The senators, like the grand jurors, knew their man, and probably conceded that Temple had given him the hiding he had been asking for. 

For eight years, he skillfully combined traditional elite dining with an anti-monarchical ideology and Virginian sociability in a way that pleased his dinner guests and promoted his own agenda.

Brockmann’s research and her insightful arguments taught me not only that plenty of knowledge production occurred in Central America before the 1820s but also that this “practical” information was designed to serve locals rather than foreigners.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

By making pirate stories dramatic and exciting, Ellms transformed pirates from news objects and historical actors to distinctly literary characters.

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals.

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 […]

Every recent presidential election cycle, about the time a campaign goes negative, newspapers run a story like the one in the […]

Myths about early American politics certainly abound, but different ones operate in different quarters of the culture.

Ultimately, my students and I had to consider how to make sense of the Douglass of the 1840s, who viewed the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” and the Douglass of the 1850s, who adhered to an antislavery reading of the Constitution.

“We the People” once had many ways of exercising their sovereignty besides those ordained and established in the Federal Constitution. […]

The Constitution’s compromises added an element of complexity to the Constitution that defies any effort to reduce it to Twitter-sized proslavery or antislavery soundbites that implicate or exonerate the founders.

So mutilated did his Notes become, concludes Bilder, that even Madison himself eventually realized that he had lost forever the original convention proceedings of 1787.

Baltimore grew into America’s third-largest city in these years, and that growth was fueled by runaway slaves and white men driven to the city by changes in rural agriculture as much as by immigration from abroad.

Though The Wide, Wide World is probably not familiar to many people today, the concerns and claims of these fan letters, rather remarkably, may be.

Jones focuses on how a proslavery “common sense” was the dominant ideological platform against which black people sought to exercise self-determination.

In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to […]

But the nature of woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility?

For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture.

“Impracticable the electoral college surely is. And it is precisely because of its improbable construction that today’s electoral college remains one of the least altered institutions established by the Constitution of 1787. . .”

The racial agenda preserved in nineteenth-century print culture resonates with contemporary U.S.-Mexico relations.

In the years that followed the annexation, plans for the next North American grab (or purchase) of Mexican lands became a regular topic of debate on the pages of U.S. newspapers.

In recovering the vibrant presence of Saint Domingue/Haiti in these American moments, both books exemplify the power and promise of adopting an Atlantic lens in telling a national story…each offers a new view onto the familiar landscape of American political development between the Revolution and Reconstruction.

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation A delicately woven ivory silk map, embroidered in the first years of the nineteenth century, […]

If blackmail is ultimately about silence, and if silence cannot—by definition—be tracked, how is one to find signs that blackmail might be present?

“Marshall remade the Court.”

Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text.

Clay embodied both union and conflict. He had been the subject of political pageantry as politics and popular culture developed alongside one another in the early nineteenth century.

As we Americans acquired a greater share of the world’s wealth and power, we internalized the bizarre claim, loosely derived from covenantal theology, that God blesses our nation with exclusive fervor.

Next to Stephen Foster, William Henry Fry was arguably the most important American composer working before the Civil War.

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music.

As the century wore on, commercial music figured increasingly in the musical lives of Americans, significantly multiplying the choices available to audiences and elevating their aesthetic sophistication.

A more extravagant disregard for instructions on his second expedition would lead him deep into California—still a part of Mexico—and would win him not censure, but fame.

As much as Audubon drew attention to himself as an artist and man of science—and he did so ceaselessly and shamelessly—he also drew the attention of the American people to the richness and diversity of nature in America, helping them see it in national as well as environmental terms.

“Face-to-face interpersonal relations took on far more importance in this society than abstract, impersonal economic relations, symbolized by commercial paper (whose origin might be unknown) or distant banks.”

Along with the broadening of the palate came a taste for dining rooms suited to more epicurean appetites. Indeed, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the designated dining room had become a central fixture of the Victorian home.

The commodification of intimacy has long worried the bourgeoisie, which otherwise enjoyed the fruits of the widening web of commercial exchange.

Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style.

To understand why credit was more important than cash in the activities of any eighteenth-century trader, we have to recapture what it was to buy and sell goods at the time.

An eighteenth-century novel explores how American society handles the collateral damage of capitalism—and who deserves a second chance.

Harry Franco and Henry Ward Beecher in the antebellum market

“Regardless of who was engaged in the business, the very nature of the business seemed to contradict the United States’s conception of itself, and thus the broker and the pawner were to remain objects of a derision that went beyond ethnic prejudice.”

