Guest Post: Fashion from Japan and France: Nightgowns in Colonial Brazil

October 8, 2018 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture Tags: Atlantic World, Brazil, Fashion, History of Fashion, Latin America, material culture, Portugal, South America, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

Le_diner._Les_dèlassemens_d'une_aprés_diner

Jean-Baptiste Debret, “Les dèlassemens d’une aprés diner,” from Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Brésil, vol. 2 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frerès, 1835)

Today’s guest post comes from Rachel Zimmerman (Ph.D., University of Delaware), Assistant Professor of Art History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. She has been studying the art and architecture of the Brazilian town of Minas Gerais since her first trip to the region in 2006. She began examining consumption in colonial Brazil for her dissertation, “Global Luxuries at Home: The Material Possessions of an Elite Family in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil,” and is continuing research for a book project on elite material culture in the city of Mariana. Follow her work here.

According to the early nineteenth-century English merchant John Luccock, it was customary for Brazilian men to discard stiff outer layers when at home and wear only a cotton shirt, often unbuttoned, knee-length breeches, and clogs.[1] Brazilian standards of decorum permitted informal dress in domestic settings, even when receiving guests. Examination of colonial-era probate inventories from Minas Gerais, the gold mining district, reveals that a small number of educated elite men transformed their state of undress from ordinary to stylish with the addition of a nightgown. Continue reading →

Puerto Rico and the Regional Caribbean

September 25, 2018 By Casey Schmitt in Academia, Commentary, Historiography, News, Opinion, Uncategorized Tags: Caribbean, historiography, Puerto Rico, Seventeenth Century, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

For early Americanists, the past two decades have seen an increase in scholarship connecting the early modern Caribbean to colonial North America. The Caribbean adds significant depth and dimension to discussions of race, slavery, diplomacy, capitalism, gender, and imperial competition by expanding the historiographies and archival resources common to early American scholarship. Yet, when a colleague stopped by my office asking for readings on seventeenth-century Puerto Rico to assign for a class, I drew a blank. Despite the excellent scholarship on colonial Puerto Rico written in Spanish, English-language scholarship focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[1]

What made this worse was that last Thursday was the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico. And, while the devastation and continued struggles on the island garner on-going media attention, the anniversary set me thinking about the place of the Caribbean in our scholarship and our teaching. It seems that, despite increased attention to the Caribbean within the field of vast early America, not all Caribbeans are created equal. And that unevenness demands our attention. Continue reading →

Frogs and Cats, or, Access and Privilege

September 5, 2018 By Carla Cevasco in Academia, Opinion Tags: Geography, Jamestown, Job Market, material culture, research travel, resource access, sensory history, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

I have never heard anything like those frogs. I was crunching along the gravel walkway from Historic Jamestowne back to the bus after the final reception of the Omohundro Institute conference in June. As I walked through the woods, the James River at my back, the calls of frogs and insects hammered at the air, drowning out the chatter of other attendees and the crunch of my own footsteps.

An hour before, I had gazed down into the archaeological dig of a kitchen site, in which researchers had discovered what they argue are cannibalized human remains in 2012. All the hairs on my neck stood up. Continue reading →

Q&A with Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History, 2nd Edition

July 17, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: American Revolution, Atlantic World, comparative history, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, historiography, New Edition, Review, Revolution, Spanish America, vastearlyamerica Leave a comment

9781479857173_full When Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History was published in 2009, it was one of the first monographs to bring together the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions in a single English-language volume. Revolutions in the Atlantic World quickly became a seminal text, finding its way on many Atlantic history syllabi, comprehensive exam reading lists, and on researchers’ shelves. In January 2018, New York University Press released a second edition that incorporates historiography from the past nine years, including scholarship on indigenous peoples and privateers. Tomorrow, Jordan Taylor will have his review of this second edition. Today, The Junto’s Julia M. Gossard interviews Klooster about the book’s second edition, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions.

