When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity. 

Four years on, a disability-informed reading of “Bartleby” seems to address even more urgently the crises our students face.

Biloquism reminds us that the questions of agency posed by generative AI are also always questions of imitation and authenticity.

The boundary lines preceding Mason and Dixon, everybody knows, were a sham. What’s to follow, despite the weighty authority of astronomical science, will be no better. 

Knowing what is missing is an important first step.

The Proctor of the play was inspired by Miller’s projection of himself into events of 1692 and it is worth digging a bit deeper into the family matters between John and Elizabeth. 

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.

Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other.

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

The set of 552 images is impossible to describe as a single body of work, but the illustrations cohere.

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial.

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.

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.

…without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, beadles, and gravediggers or the hovering evil of murderous kings, corrupt priests, scheming witches, and ungrateful daughters there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.

In this 1861 story, white society treats a teenaged African American postal rider with dignity and respect.

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers.

“Most students recognize the value of having a textbook to provide an overview but see textbooks as boring, predigested, and avoiding all controversy.”

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History illuminates the early republic’s “unknown known”—its political unconscious—with incredible precision.

For all its virtues, something was lost in translation.

There was something refreshing about reading a book like this, which I came to completely unburdened by expectations. There was no need to ponder, as I read, whether The Wonderful World of Disney had handled the material well.

The ways that maps and boundaries failed to match actual landforms often had momentous historical consequences

“It is worth considering why Americans have invested their flags with such importance and how the United States has become more saturated with patriotic color than any other country in the world. The comparative intensity of American loyalties is less noteworthy than the country’s fixation on a single symbol, which has come to be associated with a remarkably wide range of emotions.”

Among the library’s less heralded holdings are scores of volumes of community and parish records–including the revealing London list of burials mentioned above–major and minor manuscript collections (on paper or microfilm), and a substantial number of prints, paintings, maps, and other visual records, especially from the Renaissance but also before and after that era.

The problem is an overdetermined interpretive frame that presumes that Hammon’s poems matter most only when they say something about slavery.

The rise of the handkerchief was not simply a function of shifting social mores. It was also a part of the “civilizing process” through which the haves became readily distinguishable from the have-nots.

Readers are invited to imagine both the agency of plants and the very human limits to our imaginations.

Indians and English people shared a measure of common ground in their understanding of animals.

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

No saga of personal hardship and aristocratic skullduggery so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as Annesley’s turbulent life.

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

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.

Twain and Wong countered the nativist visions of white masculinity characteristic of popular romance novels featuring historical or foreign settings.

Magazines warrant fresh analysis that will enable readers to understand “the modernization of America.”

Why does Uncle Tom grow old?

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.

Steven K. Green demonstrates how easily the historical inventions of one era may become the historical facts of another.

Years before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he […]

Hinman’s book was about the dirty, miserable, and joyful minutiae of soldier life in the Union army.

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

In violation of his own rule “ that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” Twain’s writings are full of the walking dead.

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

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.

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

In conjuring an audience for which the rules of fictional narrative are more immediately recognizable and count as surer argumentative proof than the empirical facts of the everyday, Martin neatly distills some of the stickiest problems of his past and our present.

Forest Leaves helps us locate the young poet in time and space, but the retrospective addition of these poems to Harper’s corpus unsettles the literary order in interesting and jarring ways.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies.

The importance of clarity—of, as a white writer, being crystal clear about what I was saying, particularly in regard to indigenous languages and history—led me toward prose.

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.

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight.

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on […]

This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex.

“When Puritans saw specters of witches and Indians assembled in military companies, heard trumpets mustering them to meetings, or cried out that invisible attackers were tearing them to pieces, they were articulating the beliefs of their ancestors in England as well as their own New England assumptions.”

It is this messy interplay between the words of the minister and the experience of the hearer that produces the lived truth or application of the sermon.

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

all source material is from the 17th century and appears in single quotes

Research has been at the core of my poetic work for the past 15 years—largely because it gives me the chance to pursue questions of language while I pursue a subject in the world at large that interests me.

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.

Statement of poetic research One day I decided to rewrite the complete works of Emily Dickinson in “plain speech.” She […]

Statement of Poetic Research My first real awakening to the poetic pursuit that has filled the last ten years of […]

Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) I had been twice to Pondbefore I learned you hadnot only been there, but filmed it.Of course […]

Forgetfulness is like a songthat, freed from beat and measure, wanders Hart Crane When knowledge will cover the earthlike water covers […]

Caroline Remembers Her First Mistress, Darla Ford When I think on it, it is of joy I recall. And knowing […]

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

Vanishing Point In the great valley between Hwando and Yazoo City,laborers tend opium poppies and cotton,Dying of yellow fever. But […]

click for full list of links The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be […]

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.

