Guest Post: French Imposters, Diplomatic Double Speak, and Buried Archival Treasures

April 10, 2017 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Guest Posts, Recent Scholarship Tags: Archives, Britain, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, documentary editing, documents, Early Republic, France, James Monroe, military history, Navy, newspapers, Politics, Print Culture, scholarly editing, Scotland, War of 1812 Leave a comment

Today’s guest post is by Cassandra Good, Associate Editor of The Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington, and author of Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Women and Men in the Early American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Follow her @CassAGood.

The latest volume of The Papers of James Monroe covers a short but important period in Monroe’s life and career: April 1811 to March 1814. Monroe became Secretary of State in April 1811 and was tasked with trying to repair relations with both Great Britain and France. After war with Britain began in June 1812, his focus broadened to military affairs and included a stint as interim Secretary of War. The bulk of the volume, then, is focused on the War of 1812. However, there are a number of other stories revealed here that will be of interest to a range of historians. Continue reading →

Roundtable: Cash’s Bundle: Fugitive Slave Advertisements, Clothing, and Self-Care

February 14, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Colonial Couture, Roundtables Tags: advertising, Africa, African-American history, Class, clothing, Fashion, History of Fashion, Print Culture, race, Slavery, transatlantic, women's history 6 Comments

This Colonial Couture post is by guest contributor Charmaine A. Nelson, professor of art history at McGill University. Her latest book is Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica.

It is a remarkable fact that everywhere that Africans were enslaved in the transatlantic world, they resisted in a myriad of ways. While scholars have frequently examined the more spectacular and violent forms of resistance (like slave revolts and rebellions), a far quieter type of resistance was ubiquitous across the Americas, running away. Where printing presses took hold, broadsheets and newspapers soon followed, crammed with all manner of colonial news. Colonial print culture and slavery were arguably fundamentally linked. More specifically, as Marcus Wood has argued, “The significance of advertising for the print culture of America in the first half of the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate.”[1] Continue reading →

Begging for Bounty

January 2, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Digital History, From the Archives Tags: Antebellum, Class, Early America, Early Republic, holidays, labor history, literature, New Years' Day, newspapers, poetry, Print Culture 2 Comments

1829-city-scat Every day they took apart the city, and put it back together again. New Year’s Day was no different. They worked while dawn, then dusk, threaded the sky, to patch up narrow streets. Lamplighters, an urban mainstay heroicized by Maria Susanna Cummins’ fictional “Trueman Flint,” heaved up their wooden ladders to trim wicks and refill oil pans. Along with the dry-dirtman, city scavengers spread out to collect loose trash. The scene might have been Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis—and set anytime from the Revolution to the Civil War. Newspaper carriers, mostly young boys, filtered along the avenues. Tucked in sheets of newsprint, the city’s youngest workers also carried on a curious tradition: the New Year’s address. A rhyming blend of local-color writing and cultural commentary, the New Year’s address recapped the past and looked ahead. Laden with ornamental tombstone borders and often draped over double columns, each address ended with a plea for an annual gratuity. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Have You Read this?:” Teaching About Early Republic Print Culture with Hamilton

November 29, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Commentary, Pedagogy Tags: Early Republic, Hamilton: An American Musical, pedagogy, Print Culture, teaching 6 Comments

We are pleased to share this guest post from Michelle Orihel, an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Utah University. Dr. Orihel received her doctorate from Syracuse University and is currently working on a book manuscript about Democratic-Republican Societies in the post-revolutionary period.

Last spring, I blogged about how I used the song “Farmer Refuted” from Hamilton: An American Musical to teach about the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution.[1] But, that’s not the only song about pamphlets in the musical. There’s also “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” named after the sensational tract published in 1797 in which Alexander Hamilton confessed to adultery.[2]

Continue reading →

Steamboats and Teaching Tech

November 4, 2016 By Nora Slonimsky in From the Archives, Pedagogy Tags: American Philosophical Society, copyright, Early Republic, intellectual property, pedagogy, Print Culture, Robert Fulton, steamboats, teaching 1 Comment