John Fea argues that the American Bible Society was an eminently American institution that sought to build a Christian nation.

More than a historical resource, “The Lost Museum” invites us, then, to ponder the narratives with which we stage authenticity, the material objects and practices with which every generation reimagines the kinship of truth and fiction.

Highly anticipated among scholars of American art and American cultural history alike, Wendy Bellion’s Citizen Spectator is among the most significant book-length […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.

When the ballots were certified on January 13, 1842, the people of Rhode Island found themselves with two constitutions.

In polarizing times, there is a price to be paid—at the polls and otherwise—for attempting to chart a middle path.

An unlikely alliance in antebellum America

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow […]

The ephemerality of this document contrasts with the indelible event it announced: Spain’s final closure of the port of New Orleans to Americans.

Could we assume that this lowly agent of a midsize flour dealer on the lower Delaware was behaving like Jay Gould a hundred years later?

Rao’s story is less about federal financial policy than about how these laws worked on a daily basis. What develops is a story about the culture of Atlantic capitalism on the waterfront.

Jefferson used the library he sold to Congress as a self-fashioning project to shape his legacy and the way he wished to be viewed by posterity.

When it came to women being federal employees, Jefferson could not see the light for the lighthouse.

Nineteenth-century Americans abandoned the traditional English phrasing of “standing” for election and begin to describe candidates who “run” for office. The race was on.

Across the pantheon of presidential elections in early America, few have stressed the themes of sex and gender so spicily as the heated contest of 1856. It was a year of many firsts.

As I read this book in the midst of yet another presidential election cycle, it was nearly impossible not to find strong parallels between these figures and our own presidential candidates.

Some new evidence on an old controversy

“When an AP story on an errant buffalo in Ulster County or a canine candidate for statewide office in Florida is not available, Sun reporters produce their own accounts of dogs rescued at sea or giant turtles recaptured by German police.”

What falls within American Revolution scholarship? To what larger questions and themes should our more focused work speak?

From imaginary vantage points along major streets, [writers] traced the life of the metropolis from its first vigorous stirrings before dawn through its murmurs and rustlings deep in the night.

Focusing attention on the various “temporal markers” in each text, Weinstein reveals the ways the novels in her archive unsettle straightforward chronology and leave time in disarray.

“It is clear even to my own inexpert eye that the penned inscription “by Clement C. Moore, A.M.” is not written in Moore’s rather distinctive hand.”

The growing popularity of dolls had both ideological and pragmatic roots in the emerging middle class.

“At ninety dollars, they’re hardly cheap, and their price tag is part of their appeal. These are not intended to be superficial toys.”

There has never been a shortage of negative depictions of Burr, but it has become a nearly two-centuries-old cliché that he “has always been out of favor,” that he has only enjoyed the reputation of “outright villain” among the founders.

“I had argued that the establishment of the presidency proved to be the single most difficult and puzzling problem in institutional design that the Framers of the Constitution had confronted.”

“[L]et’s first distinguish between at least three distinct kinds of Clinton hating: conservative Clinton hating, left-liberal Clinton hating, and cosmopolitan Clinton hating.”

Each generation has contextualized the sexuality of the founders differently but ultimately came to value them as role models for their masculinity and sexuality.

Of all aspects of food history, recipes are the most difficult to interpret.

Methodical signs are artificial modes of visual communication based on spoken language. To their opponents, the methodical signers were wolves in sheep’s clothing.

I have visited tribal casinos in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, but none of them compare to the Mohegan Sun . . .

“Unlike West, Peale, and Trumbull, who gaze piercingly outward at viewers, Goodridge refuses a returning gaze, due not to modesty but to distraction.”

For Fisher as well as for Parsons making a self-portrait was, finally, an act of self-memorialization.

Nationalists […] aimed to rally Americans with the cry that the young nation could teach Old Europe a lesson or two about the industrial age on its own turf.

Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the […]

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

It was far less labor intensive—and therefore less expensive—for a painter or engraver to render a head than a full figure posed against an elaborate background.

British flogging of impressed American sailors was particularly resented because of its association with the treatment of slaves in the southern states.

Indiana’s Infidel Congressman Locals refer to southwestern Indiana as “The Pocket,” but politicians know this region by a more ominous […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

We ought to be asking ourselves what kind of democracy we want and what kind of democracy a particular leader or movement is offering.