Imagine yourself seated around the table at a séance. Imagine having already committed to an ethereal mechanics of sympathy and […]

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.

Americans love stories of the Revolutionary era, even if, as recent comments by leading politicians about Paul Revere, the geographic […]

This is quite a big, startling argument.

At first glance, both books seem to share an interest in philology.

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

I loved novels and short stories long before I loved the study of history. As a child, history came to […]

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.”

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

I’ve always been a big proponent of historical fiction, for the life and imagination it brings to often dry historical […]

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

In a majority of these letters, we find Whitman integrating a reflection on his uncertain state of health with an expression of his desire to be with Peter again.

 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.  

Edith Maude Eaton is more than a token representative of Asian North American literatures within the overarching fields of American and Canadian literatures.

What Farrell lays out is a fascinating spectacle, a colonial practice of counting bodies that is perpetually collapsing and producing odd, indeterminate results, even as it consolidates its conceptual hold as a way of thinking about human communities.

Wigginton reveals the many different kinds of American women—including women of color, lower-status women, and dissenting or exiled women—who participated in the public dialogues that helped to constitute an American sense of national identity.

Gretchen J. Woertendyke unsettles and unmoors our geographic conceptions, whether arranged by nation, region, continent, or hemisphere.

Jill McDonough explores the pains–explicit and suppressed–suffusing early American culture.

Winthrop’s 1861 novel is touted in 2016 as one of the queerest texts of the nineteenth century.

Attending to “the forms and institutional contexts” that characterized antebellum African American men’s writing, Pratt identifies a political-aesthetic project that he terms “stranger humanism.”

Women poets were under-recognized experts and artists in the forms associated with their homes and neighborhoods, the realms where they held power and influence.

When editorial work is done well, it prods you toward a new way of thinking about a text or set of texts without closing down other interpretive possibilities.

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.

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

Caroline Winterer describes America as “a vast Enlightenment laboratory” but one cannot easily imagine Winterer’s exuberant, capacious and eclectic American […]

On July 4, 1054, Chinese astronomers noted a “guest star” in the constellation Taurus. They had actually witnessed a supernova, […]

This book has many virtues. A chronological look at the architectural implications of food preparation and consumption in America from […]

“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 […]

As a literary scholar, I think we need to reevaluate . . . enthusiasm about Piketty’s use of literature as data.

If Piketty had turned to literary writing before Austen, he would have found a world teeming with the world-creating energies of overseas trade that economic historians take very seriously.

Piketty invites us to take seriously the forms of value discussed and represented in literary texts, and to call into question the tendency to treat everything in purely quantitative economic terms.

Piketty draws attention to the mystique surrounding economics, encapsulated in the notion that it is far too complex for the non-specialist to understand.

To speak of the imperfection and incompleteness of numerical data is, for Piketty, a way of speaking about the work of the economist.

After reading Van Engen’s iconoclastic work, it is difficult to remember why New England Calvinists are so often caricatured as cold and unfeeling.

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.

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.

Cornwell captures the multivalent nature of the Revolutionary War.

Tennenhouse urges us to look beyond the political schism of the Revolution toward a generic English culture that was reproduced and adapted in colonial North America and that ironically became even more English after the colonists won political independence.

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

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

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

After the provisions trade with Cape Breton had been reduced to a trickle following its prohibition by the New York General Assembly, the French enemy was supplied by way of the neutral Dutch and Danish islands in the West Indies.

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.

For Vowell, everything is always happening and always all at once. Her explicitly ethical and transhistorical interpretive method accounts for her unapologetically anachronistic style.

“In animadverting upon the acts of our ancestors, it is not to censure them as sinners above all others . . . ”

Discovery is one thing, interpretation another.

Sometimes we find new ways of seeing by facing the wrong direction.

Considering figures as diverse as Bach, Jefferson, Beethoven, and Frederick Douglass, Catherine Jones explores the interaction of two major art forms over the course of a century.

Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 256 pp., $65. Matthew Garrett’s […]

Living as I do in Williamsburg, Virginia, I am surrounded by the American Revolution. Here are the buildings where the […]

Michael Millner’s Fever Reading begins with the appealing idea that it “seeks to understand the meanings of reading badly” (xiii). […]

In the afterword to The Potter’s Hand, its author, A. N. Wilson, identifies the novel as a work of historical […]

On Finding the Earliest Known Poem by John Rollin Ridge, the First Native American Novelist I sometimes think that I […]

Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan speaks in Lucy Biederman’s poetry.