Continue reading →

Part of the Long History of Child Trafficking: 18th-Century French Louisiana

June 27, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Opinion, Vast Early America Tags: Child Trafficking, children, Eighteenth Century, France, French Louisiana, kidnapping, migration, Mississippi Company, Opinion, pronatalism, vastearlyamerica, youth 2 Comments

2005-0011 As we continue to learn more about the seizure and internment of migrant infants and children, both along the U.S.-Mexico border and in ICE raids throughout the nation, historians have asked us to wrestle with our long history of child-snatching, family separation, and child trafficking. I’ve read these pieces with a keen sense that while this is a particularly acute theme in American history, separating and abducting children from their families has been a tactic that many regimes have used for centuries to bolster their power. Whether we’re discussing slavery, the expulsion of Moriscos from Spain, or even pronatalist policies to populate early modern colonies, trafficking children has been an enduring state tactic. As a historian of #VastEarlyAmerica, with a focus on the French context, I keep thinking about the growth of the Louisiana colony in the eighteenth century. In addition to the forced migration and abduction of thousands of enslaved Africans, many of whom were children and adolescents, eighteenth-century French Louisiana was also populated with trafficked French children. Continue reading →

Twitter Conferences: To Do or Not To Do?

May 24, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Conferences, Digital History, Technology, Vast Early America Tags: Canada, Collaboration, conferences, Digital History, digital technology, Early Canada, New France, Public History, Technology, twitter, twitterstorians, vastearlyamerica 1 Comment

In August 2017, I virtually attended and presented at the Beyond 150: Telling Our Stories Twitter Conference ((#Beyond150CA). In collaboration with Unwritten Histories, Canada’s History Society, and the Wilson Institute, this event was the first Twitter conference to focus on Canadian history. This conference seemed like a great opportunity to present my work on “filles du roi” (daughters of the king) in seventeenth-century New France. But, the idea of presenting an entire conference paper in only 12-15 tweets was intimidating. Would I be able to get my points across in this format? Would I be able to delve into meaningful conversations with the “audience”? Would anyone be in the audience? Was I prepared to lay my research bare on the internet for anyone to find while it was still in a nascent state? Continue reading →

Why We Doubt Capable Children: Constructing Childhood in the Revolutionary Era

April 17, 2018 By Julia M Gossard in Childhood & Youth, Commentary, Research, Vast Early America Tags: 18th Century, adulthood, age, Atlantic World, childhood, children, Citizenship, consent, legal history, majority, minority, vastearlyamerica, voting, youth 6 Comments

Mann_Page_Elizabeth_Page_John_Wollaston “My friends and I might still be 11, and we might still be in elementary school, but we know . . . that we have seven short years until we too have the right to vote.”^[1] Speaking at the March for Our Lives event, 11-year old Naomi Wadler eloquently reminded us that childhood is ephemeral. Since they are future voters, she warned Capitol Hill to take the words, emotions, and pleas of children seriously. In many ways, she was also speaking to Florida State Representative Elizabeth Porter who recently exclaimed, “The adults make the law because we have the age, we has [sic] the wisdom, and we have the experience.”[2] For many like Rep. Porter, there has been something disturbing in this moment of youth activism. It cuts to the core of social stability based on the patriarchal family order—that children are subordinate, passive members of society. We inherited this idea from the eighteenth-century revolutionary era, a point in time when age became a main determinant in who could be considered a citizen and an adult. Continue reading →

Q&A: Ernesto Bassi, author of An Aqueous Territory

June 28, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: Age of Revolution, Atlantic World, Caribbean, historiography, Interview, New Granada, vastearlyamerica 2 Comments

Following up on James Hill’s review of Ernesto Bassi’s An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), we’re pleased to post this Q&A with Ernesto about his book and future research. Bassi is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. He is a historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions, whose work transgresses conventionally defined geographic units of analysis. Ernesto can be reached at eb577@cornell.edu. Continue reading →

#VastEarlyAmerica(n) Girl Doll Books: Reflections of a Father and Historian

June 7, 2017 By Christopher Jones in Founding Fiction, Public History, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: American Girl Doll, Children's literature, Mexico, New Mexico, Santa Fe Trail, vastearlyamerica, Young adult literature 7 Comments

When Sara first pitched the idea of The Junto hosting a roundtable dedicated to children’s and young adult fiction focused on early America, I was excited. But unlike others, I was excited not because Johnny Tremain was my favorite childhood read or because my own trajectory toward becoming a historian could be traced to the Dear America series or the young adult fiction of Ann Rinaldi. While I vaguely remember reading Johnny Tremain in elementary school, along with other books of early American historical fiction during my childhood and teenage years, my own interest in history was a later development in life. My excitement about this proposed roundtable came rather because I’m a father of three young children who love to read and be read to, and because I’m adamant about ensuring that they’re raised as historically-aware and -literate individuals. 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 →