For Brooks, antebellum political abolitionists—not the Populists, not the Progressives—deserve to be remembered as “the most important third-party movement in American history.”

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

[The County Election] also parodies the men in the crowd, who are divided…by the moral valence of their characters…

In an election year where claims to transparency seem deeply opaque, Foutch recalls the moment when the way to save democracy was clear as glass.

Almost every child in the United States learns who John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson […]

Weaving the Wicked Web of Antebellum Religion and Politics “Douglas is a cuning dog & the devil is on his […]

The question of national integrity in Canada is a perennial one.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii.

Notwithstanding Turkish students’ lack of knowledge about the deep American past, their familiarity with American culture has grown since the end of the cold war and the expansion of cable television and the Internet…

In Rezek’s view, the national literatures of the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland look less like the pure reflections of their respective cultures or peoples than, collectively, like a set of provincial riffs off a metropolitan literary standard.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Descriptive and analytical, the sea eye serves also as a metaphor and a theory of representation.

In this formative period between Revolution and Civil War the language of suicide became a conspicuous resource for the advancement of larger arguments about the proper balance to be struck between liberty and order.

Earl’s painting was not just a biography; it was a local history as well.

Anthony’s readings focus on texts where professional male figures seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics.

Wolf skillfully weaves together a narrative of Johnson’s life, tracing his triumphs and defeats as he sought both freedom and a meaningful place in his community of Warrenton, Virginia

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday.”

By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town.

“Collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair.”

“Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities.”

The machinery that hastened the middle ground’s destruction continued to run through the mid-nineteenth century, concurrently eroding “frontier” politics and culture and inflicting and enforcing northeastern forms.

A man’s choice of a particular friend was assumed to be based on admiration for that friend’s sensibility and character; men found in these friendships a context for being understood and encouraging their best selves.

By the 1830s, Americans more confidently adopted a modern notion of the self—made through purely individualistic means in the market—and obscured its formation through familial, communal, and national ties.

In the inability of the Mexican government to halt the raids and force Indians into submission, many Americans saw further proof of Mexican inferiority and yet another indication of American destiny to take Mexican territory as its own.

Should America serve solely as a model republic for others to emulate, or should it involve itself directly in their struggles?

Antebellum American cities changed constantly, and were scenes of “perpetual ruin and repair”

American appeals for government action were framed in terms of requests by liberal, self-interested individuals, rather than the older, public logic of republicanism.

Revolutions in France and Haiti, or at least antislavery writers’ use of them, hastened calls for immediate emancipation, the association of the South with violence and depravity, and the rise of American sectionalism.

As “disunion threats materialized into a regional program, and as images of revolution and invasion swirled in the political atmosphere,” Republicans grew increasingly antagonistic towards Southern ultimatums.

Why did authorities feel the need to apply police powers to sex?

  Read Statement on Poetic Research for Two Pieces   Cape Cod 1837 [found document: obituary] Jan 19, 1837, Barnstable County […]

So who, in Parrot and Olivier in America, is Parrot?

Even as New York was becoming an evangelical power center, it nevertheless also remained a foil against which ministers committed to the New England ideal of village life—homogenously white and Protestant—could rant and rail.

I conceived of the series of poems as a lyric travelogue, in which, mile by mile, the speaker positions himself on a raft floating on the Duck River, or on its banks, or beneath its surface, or no more than a quarter of a mile from the river.

Plaque commemorating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sojourn on Schoolmaster Hill. Photograph courtesy of the author. Click to enlarge. A Walk in […]

It turns out that historians’ inconsistent chronology had not actually been “wrong”; it was incomplete.

The layout of the home page is clear and easy to navigate, featuring twelve boxes containing links to mini-exhibits on important aspects of Twain’s professional and personal identities. Six of the boxes pertain to Twain’s most famous publications, including Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

One impressive and very useful feature of the site lies in its function as a central clearinghouse for information about the state. In an effort to be comprehensive, the site’s creators are engaged in “assisting institutions across the state in digitizing their records and placing them online for easy access.”

The sovereign vacuum created by the inability of any power to serve the needs of backcountry settlers politicized the early national West.

In this wonderful snapshot of the relationship between economic systems and social hierarchies in eighteenth-century New York, Serena Zabin offers […]

Americans expressed remorse for their lost place in the British empire and their dissatisfaction with the new political order of an independent democracy wrought by economic and moral conflict.

This is quite a big, startling argument.

The main tale is a cautionary one, although it turns not on the dire consequences of legislating morality but instead on the futility of such attempts.

