Roundtable: Making Teen Girls into Women’s Historians

June 1, 2017 By Sara Georgini in Founding Fiction, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Abigail Adams, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Ann Rinaldi, Boston Massacre, Children's literature, Civil War, fiction, Founding Fiction, Hemings, John Adams, John Brown, literature, Native American history, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Peggy Shippen, Phillis Wheatley, Publishing, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Tecumseh, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia, women, women's history, Young adult literature 11 Comments

Welcome to Founding Fiction, The Junto’s first roundtable exploring how children’s literature and young adult fiction depicts early American history. Between posts, we’ll compile a shelf of favorites to (re)read. Tweet us at #FoundingFiction or comment with your recommendations for Very Early Americanists. Happy summer, let’s dive in!

Today’s post is by Laura Ansley, Ph.D. candidate in history at the College of William & Mary, and managing editor of the Nursing Clio blog. Her dissertation is titled, “Life Problems: Sex Education in the United States, 1890-1930.” Follow her @lmansley.

Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams and Peggy Shippen and Harriet Hemings: all early American women whom I learned about from Ann Rinaldi’s young adult fiction. I have been fascinated by history for as long as I can remember, but Rinaldi was one of many authors who helped me to better understand what the best kind of historical study is. While school classes covering the Civil War may have talked about generals and battles, Rinaldi introduced me to characters like Osceola, stepdaughter of Wilmer McLean, who moved his family away from Manassas when the war came to the quieter Appomattox Courthouse—meaning the war started and ended on their doorstep. With her focus on teenage heroines, Rinaldi showed that history wasn’t only about important men. Young women experienced these historical events too, and their stories were also worth telling.
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Guest Post: Finding an Agent

April 18, 2017 By Jessica Parr in Academia, Publishing Tags: academic publishing, Publishing Leave a comment

Jennifer Goloboy is a literary agent at Red Sofa Literary in St. Paul, MN. She has a PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University, and has published articles on merchants and the early American middle class. Her book, Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era, was published by University of Georgia Press on October 10.

jennie-goloboy-2014 As an agent and historian, I’m here to explain the process of finding an agent. Don’t worry—you can do this!

Before you initiate contact with agents, you need to collect the materials that an agent will likely request. If you’ve written a novel, you need to have the manuscript completely finished. Many agents will also want to read a synopsis of the novel. On the other hand, if you’ve written a work of non-fiction, all you’ll need are a book proposal and the first three chapters. The book proposal will compare your book to other books in the field, explain your plans for marketing the book, and outline the full manuscript. (You might consider writing a proposal for your novel, too—it never hurts to have a well-thought-out plan for publicizing your book.) 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 →

13 Revolutions +1

June 22, 2016 By Sara Georgini in Digital History, Interview, Public History Tags: 13 colonies, 18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21st century, academia, Adams, African-American history, American Revolution, American Revolutionary War, Archives, Atlantic History, Constitution, cultural history, Data, DH, Digital History, digital humanities, digital technology, Early Republic, Founders, Franklin, Gender, Independence, Jefferson, law, museums, pedagogy, Popular History, Print Culture, Public History, Publishing, race, religion, research, science and technology, Slavery, Smithsonian Institution, teaching, Technology, UX, Washington Leave a comment

Diego Rivera and Bertram D. Wolfe, “Portrait of America,” 1934

When John Adams looked back on the American Revolution (something he liked to do), he reflected that, “The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” The colonists’ drive to independence marked a new era of American history, Adams thought, when “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected.” Scholars have struggled to frame the experience of the Revolution in picture and on the page. How can we use digital tools to curate collections of revolutionary culture and #vastearlyamerica for use in the classroom?

Today, The Junto chats with Darren Milligan, Senior Digital Strategist at the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access, about the Smithsonian Learning Lab, which encourages us to make, use, and share new galleries of history. Continue reading →

Evolution of an Article

March 16, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in Publishing, Research Tags: academic publishing, Black Loyalists, food, Food laws, Hunger prevention, Journal Articles, Loyalists, peer review, Publishing, Sierra Leone 6 Comments

In summer 2010 I sat in the house furnished by Rhys Isaac in Colonial Williamsburg, and attempted to write my first dissertation chapter. I’d just finished my first research trip, to Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, and was in the middle of my second, at the John D. Rockefeller Library. I was trying to follow advice I’d read to write as I researched. There was no Wi-Fi in the house, which was a curse and a blessing. I couldn’t get distracted, but I also did not have instantaneous access to articles and books, which meant I couldn’t check basic facts and chronologies, which, turns out, tend to be missing from your research! Continue reading →

Promoting Your Book

February 3, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Academia, Publishing Tags: academia, academic publishing, advice, Publishing 1 Comment

Historiography Historian Thomas Kidd recently published some suggestions on the dos and don’ts of promoting your academic book. His recommendations, which included suggestions of not joining social media just for the purpose of promoting your book was good. My aim here is not to repudiate Kidd, but rather to add my own thoughts. Since the content of The Junto is written primarily by early career scholars, I thought I might also contribute some points that may be self-evident to more senior historians, but perhaps less obvious to those who are newer to the field. This advice is also mainly geared towards those who publish with academic presses. Trade publishers function differently.