Steamboats are ready for a comeback. A pedagogical one, that is. While in all likelihood the steamboat’s time as a common form of transportation in the United States is finished, over the past several weeks I’ve noticed subtle mentions in a seminar paper, a museum display, comments during last month’s PEAES conference, and only once, I should add, did I bring them up! This may be in part due to my increasing interest in them as a pivotal subject in the history of Anglo-American intellectual property. Yet I don’t think this is entirely an instance of frequency illusion but rather indicates that while steamboats are no longer an effective mode of movement, they are very effective as an illustrative one, particularly when trying to flesh out broader themes in the political economy of the Early Republic. Continue reading →

Men of La Mancha

September 29, 2016 By Sara Georgini in Commentary, From the Archives, Uncategorized Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Adams, American Revolution, Atlantic, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Benjamin Franklin, Civil War, Early Republic, History, iterature, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, literature, New England, Print Culture, vastearlyamerica, Washington 2 Comments

don-quixote-book-cover In a certain village of vast early America, whose name I do not recall, a book fell open. Then another. And another. By 1860, many generations’ worth of American readers had imbibed the two-volume work of Spain’s early modern master, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote, or, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha (1605). Cervantes’ metafiction of a mad knight-errant, often hailed as the first Western novel, bustled and blistered with originality. Continue reading →

Autumn Reads

September 6, 2016 By Sara Georgini in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, American Revolution, Archives, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, capitalism, Civil War, Constitution, cultural history, Early Republic, Gender, historiography, Native Americans, New England, Print Culture, Publishing, race, religion, Slavery 4 Comments

Winslow Homer, “The Country School,” 1871

Looks like #VastEarlyAmerica just got even vaster—and that’s a good thing. Here’s our fall preview of new titles. Please share your books/finds in the comments! Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Bounties: The Christian Brothers, Mutinies, and Potential Piracies

August 31, 2016 By Nora Slonimsky in From the Archives Tags: Early Republic, Pirates, Print Culture, Publishing 2 Comments

A few years ago, I was delivering my first lecture to a hall full of well over one hundred students. Thinking I would impress them with my popular culture knowledge, I included a reference to Captain Jack Sparrow as an example of the type of piracy I did not research, and one of the many forms of piracy in which they should not participate. Crickets ensued. Thankfully, my follow-up joke about the crickets landed better, but this left me all the more surprised when a student exiting the lecture swung by the front desk and made a quick reference to Marlon Brandon being a better sailor than Johnny Depp. Embarrassed though I am to admit, it was a reference I did not understand until about a month ago. Continue reading →

Gawker, Gossip, and the General Advertiser

August 25, 2016 By Ken Owen in News, Opinion Tags: Aurora, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Gawker, Gossip, newspapers, Print Culture 5 Comments

I can’t say that I was ever the most avid reader, or the biggest fan, of Gawker. But as the trenchant news website was forced to shut down this week as the result of the combined forces of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan, I realized that I was being more than a little hypocritical.

After all, as a historian of 1790s culture, I rely heavily on the work of Benjamin Franklin Bache. And if anything embodied the no-holds-barred, gossipy style of Gawker in the 18th century – not to mention the attempted backlash from powerful forces – it was the Aurora General Advertiser. Continue reading →

Hidden Bureaucratic Forget-me-nots and What to Make of Ubiquity

August 19, 2016 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in Commentary, From the Archives Tags: 18th Century, bureaucracy, material culture, military history, Print Culture 2 Comments

When wading through account books, muster rolls, and other dry military records, I don’t usually get a sense of the author—there might be a name jotted down, or maybe some distinctive handwriting, but hardly any evidence of personality. Reading through a 1758 orderly book from the Oneida Carry was much the same: a recounting of paroles, provisions, parades, and troop preparations. And then, curiously, tucked between the routine orders and work details, on the bottom of the 51^st page:

When This You See Remember me.[1]

An—abruptly elegant—personal appeal hidden in the middle of a bureaucratic record, a record covering the various minutiae of one regiment of the vast British military apparatus but containing no information (other than a name) about the man who had chronicled them all. What on earth was it doing here?

This post began as a simple question about the meaning of private voices in the state record and quickly became something a little more meandering—tracing a phrase, finding its ubiquity in the British Atlantic, and then, in that broader context, pondering how and why it came to be on the page of an official military document. Continue reading →