If self-serving performances of civility were common, so were misguided inferences from them.

The Fabrication of American Literature is a long-overdue examination of the antebellum practice of “puffing” books, or shamelessly promoting them for […]

In their law talk, Americans had to grapple with difficult questions such as the purpose of punishment, the right to judge, and the authority of lawgivers

For Roylance, nineteenth-century imperial eclipse narratives did not serve as purely cautionary tales nor as negative examples.

“While Augustan satires were primarily concerned with defending the civic virtues enshrined by classical republican ideology, rather than the doctrines of Calvinist orthodoxy, both belief systems were based on an Augustinian understanding of human nature as tending toward corruption.”

“As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times.”

“Does history, as currently written, represent only one-fifth of lived experience?”

With my subject so elusive in the archive, material culture offered a compellingly direct link to her world

The new United States was born of a violent and sudden revolution. For decades after that revolution, the states, far from united, were an uncertain amalgam of diverse peoples, religions, and languages.

The extensive republic was a deliberate creation in the realm of print.

Trompe l’oeil invites us to undeceive ourselves of the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits that the senses can detect and explain deception.

In a three-day period in August 1835, Baltimoreans engaged in a tumultuous riot that killed five people, injured twenty others, […]

Why are we so readily drawn to cons of all stripes?

The presence of educated Native young men who pursued legal action in American courts, addressed American legislative bodies, and created written constitutions did not confirm the success of American acculturation efforts; rather, it threatened American efforts to seize Native land.

 Davis brings to poetics a newly enlivening framework of gesture, relation, and immediacy that boldly recasts how we read these poets, and with it the worldly work of poetry.  

Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills.

Because of their insistence on pacifism, Quakers historically have been treated as suspicious, at best, or traitors, at worst.

Cohen looks at how readers forged social connections through poems—by reading them aloud, recopying them, buying and selling them.

David Shields’s book about Southern foodways contains the seeds of many future conversations.

In taking seriously northern Republicans’ egalitarian ideals and the world-historical significance they attributed to the Union, Riley offers an important corrective to scholarship that exaggerates the political influence of racism.

Common-place talks with Brian Murphy about the business and politics of early New York State.

Though hard to fathom in a twenty-first century devoid of such an entrenched dance ethos, in 1804, the French and Americans continued to battle over the form and shape of public musical life.

What distinguished these musicians […] was their firm belief that music, particularly the large instrumental works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, not only symbolized the ideals of social harmony and equality, but also instantiated these ideals in performance.

Silverman is concerned with reading writ large: her analysis is not tied to particular genres, genders, races, localities, or ages, as is often the case in more deeply historical studies.

At a time when the wealth of the new nation derived from farming, importing exotic plants […] and establishing the systems of practice needed to make plants valuable were vitally important.

The nervous system, in the nineteenth-century imaginary, was the point of contact between the mind and the world.

Rented slaves built federal forts, roads, and the United States Capitol. Sometimes they served as soldiers and sailors.

“We Used to Wait,” the second single from Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (2010), begins like most of the songs on the record—with a […]

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Lexington, Kentucky, in May 1825 as part of his triumphal tour of the United States, […]

Common-place talks with Christopher Cameron, author of To Plead Their Own Cause, about the chronology of abolition, the role of religion in the movement, and the importance of African-American voices in intellectual history.

Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you. —John Keats in a letter to his brother George living in Louisville, Kentucky, 1819.

What matters most in Django, then, is not the accuracy of the film’s historical claims but how Tarantino’s awareness of his contemporary audience mediates his symbolic enterprise.

Culture in the Age of the […]

Modern seeks a difficult balance: he simultaneously looks to explain the methods, meanings, and effects of secularism in the antebellum United States and to assert that its discursive presence could never achieve its own universalizing goals.

Lawmakers believed that men who fathered children had fulfilled a patriotic duty, which they continued to pursue by providing for their families.

Deliberation is no doubt put to the ideological test in the pages of this book, and it does not always come out shining.

Greaves and his circle adopted a regimen aimed at the reformation of mankind quite literally through the reformation of eating.

After the Judiciary Act of 1789, courts came to wrestle with the need to mediate between state and federal judiciaries as they operated within a single overarching polity.

Adam Smith never attached the invisible hand of the market to a fully formed body, but he and his fellow […]

In the Federalist view, “self-created” associations—that is, those operating without charters and government sanction—were illegitimate because they divided the community instead of uniting it, as the agencies of civil society should do.

