Review: Atlantic Families, Race, and Empire

April 19, 2018 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic families, Children of Uncertain Fortune, Jamaica, race 2 Comments

Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018).

A central thread running through Daniel Livesay’s Children of Uncertain Fortune is deceptively simple: Atlantic families structured the development of ideologies surrounding race in the British empire during the long eighteenth century.[1] Woven through the book, however, is a richly nuanced exploration of what terms like Atlantic, family, race, and empire meant and how understandings of those terms changed over a pivotal hundred-year period starting in the 1730s. Through institutional records and family papers produced on both sides of the Atlantic, Livesay identifies 360 mixed-race people from Jamaica and traces the lived experiences of a handful of them as they navigated their social and economic position within transatlantic kin networks. Those individual narratives reveal how Britons experienced empire through family ties in ways that shaped their perceptions of race, colonialism, and belonging. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Recap of Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities Symposium

November 1, 2017 By Jessica Parr in Conferences Tags: digital humanites, Digital Humanities Symposium, memory, race, Ravynn Stringfield 3 Comments

Ravynn Stringfield is an MA/PhD student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary. Herwork considers representation of Blackness in comics and graphic novels through literary and historical lens, and though she hesitates to label herself a DHer, you can find her blogging her grad school experience on her site, Black Girl Does Grad School.

fullsizeoutput_45d I got involved with Race, Memory and the Digital Humanities Symposium (#RMDHatWM or RMDH) by accident. When I first arrived at William & Mary as a new graduate student in 2016, unsure of my label of “Digital Humanities scholar,” I fell into Liz Losh’s Equality Lab. The hot topic at the first few meetings was the symposium. As it turned out, attending this conference addressed all the concerns I have about the Academy, the role of scholarship as activism, and how I fit into the Digital Humanities (DH) world.

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Q&A: Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People

September 27, 2017 By Christopher Jones in Interview, Interviews with Historians, Methodology, Recent Scholarship, Research, Review / Q&A Tags: African-American history, archive, Archives, Book of Mormon, interdisciplinary, Mormonism, Native American history, Native Americans, race, racism, religion, religious studies 1 Comment

Max Perry Mueller is assistant professor of religious studies in the Department of Classics & Religious Studies of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the author of the recently-released Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Be sure and read Ben Park’s review of that book, posted at The Junto yesterday. Continue reading →

Book Review: Max Mueller, “Race and the Making of the Mormon People”

September 26, 2017 By Benjamin Park in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Mormonism, race 4 Comments

Modern Mormonism is known for being a predominantly white religion—at least in America. But a new book by religious studies scholar Max Mueller argues that the LDS faith has a complex and evolving story of racial imagination during the antebellum period. This is a declension narrative that is at once riveting and wrenching, and one that deserves a close reading.

Mueller Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 352 pp., 17 halftones, notes, bibliography, index. [Also, make sure to see Mueller’s interview with The Atlantic.]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, had audacious beginnings. They claimed a new book of scripture, a modern-day prophet, and a restored ecclesiastical structure. It was a reenactment of Christianity’s origins. And according to Max Mueller, those origins included a reformulation of America’s racial imagination. Contemporaries during the mid-nineteenth century were, to use a complex and problematic term, “secularizing” racial differences. They sought to justify slavery and segregation through a strict delineation of racial compartmentalization. Race, in other words, was becoming a fixed identity. But among Joseph Smith’s radical protests was an attack on that very assumption: Smith, the book Smith translated, and the movement Smith led, posited that race was a malleable component dependent more on righteousness than descent. They believed in a moderate “racial universalism” that, though it required the subjugation of non-white races, could unite the entire human family. Or, at least, they believed this during their first two decades, before eventually succumbing to a much more mainstream structure of racial difference. 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 →

Guest Post: Stephen Campbell, “Reimagining the Second Bank of the United States in Early American History”

January 17, 2017 By Benjamin Park in From the Archives Tags: Edward Baptist, Great Britain, Henry Clay, new history of capitalism, race, Second Bank of the United States, Slavery 4 Comments

Stephen W. Campbell earned a doctorate in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2013. A lecturer at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Campbell is the author of articles that have appeared in American Nineteenth Century History, Ohio Valley History, Perspectives on History, and History News Network. He has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Banking on the Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America, 1828-1834.

