The Trouble with Global: Early Thoughts from an Early Americanist

April 29, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Pedagogy Tags: capitalism, empire, global economy, global history, imperialism, narratology, survey course, teaching 16 Comments

mapofthenewworld-debry This week, I’m wrapping up my survey course on modern global history (1500 to the present). It’s the first time I’ve taught this course. So I have opinions.

Let me just put this right out there: I had long been skeptical about global history as a standard survey course. It seemed too unwieldy, too shallow or spotty in coverage, and way too vulnerable to political ax-grinding. I assumed this course would reinforce old stereotypes: that history is an endless parade of random facts and dates and battles and names of elite men. Or else it would turn into pure theory, and thus an exercise in polemic. Either way, it would have little of the texture of lived experience, which is what I reckon makes history compelling to ordinary powerless students.

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Manco Capac and the Global American Founding

August 19, 2013 By Tom Cutterham in Commentary Tags: American Revolution, Founding Fathers, global history, Joel Barlow, John Adams 5 Comments

Everyone’s thinking more globally these days, historians included. But constructing a historical imagination that encompasses the whole planet isn’t only a project of the twenty-first century. The American Revolution took place in an age of global exploration, commerce, and empire. When people wrote and thought about the new nation’s founding, they didn’t look just to Europe and the classical world for connections and comparisons, but to Asia and South America as well. Writers were eager to show that the context in which they understood American events was a global one. Take for example the career of Manco Capac, founding father of the Inca kingdom of Cuzco. Continue reading →

The JuntoCast, Episode 2: The American Revolution

June 26, 2013 By Michael D. Hattem in The Junto Podcast Network, The JuntoCast: A Podcast on Early American History Tags: "The American Revolution Reborn", American Revolution, Atlantic History, Constitution, global history, podcast, Republicanism, The JuntoCast 2 Comments

The Junto is happy to present the second episode of “The JuntoCast,” our new monthly podcast featuring Juntoists discussing issues related to early American history, academia, pedagogy, and public history.

In our second episode, Kenneth Owen, Michael D. Hattem, Roy Rogers, and Eric Herschthal use the recent MCEAS conference, “The American Revolution Reborn,” as a springboard to launch into a discussion on questions of periodization, Atlantic and global contexts, the limits of “republicanism,” and the value of recovering “lived experience.”

You can click here to listen to the mp3 in a new window or right-click to download and save for later. You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. Continue reading →

Revolution Not Dead

June 13, 2013 By eherschthal in Conferences, Recent Scholarship Tags: Age of Revolution, American Revolution, Civil War, global history, Latin America, neutrality 2 Comments

If “The American Revolution Reborn” conference proved anything, it’s that the Revolution is in no danger of getting old. So much is still left to be told. Topics that few Revolutionary narratives have fully considered—ambivalence, religious dissent, hindsight connections to Scotland’s union with England in 1707, and future links to the Latin Americas—beg for further research. And those are only the issues that were discussed on the first day.

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Intersections upon a Dark River

June 5, 2013 By Roy Rogers in Book Review, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: cultural history, economic history, global history, history of capitalism, religious history, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtable, Slavery, Walter Johnson 2 Comments

Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is the best big book on slavery I have ever encountered. This is not faint praise; there is some about the subject that causes its best historians—Eugene Genovese, Winthrop Jordan, Kenneth Stampp and more—to write in at bullet-stopping length. Johnson’s volume stands out due to his ability to seamlessly place the history of antebellum slavery at the intersection of three of the nineteenth century’s key themes—imperialism, capitalism, and technological development. He does this, as other contributors to this roundtable have noted, at the sweeping level of the very geography of Mississippi River Valley and at the much more intimate level of the lived experience of enslaved laborers. Continue reading →

To See The World In A Bale of Cotton

June 4, 2013 By Matt Karp in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Antebellum, capitalism, global history, imperialism, Slavery 3 Comments

The promise of a tie between the local and the global—a thread to join the dense fiber of individual life to the vast patterns of human interaction—has long lingered at the edge of the historian’s vision. “The hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours,” wrote Emerson in “History.” “Each new fact in . . . private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done.” Even the less Transcendental among us are lured by a link between the intimate and the infinite: every globalist, no matter how ambitious, must find their ground-level characters and illustrative anecdotes; the best microhistorians train their lenses to reveal not just cell particles but a whole cosmos. Few recent works in early American history, however, are so explicit in their equal pursuit of the local and the global, the hours and the ages, as Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Continue reading →

The Week in Early American History

January 27, 2013 By Joseph M. Adelman in The Week in Early American History Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Banneker, E.P. Thompson, Fellowships, Georgia, global history, gun control, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Second Amendment, South Carolina Leave a comment

TWEAH Good morning, and welcome to another edition of The Week in Early American History. Lots going on this week, so let’s get straight to the links.