By dispensing with the notion that there is a master text or a master figure capable of standing for fugitive or free African America, Chaney’s analytic strategy parallels the experiences and perspectives of his subjects.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The women of sensibility were expected to feel but not to feel too much.

While readers may remain unconvinced that Fenno or Duane should share the spotlight with Thomas Jefferson, this book makes it abundantly clear that they were not bit players.

The world was rife with risk and uncertainty for early America’s urban middle classes, facing as they did the caprices […]

“It is with great pain we observe a species of libel has already appeared in our country in imitation of the abominable and licentious practice of the lower English, commonly called caricature, in which the unhappy object of abuse is exposed to vulgar derision…”

Although menagerie owners emphasized the educational value of their exhibitions, they were clearly driven by economic rather than educational imperatives. Menageries were both capital-intensive and risky ventures.

Common-place talks with Jessica Choppin Roney, author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition.

Slave financiers and shippers influenced the trajectory of American capitalism more directly than any other group of entrepreneurs during the antebellum era.

Jodi Schorb extends and revises the historiography of literacy, punishment, and incarceration during the long eighteenth century in British North America and the early United States.

Five unpublished letters (1825–1830) reveal the ornithologist’s dream and how he (almost) achieved it

Freedom occupies a permanent place in our national consciousness.

For liability purposes, it is the sea that will kill you.—Pirate Captain, The Simpsons “In the beginning was the land.” […]

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle placed “spectacle” (opsis, that which is seen) dead last in importance among the […]

Government by Dissent is an engaging meditation on one of America’s founding fantasies—the fantasy of democratic self-government. In 1776 Thomas […]

The continental versus Atlantic debate is more about historiography than history.

A welcome new edition of George Lippard’s provocative 1850 novella–

Was age in early America an objective measure of years, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official?

Exploring the materiality of early American paintings and prints, Jennifer Roberts’ excellent new book spans the 1760s to the 1850s in three fascinating case studies, each involving the complex transport of art.

Work required Americans to keep a close eye on the natural world, for most still wrung a living from understanding and manipulating nature.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Can early American books regain such a readership in the twenty-first century?

Stowe took a fugitive black man into her home and, under the threat of very real danger, waited upon him, hid him, and allowed her children to help care for him.

How did a speech that began in Kansas end up in the Caribbean, by way of Crimea?

The secrecy of brotherhood made brothers; men achieved their highest emotional possibility in republican secrecy.

The SPGNA, American Indians, and the Turn to Foreign Missions in the Early Republic Hazelnuts. That’s what the girl at […]

While the lyrics conveyed forceful messages to the eighteenth-century public, the music also spoke to listeners.

Like countless other men of his generation, Bullard began his working life as an artisan and ended it as a businessman.

His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“[G]iven the sorry record of ‘legitimate’ European medicine in the period, a profession that one historian of medicine recently noted was as likely to kill a patient as to cure her, it is no surprise that Mesmerism–which at least did no damage–successfully passed itself off as the cutting edge of Enlightenment science.”

Because psalmody was transmitted through a fluid mix of printed books, manuscript compilations, and oral tradition, hymn tunes and texts were frequently mixed and matched, and tune names likewise varied.

Historians interested in religion and politics in the early American republic have long seen the American Revolution as the catalyst […]

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Contingency is in; inexorability is out.

The stereograph comes to America

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

“Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature’s eternal love, are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.”—John Muir

Viewing this rare artifact was a great highlight in a journey that has consumed my life for the last six years.

Eighteenth-century French armies marched at one of two tempos.

As a bleak and miserable winter gave way to a bleak and miserable spring, the prisoners began to wonder why, if there really was a peace, they had not been exchanged.

One may still hear such wardrobes called “armers” in the Deep South, where they were ubiquitous in an era before built-in closets and pantries became de rigeur.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“How did Independence National Historical Park become the location for what may become the most powerful commemoration of the impact, achievements, and aspirations of people held in slavery ever built in the United States?”

Freemasonry and these notions of public and private, legality and illegality, justice and injustice, have crossed paths more than a few times.

Even as Democrats condemned powerful private institutions in the name of equality, the most prescient nineteenth-century observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, applauded those institutions.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

While I don’t ask students to assess whether Anne Bradstreet’s or Thomas Shepard’s beliefs are closer to their own, early Americanists do often have allegiances to authors and texts.