“Man,” wrote John Webb, a Boston-based minister, in a 1726 sermon, “conforms to the Tempers and Manners of the Company […]

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

“This study presents the kind of creative synthesis and thoughtful working-out of big ideas that will make it required reading. . . “

Caleb Smith, The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 288 pp., $35.

Notetaking and Sermon Culture in Puritan New England

In memory of the unnamed woman branded Y, sent in 1719 from Barbados to Kittery, Massachusetts, Province of Maine.

Where and how to find the narrator, who was not only an escaped slave but an author with no name?

The satire’s narrator is a louse who has lived on a series of heads in and around Paris and been witness to the political maneuverings happening behind the scenes of the American Revolution.

The lines between high and low culture were blurry in nineteenth-century America. Dime novels lacked critical acclaim, yet famous authors like Samuel Clemens readily drew from dime novel conventions.

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

We are at sea even before the Pequod’s voyage begins.

Age-phobic rhetoric is commonplace in American culture, especially as it relates to women, its history stretching back at least to the second half of the nineteenth 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.

The Literary Paradises of Hurston and Bartram in a High School Curriculum Early American literature is not commonly taught at […]

American literature, culture, and ideals stand wounded because America has regularly asserted that some lives and literatures—especially Black lives and literatures—matter less than others.

I begin with classic Anglo Saxon understatement: The American Jeremiad has been invaluable for my work and, safe to say, […]

Taken together, the short essays gathered here point out the ways in which numbers and graphs constitute narratives, and insist that data’s stories are just as constructed as those found in words and novels.

Almost immediately upon starting a book I ask myself—usually while reading—what will I read next: should it be more fiction? a history book? current events? pure escape? enrichment?

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

More and more, we point our computers’ browsers at what we want to read, instead of lacing up for a walk to the library or the bookstore.

Recasting autobiographical revisions through aging studies enables us to see ambivalences that the dominant aging plot of decline has foreclosed.

When historical novels are presented as works of historical interpretation, they can also serve as tools that help students learn to “read like historians.”

How can acts of periodization produce historical frameworks commensurate to the vast trauma and shock of the Civil War?

I was struck by the thin pamphlet’s integration of word and image: in ten engravings, the booklet plotted out the life of the Christian soul.

Automatic Writing If, as the scholar claims, a photograph is a sudden death, if the historian’s citational practice is cousin […]

Keeping up with the news

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.

How do we think about early American legacies today? And should we be thinking about them at all?

A sophisticated grasp of history is the exception, not the rule.

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

As a professor in a law school, I should begin by stating that I am on record testifying that Professor […]

For an Americanist, one of the strangest developments of the past few years has been to hear the phrase “American […]

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Does literature matter to politics and law?

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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.

It has been several decades since large numbers of Americans used the U.S. mail for the majority of their long-distance communications or for casual daily contact with nearby friends and family.

An interesting close-reading of an illustration from Moses Roper’s slave narrative.

With so many uses, the almanac, like an iPhone, was truly interactive.

The Civil War was one great eruption of something immanent in human civilization: an ineradicable cycle of violence, a timeless struggle for democracy and freedom.

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.

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The prehistory of American bestsellers takes us beyond questions about the content and literary value of bestselling texts and invites us instead to explore just what makes such a phenomenon possible.

The difficulty of making a good American Revolution movie has something to do with the challenge of finding a plot for the Revolution that can be arranged in the form of a family drama.

The life of the poor … is saturated with market logic, a logic experienced as the perpetual loss of one’s possessions to the anonymous forces of greater purchasing power.

The American Jeremiad passes at least one test of really important work: it forces you to reconsider beliefs that you […]

What happens if we pair “post” and “transbellum”?

The “new atheism” derives from a long-established free-thinking tradition in which Thomas Paine has a key place.

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Natives were eager consumers of the kinds of print ephemera that circulated throughout New England.

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

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.

Dickinson did not regard the book as a meaningful unit of analysis for her work, but too often, her editors and critics have.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

This special issue of Common-place gives us a chance to step back from the earnest defensiveness that has sometimes characterized early American literary history and delight publicly in the strange and wonderful books that are our American legacy.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

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

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

“How do we then account for the transition from curios to antiques? Why was the change in nomenclature and character so rapid?”

What version of the past was this? Was I really getting a taste of what life would have been like for someone like Franklin during his many months at sea?

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to […]

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

Before writing these remarks I re-read The American Jeremiad for the first time in quite a while. I believe in […]

Who, in our own post-postmodern age, would dare to ask a question as simple as: What does America mean?