Cadwalder Family Papers, Box 98, Folder 24, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. [Click for full-size]

Unexpected “ah-hah!” moments make long hours of historical research worthwhile. A few months ago I was perusing a letter from an edited volume of Henry Clay’s correspondence when my eyes began to drift over to an adjoining page. A letter, dated August 17, 1830, showed the great senator and orator instructing his Washington agent, Philip Fendall, to send one of his slaves, Lotty, back to Kentucky. Clay wanted Lotty “to have the means to bring herself home…but if she wants money for that purpose I will thank you to apply to Mr. R[ichard] Smith to advance her the necessary sum.” Nothing in the footnotes or index shed light on this enigmatic Smith (an exceedingly common name both then and now), but I had come across this name several times before. This was almost certainly the cashier of the Washington branch of the Second Bank of the United States (BUS), the nation’s de facto central bank. A few weeks later, Clay again penned Fendall: “There are persons frequently bringing slaves from the district [of Columbia] to this State, some of whom might perhaps undertake to conduct [Lotty] to Maysville, Louisville, Lexington, or some other point from which I could receive her.”[1] Continue reading →

Manufacturing Bodies: A Review of Slavery at Sea

January 10, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, race, Slavery, Slavery at Sea, Sowande' Mustakeem, transatlantic slavery 4 Comments

Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

slavery-at-sea Writing a book review a day after Karin Wulf’s entertaining analysis of what makes for a good review might be hubris at its worst, or simply bad timing. And, while I will never have the expertise, style, and prose that made Annette Gordon-Reed’s review of Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution so good, I do hope this review will explore the central ideas of Slavery at Sea in anticipation of a Q&A between the author and The Junto’s own Rachel Hermann tomorrow. Stay tuned for that!

In the introduction of her new book, Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies, Sowande’ Mustakeem, writes that, “not all slaves endured the transatlantic passage in the same way.” That statement serves as the driving force behind an unflinching exploration of the “multiplicity of sufferings” endured by aged, infirm, and infant Africans carried across the Atlantic and into slavery. Despite the simplicity of that premise, Mustakeem’s concise monograph exposes how the focus on young and able-bodied African men as the predominant population of captives held in slave ships overshadows the experiences of the “forgotten” of the transatlantic slave trade. As a result Mustakeem’s narrative lingers on the painful details of what she describes as “a massively global human manufacturing process” that commodified the bodies of young and old, healthy and infirm, female and male (9). Continue reading →

Guest Post: Candace Jackson Gray interviews Paul Finkelman

December 27, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Academia, Interview, Interviews with Historians, Special Features Tags: Interview, legal history, Paul Finkelman, race, Slavery 1 Comment

Photo is courtesy of Keydron K. Guinn, Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Morgan State University

Paul Finkelman is currently the John E. Murray Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law and a seminar on the law of slavery. He received his PhD in U.S. history from the University of Chicago and his BA in American Studies from Syracuse University. He specializes in American legal history, slavery and the Founders, American slave law, modern human trafficking, the Civil War era, U.S. Constitutional history and law, the legal history of race relations, the history of Civil Liberties, the history of the electoral college, Constitution and firearms regulation, and Baseball and Law. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than forty books. His next book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery and America’s Highest Court, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2017. His work on legal history and constitutional law has been cited four times by the United States Supreme Court, numerous other courts, and in many appellate briefs. He was an expert witness in the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument Case and in the law suit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball. He has also recently worked with HeinOnline to create a free database called Slavery In America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, which he discusses below. This interview was conducted by Candace Jackson Gray at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD on November 30 and December 1, 2016. Continue reading →

Reading Race in Early America

December 21, 2016 By Jessica Parr in Lists, Recent Scholarship Tags: books, Citizenship, Gender, lists, Nationalism, New Orleans, new scholarhip, race, religion 15 Comments

In the past 10 years, we have seen an embarrassment of riches in scholarship that considers race in Early America (broadly understood). The list below is not exhaustive, but highlights some of the recent scholarship. Feel free to add your own favorite recent scholarship in the comments, and keep your eyes out next month, for our CFP for a roundtable on race in Early America.

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Guest Post: German Pietism and the Black Atlantic

December 13, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Guest Posts, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Atlantic History, Black Atlantic, Christianity, German History, guest post, race, religion, Roundtable 5 Comments

This is the second post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey. Mark Dixon is a PhD candidate in Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary writing a dissertation on the interaction and exchange between German Pietists and enslaved Africans in colonial South Carolina. He spent the past year (2015-16) as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow researching in Pietist archives in Halle and Herrnhut, Germany. He produces Church History Chat, a podcast featuring interviews with historians of Christianity, which will begin publishing episodes in February 2017.

A painting depicting the first Moravian converts. Johann Valentin Haidt, “First Fruits” (1747). Source.

If it sounds strange to speak of a German Atlantic in the first place, it must sound even stranger in a conversation dedicated to new scholarship and understandings of the Black Atlantic. After all, Germany was not an Atlantic colonial power, and German speakers were not as deeply involved in the slave trade as their British, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish neighbors. Indeed, Aaron Fogleman’s 2015 keynote lecture, “A German Atlantic, or Germans in the Atlantic?” delivered at the McNeil Center’s spring workshop, questioned the label’s usefulness for historians.[1] I want simply to assert the reality of the German Atlantic, and more importantly speak to its surprising utility for scholars interested in the experiences of Africans and people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. In particular, the activities of German Pietists (and their surviving sources) can enrich Black Atlantic studies. Continue reading →