The following is an interview with Kyle Bulthuis, an assistant professor of history at Utah State University. Jonathan Wilson’s review of Kyle’s recently-released book, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York’s Early Republic Congregations, appeared on the blog yesterday. Kyle agreed to sit down and answer a few follow up questions about the book and his future research plans, which we are happy to post today. Continue reading
Tag Archives: writing
Trials and Tribulations of Writing while Sleeping
A few weeks ago, I dropped my iPhone in water. If you were wondering, those things do not float. As I pulled the phone out and dried it as best I could, all I could think about was my dissertation. I was in the throes of finishing a chapter, and I had a lot of really good ideas on that phone. In this post, I want to explain why my phone has become so important to my scholarly life. Continue reading
On Gender and Genre
Do biographies of women have different conventions to biographies of men? Setting out on a new historical project—which, at least for the moment, takes the form of a biography of Angelica Schuyler Church (not pictured! That’s Dolley Madison)—I’ve been thinking a lot about the particular confluence of what often seem to be maligned and marginalised fields even in their own right: women’s history and biography. I have a lot still to learn about both. But let me offer some preliminary considerations here, and invite Junto readers to pitch in in the comments.
The Week in Early American History
Hello and welcome to another slightly belated Week in Early American History!
A Rumination on “Perhaps”: Demos, Editing, and First Book Projects
Confession: I hated John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive when I read it in graduate school. So much so that whenever my future roommate and I became frustrated by the vagaries of our PhD experience, we’d lapse into extended wailing cries of “EUNICE!” that stretched across apartments, parking lots, and doubtless a library lobby or two. I’m not sure why it seemed so funny to us, but then, comprehensive exams do strange things to graduate students’ psyches. Continue reading
The Great Writing and Editing Extravaganza of 2013
That moment in the semester had arrived. You know the one: the point at which, having received their grades from the first assignment of the term, students were beginning to panic about their final writing tasks. Even though I, as a historian, write quite a bit, I sometimes find it hard to teach writing because it’s difficult to articulate the rules I inherently know. I also think that it can be tricky to teach in an engaging way. Because I can be a competitive person, I decided to teach my first-year students about writing through a contest of sorts. Continue reading
On Undergraduate Writing
I am currently in the midst of grading midterms and the process, as well as a recent piece by Marc Bousquet at CHE, has gotten me thinking about undergraduate writing and the debate of its value kicked off by Rebecca Schuman’s piece, “The End of the College Essay,” in Slate back in December. I want to use my post today to lay out some thoughts I have been having about undergraduate writing in lieu of the debate these articles have occasioned. Continue reading
The Week in Early American History
On to this week’s links…
The Week in Early American History
Interviews with Historians: Carol Berkin
Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor Emerita at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College. In 1972, she received her PhD at Columbia University, where she also worked on the Papers of John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Her dissertation on Jonathan Sewall won the Bancroft Award for Outstanding Dissertation and the subsequent book, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. She then spent her entire teaching career at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her most popular works include A Brilliant Solution (2002), which has been translated into Polish and Chinese, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (1996), Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (2005), and Civil War Wives (2009). She is a pioneer in early American women’s history and also the author and editor of numerous textbooks, readers, and teaching guides for women’s history including Women of America (1980), Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: Documents in Early American History (1998), In the Words of Women: The Revolutionary War and the Birth of the Nation, 1765 – 1799 (2011), and Clio in the Classroom: A Guide to Teaching Women’s History (2009). She is also the editor of History Now, an online magazine published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She has appeared in numerous television documentaries, including Founding Brothers and Founding Fathers on the History Channel and Ric Burns’ New York on PBS. Continue reading
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