How did women, with multiple daily obligations to family, reconcile a seemingly contradictory Transcendentalist imperative to cultivate “self-reliance”?

…printing shifted from a craft to an industry, printers became publishers, authorship became a profession, literary property became regulated, and reading became, increasingly, a value as much as a practice.

The devotional culture of early New England did not predict or facilitate a straight line from sin to salvation.

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Historians recommend American books

Contending with the physical characteristics of various woods and the way they respond to machines and the hand has . . . helped clarify how I think about history.

Who were these intrepid, incestuous, robust pioneers of whom Bemiss spoke? They were Americans, of course, whose, “extraordinary activity and energy” were “due to the composite nature of their blood.”

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.”

Between the lines, buried deep in the least likely passages, among small tidbits of oral lore, they can be heard but only faintly.

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

When asked to contribute to this discussion of Bercovitch’s landmark work, I decided that I wanted to reflect on the […]

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

Brown, like Melville, gives the reader the impression that he is playing with masks. You are not sure which mask is hiding his true intention, or whether he has any true intentions at all.

What Columbus discovered was less a new world than a new ocean.

… here are thirteen emerging early American scholars introducing a pre-1800 text available online to the public for free.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

. . . scrapbooks created to save newspaper and magazine items often used few of the pictures from those publications. Perhaps pictures undercut the seriousness of a homemade object that mimicked the look of a book or newspaper.

Dolley Madison proved a premier influence peddler, though she would have never seen her work that way nor would her contemporaries.

As Marrs makes clear, the career plot of transbellum authors reveals how periodization has distorted what we could know about the works of writers stranded for too long on one side of the Civil War divide.

How can belief in such oddities be allowed any place in scholarship?

By broadening her narrative to encompass the wider urban context in which the trials took place, Lepore brilliantly reveals what theatrical plays men like Horsmanden saw, what accounts of other slave conspiracies they read about in local newspapers (most especially the recent plots and rebellions in Antigua and South Carolina), and how they regarded other faiths.

Caron’s speculation and his reliance on outdated literature lead him to significant interpretive errors.

Much made of little. Little made of knowledge. Knowledge made of scholarship. Scholarship made of textbooks. Textbooks made of terms. […]

The State of the Americanist Field The remarks collected here were offered on a roundtable at the 2013 Modern Language […]

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

In [Grant’s] view, offered in the form of a press release issued for the painting’s public debut, the cherry-tree story was at once too good to be true and “too good to lose.”

People relied on memory and touch to help navigate their homes in the dark. Memory, hearing, touch, and even smell made it possible to travel in the countryside on moonless nights

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

I knew what I was doing was risky, and I knew that sooner or later I would make a mistake of one kind or another.

“[T]he full hall at the Virginia Theatre snickered every time God, the Devil, or magic was mentioned. For a New York theater-going audience the notion that such ideas could carry intellectual and emotional weight seemed ludicrous.”

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?

“I always feel that if just one reader stops and thinks for a second, I’ve been successful. I want them to wonder, ‘Did that really happen to Blackbeard when he got caught down in North Carolina?'”

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

“How did this ultimate Tomistic curiosity evolve, and what does it mean?”

The Scenographia Americana corresponded closely with imperial optimism in 1768.

Historical inquiry may often be blocked by the prior agenda of the historian.

The most significant accomplishment of America’s Founding Food is the truly impressive collection of lively and illuminating primary-source accounts.

In place of powdered wigs and radical ideals, Berkin shows us bloody legs and dirty shirts.

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

I also think professional historians should be more open to what self-trained, so-called amateur historians can teach them.

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.

Burstein is most provocative and imaginative, and the book is most intriguing, when he is exploring the “Jefferson-Hemings puzzle,” as he terms it.

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The book’s a genre send-up: a mystery, with traces of the gothic; a love story, with an overwrought romantic sensibility; a picaresque, somewhat overblown.

“The New England Primer emerged from, in David E. Stannard’s phrase, ‘a world in which the presence of early death was everywhere.'”

Starting in the dining room, I stared blankly at the large gold-framed portrait of a young woman. Although I had walked past her a hundred times, I had never stopped to ask, “Who is she, the woman with knotted braids gracing her rose-tinted cheeks?”

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.

“It may seem natural to us that in 1825 the children and grandchildren of minutemen would commemorate the fight at the North Bridge. It was not.”

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.

The value of interdisciplinarity is something most of us within the academy are familiar with and to which many pay lip service. But here, there was no lip service. Interdisciplinarity was central to our entire enterprise.