In the 1820s, the idea of the traveler was in flux, a category that had come to encompass every itinerant from Joseph Banks, science officer of the Endeavour, to British lads on vacation.

The actors who clawed their way to fame in the early decades of the American theater labored in an entrepreneurial industry that was far more reminiscent of prospecting for gold or financing merchant ships than it was of modern industrial production.

Having been involved in different levels of reenacting for 30 years, from the French and Indian War to the Western […]

Dancers and musicians, who work primarily with physical knowledge and sensation, perceive jigs differently than historians who rely on written evidence.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Because antebellum northern cities could be worrisome and puzzling, exactly because they were so incontestably changeful, and perhaps also because, as a result, urban vistas departed so dramatically from the iconic, reassuring visions of rural America—for such reasons, there was a generalized desire, indeed a broadly felt necessity, to develop firmer understandings of the urban milieu.

Participation in a privileged culture of masculinity was an important part of achieving and maintaining political power.

Why did I leap into this project—and why did I stick to it?

Through what mechanism do actual people suffer when a bank fails? To the modern ear, the very question sounds naïve, at best.

As the crisis intensified, the notion that each man assumed responsibility for his economic fate seemed increasingly flawed. Everyone, that is, was ready to claim credit for prosperity; none were willing to confess to personal failure.

Accounting was not an orderly process, but rather a vigorous and open-ended mixing and remixing of information.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

By 1819, with many thousands of worthless books circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a bookseller was a frequent occurrence.

A close examination of Josiah Warren’s utopian form of currency.

In its intermingling of the national, the paternal, the feminine, and the global, this letter is perhaps not quite the warm epistle of friendship it purports to be.

When Thomas Harris’s ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he […]

How should we understand the major role European classical music has played in American cultural history?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Before the secret ballot became the national standard, election ballots were a vivid genre of print ephemera.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

What does aligning ourselves with, rather than against, America tell us about us?

Jefferson documented his collection decisions in this manuscript—which books to retain, which ones to give away, and to whom.

Americans fought righteously, and with their eyes on the main chance. They fought for themselves, for their comrades in arms, for their families, for their communities, and with God on their side.

The abstract goal of thinking about history is made wonderfully concrete by the documentary’s organizing structure.

Well-meaning educators are often unwittingly sabotaging their lessons before they have a chance to get them off of the ground.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

These groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men.”

Schocket builds the case for how the economic elite of Philadelphia reasserted power and authority by using the corporate form to counter the leveling effect of the Revolution.

Frances Trollope, the English-born Tory, found American religious habits loathsome (in truth, she found most everything about America loathsome). But […]

Hayley’s arrival in Boston was reported in newspapers from New England to South Carolina.

We learn how, when, and where High Federalism began to alienate Americans with its disturbing encroachments on the most basic forms of democracy and dissent.

What was Burr to do, once the path to further political advancement was barred?

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“In the end, the Old Man of the Mountain proved just as mortal as the race of creatures whose face he resembled, the race that had tried and failed to ensure that the Old Man would last forever.”

The smuggling business represented the effort of small producers (who claimed simply to be free traders) in an economically marginal environment to take advantage of external market demand, and it contributed to the growth of the local middle class that took part in it.

Greenberg’s unique angle nicely complements the existing literature on working-class households and labor activism, yet it will simultaneously force scholars of the period to rethink their entire approach to investigating working men.

An increasing popular interest in classical mythology proved liberating for American women.

This stamp pattern book opens up a rare glimpse into a small nineteenth-century American business, revealing just how many designs one man produced in his lifetime.

The achievement of the Great Awakening was the belief that religious experience is inherently subjective.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning…

“[T]he debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment is surprisingly recent.”

In short, free American males could have owned firearms to further their personal happiness and should have owned firearms to help protect the community.

Just as working with religiously committed scholars in graduate school had deepened my appreciation for the intellectual depth of perspectives rooted in faith, my experience at that Christian college helped me more easily imagine the closeted lives of skeptics in the early republic.

Plantation doctors understood that they worked for the slaveholder, not the patient, and elevated their reputations over their patients’ desires.

Today nearly half of all Americans own market-traded securities and anyone can gorge themselves on high-interest credit-card debt, yet Wall Street’s idea of deep history is a five-year moving-average price graph.

Confounded physicians could but observe the often contradictory genitalia, and consequently their pronouncements depended as much on traditional stereotypical social indicators as on biological markers when they decreed a physically anomalous individual male or female.

