother Zion Church, New York City, St. Philip's Church, Trinity Wall Street 2 Comments

Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

In many respects, Four Steeples over the City Streets is a story about different ways of being Anglican in New York City. It’s also a story about how external social changes influenced and threatened a vision of social order without destroying it. And it’s a story about how different kinds of New Yorkers in the early republic–black and white and male and female–experienced their community in religious terms. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Seneca Village Memory: The Problem of Forgetting

July 28, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Guest Posts, Methodology Tags: Central Park, free people of color, historical markers, historical memory, housing, memory, New York City, Public History, Seneca Village, urban history 14 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Alexander Manevitz (@historicities), a Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University.

When I started my doctoral program, “memory studies” struck me as more of a trend than a field. Something everyone talked about doing but couldn’t really define. After all, isn’t all history sort of a study of memories and how they’re made and used? Well, as with all things trendy, I was late to the party.[1] My first year of graduate school, I read Michele-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and David Blight’s Race and Reunion within a few weeks of one another, and I realized how wrong I’d been, and my interest has only grown from there.[2] I have since turned to questions of memory and amnesia in my own scholarship.

My work focuses on Seneca Village, a once-vibrant community in upper Manhattan where community activism and urban development collided when the city evicted the residents to clear land for Central Park in 1857. Despite its significant role in the development of African-American social activism in the early republic and its place in relation to one of the young nation’s largest urban development projects, Seneca Village has been almost entirely forgotten in popular and scholarly memory.[3]

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