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 →

Retelling “A Tale”: An Interview with Richard S. Dunn

January 30, 2015 By Sara Georgini in Dunn's "A Tale of Two Plantations", Interview, Interviews with Historians, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Alabama, Antebellum, Archives, Atlantic World, Caribbean, Digital History, digital humanites, digital projects, documentary editing, Early Republic, Edward Baptist, expansion, family history, Greg Grandin, Herbert Gutman, Jamaica, migration, Penn, Richard S. Dunn, Slavery, sugar, Virginia, Walter Johnson, Winthrop Leave a comment

Dunn Roundtable Cover Wrapping up our roundtable review of A Tale of Two Plantations, The Junto chats with Richard S. Dunn about microhistory as a “healthy antidote to top-down history,” and the archival surprises that reshaped his work. If you are near Harvard University on February 5th, come and hear more about the project. Continue reading →

A Tale of the Classroom: Introducing Richard Dunn’s Book to Undergraduates

January 29, 2015 By Benjamin Park in Dunn's "A Tale of Two Plantations", Roundtables, Special Features Tags: A Tale of Two Plantations, Digital History, Jamaica, pedagogy, Richard S. Dunn, Slavery, teaching, Virginia Leave a comment

Dunn Roundtable Cover Richard Dunn has written a big book. Normally, big books like Dunn’s are primarily meant for fellow academics, grad students who need to pad their comps list, and the super-interested general public. (That category still exists, right? Right?) For academics, these types of books influence two aspects of our scholarly life: our own academic projects and our classroom instruction. The previous participants in the roundtable have focused on A Tale of Two Plantations’s contribution to the former category, while I would like to focus my remarks on the latter. So I am going to skip the basic parameters of a book review—namely, identifying the key arguments and weaknesses of the volume—and focus on how this book can work with undergraduate students. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Fear in the Revolutionary Americas” Conference Recap

November 18, 2014 By Sara Georgini in Conferences, Guest Posts Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic World, British Empire, conferences, historiography, Jamaica, Native Americans, New York history, race, Slavery, South Carolina, Virginia 4 Comments

Elizabeth M. Covart is an early American historian, writer, and podcaster. Presently she is working on her first book manuscript about cultural community creation in Albany, New York, 1614-1830. Liz also writes a practical blog about history and how to make it more accessible at Uncommonplacebook.com and her new podcast, “Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History,” seeks to bring the work of academic and public historians to history lovers everywhere.

October 31, 2014. On the most fearsome day of the year, Tufts University convened “Fear in the Revolutionary Americas, 1776-1865,” a one-day conference designed to explore the question: What role did fear play in the revolutions that occurred in North and South America between 1776 and 1865? Continue reading →