What Hochschild does is not so much revise our understanding of the British abolition movement as humanize it.

Economic history still has something to tell us.

Unbecoming British offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary history of identity formation in the United States between the Revolutionary War and the […]

“As white fascination with black actors imitating white theatrical performances began to give way to the more racy thrills of minstrelsy, Hewlett found diminishing interest in his act as ‘Shakespeare’s proud representative.'”

“Is the American constitutional system meaningfully democratic, or is it a system that confines its democratic elements within such elaborate systems of indirect representation and checks and balances that it effectively preserves domination by established elites?”

Pamphlets, plays, poetry, and periodicals overflowed with news and opinion about bloody tragedies, both real and imagined.

Newspaper articles and editorials suggested that there was something morally improper about leaving so many thousands of bodies exposed for the amusement of urchins and stray dogs, or left to rot in packed trenches, awaiting medical-school body snatchers.

What separated Virginia from Pennsylvania and condemned the Old Dominion to second-rank industrial status was quite simply slavery.

If Adams had not settled the Quasi-War with France and demobilized the army, might the Federalists have attempted a coup?

It is only when middle-class hopes and fears meet the realities of a modern economy that a fuller picture of this class’s experience can emerge.

Mary Clark Carr, it turns out, is even more interesting than Ann Carson. Anyone with a gun and a few friends can kidnap a governor, but how many women in the early republic had the talent, initiative, and opportunity to earn their living by writing?

Ward gives equal consideration to the historical evidence of text and image, reminding us that portraits are not just cultural commentary, but are in fact culture itself.

Even on the old frontier, those who were at the top took pains to let everyone know.

By the late eighteenth century, Americans were well on their way to understanding democracy as a process, really the process, for pursuing politics.

“Do [these pamphlets] represent what the Atheneum’s generous donors perceived as important materials of the day, things that any major cultural repository should hold?”

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

What then can the history of the asylum tell us about meanings and forms of liberal culture?

The central theme in the study of Brook Farm, [Delano] emphasizes, should not be explanation for its collapse but appreciation of its achievements.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution “to write down what I see and hear and feel daily,” his use of journals to “let off” rants of “indignation,” his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the “greater part of the day writing in his room.”

Rice argues that contemporary debates about popular physiology utilized a metaphor that bodies acted as machines and therefore created the notion that all people were natural machine operators.

Friend clearly sets out to engage in the debate over the transition to capitalism in early America.

Both New Englanders and English dissenters talked the talk of Protestant internationalism and unity, but when the conflict between Britain and the American colonies escalated, they did not walk the walk.

The issue here is not one of historical merit but whether tools intended to give voice to the voiceless should be used on elites whose immense paper trails allow them to speak.

We know a fair amount about theories of trial procedure, but scarcely anything about the courtrooms in which lawyers and judges practiced.

Yet, the same ideas that made it difficult for many families to adopt the trappings of modern childhood also spurred reformers to try to “save” dependent, delinquent, and destitute youngsters.

Only a year and a half after the fact, the rescue of Jessica Lynch has begun to seem like a quaint memory, as our attention has been turned from American captives to American captors, from Lynch’s blond ingenuousness to the scary hard eyes of Lynndie England and her comrades at Abu Ghraib.

When biometrics look to a face it is to identify a person, when physiognomy looks to a face it is to identify that person’s permanent moral character. Yet, each attempts to control mobility and the instability it brings to the social order by turning to bodies in general and faces in particular.

Sweet provides rich evidence of slaves running away and thus directing their resistance towards individual masters rather than the slave system itself, but he broadens this view by arguing that the general threat of slave revolt was partly directed at a complicit public that failed to recognize the rights of slaves.

Unlike the courthouse, church, town hall or other purpose-built public structure, the public market of the first half of the nineteenth century welcomed everyone–the farmer with his cabbages to sell, the housewife in search of dinner, the indigent widow-huckster provisioning her basket, and those with nowhere else to go to find shelter, sociability, a job, or a cheap meal.

“Plantation slavery was in decline in Louisiana when it was purchased. Thereafter, Arkansas and Missouri only came into the Union as slave states by bare majorities. Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Cause, a republic of free and independent yeoman farmers, was lost in a series of insufficiently contested choices.”

What better way to explore the bare essentials of the master-slave relationship than with the figure of the black slaveholder, who comes to slavery without the delusion of racial difference that divided white owners from their slaves?

