Junto Summer Book Club: Interview with Kathleen Brown

August 15, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Interview, Summer Book Club Tags: Class, Gender, interviews with historians, Junto Summer Book Club, race, Slavery, teaching, women's history 4 Comments

We at The Junto would like to thank everyone who read along with us for the Junto Summer Book Club. To bring the book club to a close, we caught up with Kathleen Brown, the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs, via email. Brown is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.

In our interview, Brown reflects on Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs eighteen years after its publication, assesses the state of women’s history and gender history, and shares her current project. Continue reading →

Summer Book Club, Week 6

August 8, 2014 By Joseph M. Adelman in Summer Book Club Tags: Good Wives, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs, patriarchy, Slavery, Virginia 2 Comments

Brown GWNW And so we’ve come to the end of the road, a consideration today of the final chapter of Kathy Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs (the full set of posts is available here). We’ve enjoyed working through the book over the past several weeks, and look forward to a healthy conversation about the final chapter.

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Summer Book Club, Week 5

August 1, 2014 By Sara Georgini in Summer Book Club Tags: Class, Gender, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, race, Slavery, Virginia Leave a comment

Welcome to the semifinal edition of the Junto Summer Book Club! Before we head into the closing week, let’s pause at Chapters 8 and 9 of Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, to remember the ladies—and gentlemen—who invested in creating Virginian society. Continue reading →

Gone Conferencing

July 18, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Administrative Tags: Junto Summer Book Club Leave a comment

With early Americanists flocking to Philadelphia for SHEAR’s annual meeting, we have decided to postpone this week’s installment of our Junto Summer Book Club. The revised schedule for our discussion of Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs is as follows: Continue reading →

Summer Book Club, Week 4

July 11, 2014 By Jonathan Wilson in Summer Book Club Tags: Gender, interracial marriage, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, marriage, race, sex, Slavery, Virginia 2 Comments

Brown GWNW After a hiatus for Independence ~~Day~~ Week, we’re back today for chapters six and seven of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. These chapters guide us into the eighteenth century, showing how an increasingly recognizable racial order, predicated on the authority of white householders, took shape in Virginia.

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Summer Book Club, Week 3

June 27, 2014 By Tom Cutterham in Summer Book Club Tags: Bacon's Rebellion, Class, Edmund Morgan, Gender, interracial marriage, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, marriage, race, sex, Slavery, Virginia 1 Comment

This week in the Junto Summer Book Club we’ll be looking at chapters 4 and 5, in which Brown looks first at the beginnings of Virginia’s slave system in the mid-seventeenth century, and then at the memorable—and highly teachable—events of Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670s. Continue reading →

Summer Book Club, Week 2

June 20, 2014 By Sara Damiano in Summer Book Club Tags: Chesapeake, frontier, Gender, interracial marriage, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, marriage, Native Americans, race, sex, Slavery, Virginia 4 Comments

Welcome to the second installment of the Junto Summer Book Club! We discussed the introduction and first chapter of Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs during Week 1. This week we’ll consider Chapters 2 and 3. With these chapters, Brown transports us across the Atlantic Ocean, shifting her focus from early modern Britain to the early years of English settlement in Virginia.

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Summer Book Club, Week 1

June 13, 2014 By Joseph M. Adelman in Summer Book Club Tags: Chesapeake, Gender, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, race, sex, Slavery, Virginia 10 Comments

Welcome to the Junto Summer Book Club, where over the next six Fridays we will be reading and discussing Kathleen Brown’s 1996 book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs. Each week, a Junto representative will write a brief post on that week’s chapters to offer a few opening remarks and raise some questions to get the discussion started. We will then open up the comments section for you to address any topic related to the book—its argument, Brown’s use of sources, the historiography, using it in the classroom or in a public setting, to name just a few. We look forward to a lively conversation and to seeing how it develops over the next several weeks.

This week, we begin our conversation with the Introduction and Chapter 1, “Gender and English Identity on the Eve of Colonial Settlement.”

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Announcing the Junto Summer Book Club

May 30, 2014 By Joseph M. Adelman in Administrative, Summer Book Club Tags: Chesapeake, Gender, Junto Summer Book Club, Kathleen Brown, race, sex, Slavery, Virginia 10 Comments

With summer upon us, many of us are turning our attention to reading lists, whether for upcoming graduate exams, syllabus preparation, research, or pleasure. For many, it’s an opportunity to catch up on new work that sat neglected during the push through the final weeks of the semester and exams, but it’s also an opportunity to return to more classic books that have shaped the field and deserve reconsideration. Plus, we at the Junto love nothing more than to discuss and argue about history. Therefore, we would like to introduce a new feature: the Junto Summer Book Club.

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