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Autumn Reads

August 19, 2015 By Sara Georgini in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: 19th Century, Adams, Africa, American Indians, American Revolution, Amistad, Antebellum South, Archives, Atlantic World, braddock, Caribbean, Charleston, Civil War, Confederacy, cultural history, Democracy, Diplomacy, diplomatic history, Early Republic, Founders, French Atlantic, Gender, George Washington, historiography, History of Medicine, Jefferson, John Adams, legal history, London, Methodology, museums, Nat Turner, Native Americans, New England, New York, Pirates, Politics, Print Culture, prisoners, Publishing, Quaker, Quakers, religion, religious history, renaissance, Romanticism, Slavery, southern history, Spanish Empire, theatre, Thomas Jefferson, university press, Virginia, visual culture, War of 1812, Washington Leave a comment

“Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn,” Thomas Moran (ca. 1862)

Fall brings new early American titles to explore. Enjoy our Spring Reads 2015 list, too, and share your finds below!

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After the Trail

August 4, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Public History Tags: 19th Century, academic publishing, academic v. popular history, American history, American Indians, Antebellum, Anti-Rent, Berkshire, Boston, Canada, colonial history, environmental history, Francis Parkman, Gold Rush, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Indians, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society, material culture, Medford, Montreal, Native Americans, Oregon Trail, Parkman, Popular History, Public History, Publishing, Quebec, research methodology 8 Comments

Oglala Sioux Shield, ca. 1846

Consider the sixth-grader of 1907. Gertrude F. Greene’s syllabus passed over Plato, sidelined Scottish ballads, and resisted the Alaskan derring-do of The Fur-Seal’s Tooth. At the top of her reading list—first to devour on a snowy winter break from the old Belcher School—she ranked Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail (1849). In under a century, Parkman had gone from cliffhanger to canon. Why? What might students learn from a 23-year-old romantic historian’s rambles in the Indian country of 1846? Glints of Parkman’s early artistry shone through, but only when you shook up the story a bit. His sketch of life with the Oglala Sioux melded ethnography and emotion, sense and sensation. His Oregon Trail had been greatly curated, edited, and revised in the retelling. And yet Ms. Greene’s sixth-graders missed out on the juicier bits. What Parkman saw (“a strange variety of characters”), what Parkman heard (“harsh and guttaral” dialects), and what Parkman ate (buffalo, fish, dog) on the road filled his private journals, first made available to readers in the 1940s. There, stashed away in the “no-filter” notebooks that Parkman used to piece together his first blockbuster, lay the real adventure. Continue reading →

Before the Trail

August 3, 2015 By Sara Georgini in From the Archives, Research Tags: 19th Century, academic publishing, academic v. popular history, American history, American Indians, Antebellum, Anti-Rent, Berkshire, Boston, Canada, colonial history, environmental history, Francis Parkman, Gold Rush, Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Indians, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society, material culture, Medford, Montreal, Native Americans, Oregon Trail, Parkman, Popular History, Public History, Publishing, Quebec, research methodology 4 Comments

Francis Parkman’s Medicine Chest

Pratt must be paid. There was a route to examine one last time, and three shirts to stuff into a knapsack bulging with flannels and history books, powder and shot. The Berkshire Hills trip was a rush job; he needed to return for graduation in late August, 1844. Into the knapsack went a 4” x 2½” dusky-green journal, with shorthand notes in pencil. After a boyhood spent hunting and riding bareback on the Medford frontier, the blue-eyed Harvard senior, 20, knew how to pack for a research errand into the wilderness. Already, he boasted colorful adventures from past summer forays, fine-tuning the field skills that history professor Jared Sparks did not cover in class. Take July 1841: Scaling his first New Hampshire ravine, the rookie historian slipped and swung free, clawing air. As he “shuddered” and clung to the crag, a hard sheaf of pebbles fell, “clattering hundreds of feet” to the sunny gulf below.

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