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

Author’s Note: As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters […]

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?

At its best, the book finds a kind of poetry in the act of diving into the wreck of the archive, the dark grottoes of history where competing narratives jostle, where myth and “truth” hopelessly blur.

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

“For a kick I clicked on the description and viewed the item. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Why do coffee and business seem to go together so naturally?”

“Emerson celebrated the creative originality of each new generation and warned his readers and listeners against undue reverence for ‘the sepulchers of the fathers.'”

“History concerns what Napoleon did; biography concerns what it meant to him.”

“If, as Jennings argued, Parkman offers bad history, then why plow through thousands of pages of the stuff?”

Crucible of War has nearly as much to teach about form and style as it does about the Seven Years’ War.

of course, Crucible of War is both imperfect in form, and incomplete–with respect to the scholarship it seeks to synthesize, no less than to the immensity of the event it tries to capture.

“It was fear that he needed to cultivate, a necessary ingredient that had to be constantly attended to, like the feeding and grooming of the beauteous beasts in his kennel.”

“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.”

“I’m not sure how I made it this far without realizing that I would find Wilder’s books on the fiction shelf.”

“He would draw nothing tonight. He would exert not one smidgeon of pain or skill upon recording the scene or its actors. There was no point.”

“[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.”

Slavery and its aftermath are human drama still unsettled. Administrators, timekeepers, civil servants, guardians of the state try to revise our understanding of the period and its outcomes. An effort to convince us that the drama is over rages. Some of us insist, and rightly so, that we are now in this drama’s second act, we have not moved beyond the raised curtain, we are still in shock at what we have finally seen.

“What would it be like to step inside the memory of the diarist? To experience a diary as if it were a video replay? What would I ask an enchanted diary if it one day spontaneously responded to my marginal annotations?”

“[T]hese days it seems Americans prefer their Founding Fathers warts and all: fresher, snappier, even naughty.”

“I could not overlook the biggest anachronism of all–that of character.”

“Compared with most heritage tourism, ghost tours—by turns campy and didactic—offer visitors unblinking and, no doubt, at times unwelcome views of the skeletons in the closet of early American history: slave coffles, Indian massacres, debtor’s prisons, and the sundry other sad and sorry fates of people you might expect would want to haunt America’s cities.”

“What Mount Vernon Love Story offers are not steamy sex scenes, of which there’s nary a one (was it the teeth?), but countless moments spent in the throes of hot, throbbing interior decorating.

Thus, the poems examine both the social structures contributing to the accusations as well as the relationships between people that were wounded or destroyed by the suspicions, convictions, and executions.

McGrath’s skill in shaping characters and crafting prose is not to be denied. Whether he has transcended previous fictional attempts to make some sense of the American Revolution is another matter.

For all their decadent, Italianate, Miltonic overtones, the serial-killer books by Thomas Harris resurrect the gritty frontier narratives of the Wild West and Indian fighting that are the literary precursors to later American gothic and horror fiction.

The scholarly enterprise, particularly the need to pursue a single-minded thesis, does not allow for much exploration of the contradictions and ambiguities that Kupperman shows were constant features of English-Indian relations.

Turning journalists into heroes takes some doing.

—The Mekons

Women like Pocahontas essentially became, like Pygmalion, characters eventually submissive to certain English manners and mores, made devoid of all cultural threat by their nearly complete assimilation into dominant, white society.

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.

Common-place asks Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, whether he thinks the largely backward-moving narrative he uses in his recent book, Trials of Intimacy, is a strategy other historians might want to try.

Far reaching in its range, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture” amasses a rich archive of textual material in print, sheet music, song, illustration, and film, allowing viewers to encounter the many faces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The reverend author of this book before us, which we are at a loss whether to denominate a biography, or a novel, founded on fact, has presented a specimen of writing, which for variety and oddity is almost an unique in the annals of literature.

For historians, perhaps the bottom line is whether one learns well or badly from a novel. Is Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo a good teacher about Texas in the mid-1830s?

Death of a Notary offers a particularly good example of the possibilities of microhistory, although Merwick never refers to her study in those terms. Merwick’s careful reconstruction of Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam’s life illustrates the rewards of microhistory’s emphasis on rigorous interpretation of small details and small subjects.

Franklin figures prominently in Jon Butler’s Becoming America, a wide-ranging and spirited book that describes the emergence of the first modern culture in a way that will satisfy many readers and provoke others.

Common-Place asks scholar-writer Richard Slotkin, author of such classics of American cultural history as Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation, and, most recently, of Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln: “What can you do as a novelist that you can’t as an historian–and vice versa?

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