For Morse, life was one smear campaign and betrayal after another.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“For Baltimore’s elected officials, prominent merchants, and moral reformers (who were often in fact the same people), the bad behavior of their working-class neighbors required much attention. Petitions to the city council complained of black women washing clothes too boisterously in a stream, Irish laborers singing too late into the evening, and unsupervised apprentices, servants, and slaves cursing and gambling in the marketplace.”

Is it possible to write an intellectual history of early American theology that keeps readers awake, and indeed eager to turn each page?

“As I stood alone in the middle of Thomas, I conjured up the crowds that milled there in the weeks after the murder, hoping for a sight of the much-rumored Helen Jewett’s ghost. I didn’t see her ghost, but I could–almost–sense the crowd.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“When the legislature was occupied with other matters, the inattention permitted a kind of anarchy. Nowhere is the fluidity more apparent than in the naming of streets.”

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The water brought life to the slope—and sometimes death.”

“What the journals provide, then, is access to any number of subjects–gender, race, exploration, the self, humans and nature–for which they have been only lightly used.”

“Kukla situates the purchase in the context of a fragile American union, impetuous western settlers, and calculating New England politicians.”

The late-breaking beatification of John Adams and his family, soon to be a major monument, forms one of the wonders […]

The 1824 Presidential Election  is one of the most well remembered, primarily because it is the only election ever forced into the House of Representatives because no candidate succeeded in getting a majority of electoral votes (different from the 1800 Presidential Election in which two candidates got a majority, thus forcing the passing of the 12th Amendment).

“The challenging, yet glorious, differences among visitors’ expectations when they come to Independence Hall constitute a unique opportunity for learning.”

January 31, 2008 Goody Bags Bad The eloquently nasty James Wolcott made a sharp comment on the historical contribution to […]

“‘And in what walk of life, or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!'”

“In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters [ . . . ], and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds.”

“The labor of taking notes, expanding them, and preparing himself as one of the most important participants in the debates, Madison said, nearly killed him.”

“Wyss contends that scholars of early American literature have let their notions of what constitutes an “‘authentic’ Native voice” deafen them to the many writings by Christian Indians before . . . the early nineteenth century.”

“Freeman convincingly demonstrates that the Founding Fathers of the United States not only hearkened to Old World notions like ‘rank,’ ‘character,’ and ‘fame’; they daily lived them.”

“In the period of initial contacts with Europeans, Native Americans lacked any exposure at all to Variola; when it arrived in a given locality, virtually the entire population was likely to be infected . . . “

“Two hundred years before the advent of computer technologies, Americans were already escaping into virtual reality.”

“Americans have long forged deep, intimate, and enduring links with their public buildings.”

“[The Journal of Henri Joutel] doesn’t fit into Anglo-American heroic origins, like Lewis and Clark’s journals, and it hasn’t enjoyed a revival as Chicano literature the way Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios has. Yet as exploration narrative it’s much better than the former and every bit as good as the latter.”

“Even though Crain invokes Tocqueville and presents Emerson as particularly attuned to larger currents, he is reluctant to draw connections between his subjects and American culture, or to look elsewhere for further support of his interpretation.”

“Sobel’s book is notable in turning our attention back to a topic too long thought off limits to historians: the psychological origins of race and racism.”

“[I]n contrast to those who simply lament the decline of bourgeois institutions of public reflection (for example, the coffeehouse), Henkin puts forward a story about a public that succeeded–and in some ways exceeded–those earlier institutions.”

“[S]erving in a patrol may have reaffirmed Southern notions of community, kinship, masculinity, and honor.”

The evocative writing style pulls the reader into the book, creating word-pictures about the wharves of New Orleans, the slave pens where deals were struck, or the desperation of slave families confronted with the loss of loved ones, often forever.

Turning journalists into heroes takes some doing.

—The Mekons

Converts’ spirits were stirred by impassioned preaching and hymn singing, and moved by holy laughter and ecstatic barking at revival meetings; some claimed to hear mysterious voices in otherwise empty rooms or angelic choirs at their deathbeds; still others tried to describe their new spiritual perceptions as in some ways analogous to listening.

Appleby’s Americans did not fight the Revolution, nor apparently remember it, nor even spend much time celebrating or thinking about what had happened to the previous generation. Rather, they took the Revolution’s fruits–and ran toward a new future.

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“When it comes to the United States Constitution, most historians reject the idea that its meaning can be reduced to some easy formula or series of sweeping generalizations.”

Moral Minorities tracks how vocal minorities argued for a place in American democracy.