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. 

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

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world.

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so.

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.

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?

Before we move forward, it is a good time to look back on the history of Commonplace and its place in digital humanities over the last two decades.

In the two decades following the Revolutionary War, one of the most critical and troubling questions facing the emerging nation was thus whether Americans would enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi River.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

What can making now tell us about the past? Or should the past remain untouched? 

One of the most common printed images of the first half of the nineteenth century was also the one of […]

Keys are border-phenomenon that split the world into a within and a without and, in the seventeenth century, record a surprisingly tight fit between subject and object.

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

It is an issue of authority; namely, who has enough of it to be qualified to decide what’s best for the global environment.

The resolve of Philadelphia’s medical elite as well as their patients was quickly tested after the war by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human.

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.

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.

John Dixon’s welcome study of Cadwallader Colden is the most comprehensive of the few biographies we have of this important North Briton colonial.

The presence of railroads in the North and South did not determine social relationships in either region. Instead, both sections of the country used the same technology for their own ends.

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.

If a decade ago some folks were wondering why we had stopped taking religion seriously as a legitimate academic topic, today many are taking religion seriously enough to be willing to tip one of the sacred cows of Enlightenment modernity itself: that cow being, of course, secularism’s sense of its total victory.

As a profession, we are experiencing a generational shift, and much of the data created several decades ago has already been lost.

Neither natural magic nor the occult sciences such as alchemy and astrology (excepting only judicial astrology) were seen as incompatible with Reformed religion in the seventeenth century.

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

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The disputed result of the 2000 election brought questions of materiality and meaning, which are frequently studied in academic settings, to the streets and the courts.

Everything seemed blasted by a new, blank enormity. The world was too big to be beautiful.

Nineteenth century social and economic knowledge at once functioned as an instrument of capitalism while also serving as a tool for minimizing capitalism’s most disturbing consequences.

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.

Linnaeus, sitting at home in Uppsala while his students traveled all over the world collecting natural objects for him, could be quite peevish and demanding.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

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

Kamil… goes against the grain in arguing that metaphysics, not skepticism, laid the basis for early modern “multiculturalism…”

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The layout of a voting machine harbors implications about meaning, about what is and what is important, and therefore harbors politics in its broadest sense.

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.

Electricity was one of the leading branches of experimental science in the Enlightenment, certainly the branch with the highest public profile owing to the proliferation of commercial entertainments after the 1740s, both in Europe and British America, where customers willingly paid for the novel experience of having the “electric fire” course through their bodies.

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

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Cook and Malaspina pursued the same goal in the icy North Pacific—a waterway to the Atlantic Ocean—and they each viewed the purported existence of this natural phenomena with rational skepticism.

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

Instantly there is a strong spark and stroke, and the whole line of gold, which completes the communication, between the top and bottom of the bottle, [appears] a vivid flame, like the sharpest lightning

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