Review: Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World

May 28, 2019 By Carla Cevasco in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Uncategorized Tags: environmental history, French Atlantic, history of science, Native American history, settler colonialism 2 Comments

**Christopher M. Parsons, A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).**

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Today, Carla Cevasco reviews A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America by Christopher M. Parsons, Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. Tomorrow, the author will discuss the book in a Q&A with Rachel Herrmann.

When the French first invaded northeastern North America in the seventeenth century, they aspired to make wine from the indigenous grapes of the region. By the eighteenth century, however, they faced the disappointing reality that wine produced with French techniques from these grapes was acrid and viscous, and, moreover, that wine grapes native to France did not necessarily thrive in such a cold climate. The dream of Canadian wine proved a failure to early French colonists.[1]

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Review: Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions

June 20, 2018 By Vanessa Holden in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: colonial newspapers, colonial slavery, Complexion, cultural history, History of Race, history of science, history of the body, indentured servitude, Resistance, runaway, Sharon Block, Slavery 1 Comment

Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Colonial Complextions Cover

At the opening of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America, Sharon Block poses two provocative questions: “What were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial eighteenth century; and how did Anglo-American colonists describe people’s appearance?” (1) To answer these queries Block presents a cultural history race in Britain’s 18th century American colonies. She makes a careful study of the descriptors advertisers and editors used in missing colonial persons adds for runaway African descent and their European and Native American servants. Continue reading →

Inspiration Roundtable: Guest Post by Whitney Barlow Robles, “Naturalist in Historian’s Clothing”

November 27, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Inspiration in Research, Recent Scholarship, Research Tags: history of science, Inspiration, Nature writing 2 Comments

This week at the Junto we are stepping back to talk about what inspired our research projects. From dissertations to first and second book projects, we will bring together a range of scholars to discuss the method, source, book, or lecture that got them started. Today, we have a guest post from Whitney Barlow Robles. Whitney is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard, and her work spans early American history, history of science, and material culture studies. Her most recent publications include an essay about a 1755 earthquake that shook Boston, published in The New England Quarterly, and a chapter about flattened scientific specimens in the book The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820. Her research has recently been supported by the American Historical Association, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Smithsonian Institution.

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I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or rather, a nature writer dressed as a historian. My dissertation reexamines the history of natural history in eighteenth-century America and the British Atlantic world by putting animals and natural specimens at the narrative center. It asks: What might historical documents, written or dried or submerged in alcohol, tell us about the actions of historical creatures? Why did animals remain, at some level, inscrutable? How did they escape the net, crash the experiment, shapeshift, fly away, or even help naturalists preserve specimens? And what might their role in early modern science tell us about the larger social and political projects powered by natural history? Liable to change over time, animals influenced the human world through their behavior, biology, physical traits, and, in the case of beasts like raccoons, perhaps even their own desires. Without understanding how animals circumscribed the project that sought to study them and thus set the terms for what humans could learn about nature, our view remains obscured. We can look through the microscope, but only with a cloudy lens. Continue reading →

Natural Histories

May 13, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Public History Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Harvard, history of science, james bowdoin, Joseph Pope, material culture, museum, Oxford University Press, Paul Revere, Tangible Things, Winthrop, women, women's history 1 Comment

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See the world through Hannah Winthrop’s eyes. Your gaze dips down into the high-polished tea table and shears past John Sing leton Copley’s brush, into summer 1773. Shown here serenely grasping a nectarine branch, Hannah likely knew that her world—what she called the “same little peaceful circle”—was spinning into a new revolution. Continue reading →

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 →

Deadline approaching for Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic

January 8, 2015 By Rachel Herrmann in Announcements, Conferences Tags: Atlantic History, cannibalism, history of science, Jamestown, Maritime history, Native Americans, omnomnom, Slavery Leave a comment

Do you like cannibalism? As a topic, obviously, not a personal preference. Of course you do! If research travels will take you to England this summer (or if you reside in the UK or nearby), please consider submitting a proposal for a conference I’m organizing at the University of Southampton this June. Continue reading →

Guest Post: On the Anvil of Labor History in the Revolutionary Era

November 13, 2013 By Michael Blaakman in Conferences, Guest Posts Tags: Billy Smith, Class Matters, Guest Posts, history of science, labor history, McNeil Center for Early American Studies 3 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Peter Kotowski, a Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University Chicago. His research uses the lived experiences of indentured servants to explore Pennsylvania’s development within the Atlantic economy and the extent to which the colony was “the best poor man’s country.”

In the introduction to their 2008 edited collection, Class Matters, Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith make the bold proclamation that “as a mode of historical analysis of early North America and the Atlantic World, class is dead – or so it has been reported for the last two decades.”[1] The subsequent collection of essays makes a convincing case that class is not, in fact, dead. For Smith, this volume was merely a continuation of a decades-long commitment to class as a primary mode of analysis. It was in the spirit of Smith’s work that dozens of scholars converged on the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia from November 7-9 for what was affectionately dubbed “Billyfest.”
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Science, Meet Slavery: “River of Dark Dreams” and the Future of Slavery Scholarship

June 8, 2013 By eherschthal in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Antebellum South, columbia, Harvard, Harvard University Press, history of science, Presentism, Review, River of Dark Dreams, science and technology, Slavery, Walter Johnson 2 Comments

04b0c-johnson I bet few graduate students these days haven’t read, or at least seen referenced, Walter Johnson’s essay “On Agency.” Published a decade ago, the essay was prompted by what had become hackneyed trope in slavery scholarship. Everyone seemed to ascribe slaves a role in shaping their lives—“agency”—despite the power asymmetries inherent in the slave-master relationship. Johnson famously called for an end to this kind of writing. But one of his subtler points may have been lost amid his overarching argument. It wasn’t that slave agency was unimportant, but that it had lost its contemporary relevance. Finding agency mattered in the Civil Rights Era, the years in which the scholarship flourished, because it bolstered African Americans’ claims on the nation’s past, and thus its future. Continue reading →