Today, The Junto features a Q&A with Brooke Newman, 
author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale, 2018), which was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Center’s 2019 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for the best work in English on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in the context of slavery and abolition in the British empire, focusing on the Caribbean. Newman is an Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is also Interim Director of the Humanities Research Center. Look for a review of A Dark Inheritance later this spring.
Tag Archives: Sexuality
“Meditations on Archival Fragments”: Review of Dispossessed Lives
It should go without saying that the historical profession depends on archives. Near or far, we need those repositories to craft historical narratives about past worlds. There is also no shortage of books and articles critical of the construction of colonial archives, perhaps the most famous among them being historian Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain. Despite the popularity of that book, however, historians still rarely discuss their archival methodology. Monographs always provide a list of consulted repositories, which for early American history can often read like a top ten greatest hits of national and state archives. And yet, try looking for the word “archive” or “archival knowledge” in the index of most books and the result might be surprising. Continue reading
Building Intellectual Community at SHEAR
Students of the early American republic: I urge you to apply to SHEAR 2016’s Graduate Research Seminars!
The program, which debuted last year, brings together grad students and senior faculty clustered around four “hot” themes in the field for an hour and a half or so of small-group discussion. Lunch is free. The sessions are open to current graduate students and those who earned a Ph.D. during the 2015-16 academic year. A one-page dissertation abstract is all it takes to apply. Best of all, this year’s lineup of topics and faculty is just as wonderful as 2015’s was. Continue reading
Revisiting New England’s Legal Development: Review of Chandler, Law and Sexual Misconduct
Abby Chandler, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015).
Between 1650 and 1750, the courts of Maine, Rhode Island, and Essex County, Massachusetts heard 1,843 cases concerning sexual misconduct. These suits, which concerned matters including rape, sodomy, adultery, and sex outside of marriage, are the subject of Abby Chandler’s new book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England (Ashgate, 2015). By examining three jurisdictions not previously studied by historians of law and sexuality, Chandler complicates standard narratives of the extent to which New Englanders adhered to English law. She also engagingly reconstructs the familial and neighborhood conflicts that shaped individual cases.[1]
Guest Post: Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750
Abby Chandler is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She received her PhD from the University of Maine at Orono. Her first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Towards England is due to be released by Ashgate in November.
My forthcoming book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England, uses sexual misconduct trials to examine the ways in which the growing Anglicization of the New England colonies played a role in the daily lives of ordinary colonists. Such trials may seem an unusual source base for studying broader political change, but their frequency and consistency allowed me to track the often subtle shifts toward more Anglicized legal systems. Likewise, both men and women were routinely charged with sexual misconduct, which allowed me to examine these shifts from male and female perspectives. This is the story of two widows in Essex County, Massachusetts, and their very different experiences with the Puritan dominated legal system of the seventeenth century and the Anglicized legal system of the eighteenth century.
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