Freedom Seekers will show how all kinds of men, women, and children who escaped were important actors in the challenge not just to their own enslavement but to slavery more broadly.

Thinking back on the exhibit, I love how the curators concluded it with a statement on Black people’s desire to control or reclaim the narrative about them.

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

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.

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

Too often, historians turn to records of constituent or legislative deliberations from the eighteenth century as a source to draw quotations from early American political figures, without questioning their accuracy.

This is why you need a plan: to read attentively but efficiently, and sustainably, without surrendering your book-life balance.

Knowing what is missing is an important first step.

Even before the miniaturization of mokuks as souvenir items, these folded birchbark baskets served as trade items that also facilitated diplomacy between Native and colonial nations.

The Dawn of Everything provides a framework that engages with “big history” or “deep history” while avoiding explanations that flirt with biological, demographic, environmental, or technological determinism.

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

Podcasts serve as a gateway to other media about history, serving as a tool for historians to engage with people who have an interest in the stories they tell.

Insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities.

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on […]

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

“[R]everence for the document is key to how people today think of the Constitution.”

America’s ambivalence about labor is nothing new. In the colonial era the ruling class had nothing but contempt for anything that could be justly called “work.”

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.

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

“But what if women indeed were mentioned? Would we have to change our interpretation of the place of women in the Constitution?”

Calling the exercise a Caribbean “game” begs the question of who, in the end, won the Caribbean.

The power base for revolution was with the great mass of slaves who became the nouveau libres. Toussaint in all his rhetoric identified himself with that group, to which he did not in fact belong.

Why are early Americanists so obsessed with region—with geography, in short—rather than with chronology?

It turns out that, in legal terms, the mystery of who found the broadside matters a lot less than who lost it.

It should be said that the founders’ views on these matters have not survived strict historical scrutiny.

“Marshall remade the Court.”

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not.

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

Teaching in historical clothing helps to tell the story of how wider societal transitions affected the lives of ordinary people.

Once the students begin actively listening to the songs, their enthusiasm for the material grows.

In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall.

“[I]n late March, just days before Plimoth Plantation’s village of 1627 was to come to life for the 2001 season, the museum’s 130 head of livestock were rounded up and removed to a modern breeding barn at the back of the property.”

“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.”

Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones.

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

While primly stitching Eve’s fall from innocence on her canvas, Christina likely reflected on the brutal consequences suffered by those who succumbed to temptation in her everyday world.

Here was a Bible that had not only come over on the Mayflower in 1620, but had belonged to some of the most prominent early settlers, according to annotations on its pages . . . Could it be true?

Cholera maps chart the movement of the disease, and the terror that accompanied it.

It seemed to me that the conditions of cancer and captivity shared physical, emotional, and spiritual correspondences.

“He exclaimed ‘Lobsters! I’ll make Cornwallis and his men lobsters!”

Historical memory operates differently in professional military circles.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

By changing the head, the coat, and the background building, the publisher could quickly produce a dignified presidential image with all the expected components of high office.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that […]

Jefferson quoted in Greek to substantiate a racial hierarchy by linking racial identity and classical learning, but the Greek in that quotation has been plagued by errors.

Salisbury’s purchases clearly evoke the image of a young man concerned with meeting the expectations of Worcester’s privileged class.

I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts?

Ink covers much of the wood work, various parts have been gouged by nails or other sharp tools, the bar handle has been smoothed by the hands of many journeymen printers, and overall the press has the worn but proud look of an old veteran.

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

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.

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example
of how it works.

“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.”

Is slave food soul food?

As students write and perform toasts, they attempt to speak the (often combative) language of 1790’s politics.

Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

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

Bon appétit!

Isn’t barbecue one of the few foods prepared and enjoyed by all Americans regardless of color?

The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

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

In the end, four papers stood out as making truly original contributions to scholarship on Salem witchcraft.

Constant attacks from weather, in addition to the mechanization of landscaping, conspire to destroy these stones as they once stood. Ironically, New England’s historic cemeteries are dying.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the history of New France seemed to drift from French historical consciousness.

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 the 2013-2014 academic year, over 350 historians collaborated to produce The American Yawp, a free online, collaboratively built American history textbook.

Vikings—Scandinavian adventurers who expanded, as far east as the Ukraine and as far west as Greenland and coastal Newfoundland, between the eighth and eleventh centuries C.E.—deserve a more prominent place in early American history than they have yet garnered.

To plan for the observation of the events central to the history of seventeenth-century New England, a partnership of organizations and individuals was formed as New England Beginnings in 2015.

Classroom Collaborations, Public Engagement and Adventure This past September, the commemorations of the terrorist attacks on New York City and […]

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.

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.

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.

Material culture interfered with the seemingly inexorable rise of racialism in Louisiana, creating its own chronology, and highlighting the uneven development and fractured character of the process of racialization in North America.

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

Evocations of Survivance: Native Storiers in Word and Image in Remembrance of Sand Creek

While our own culture shields itself from the prospect of death, our nineteenth-century forebearers embraced it.

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.

has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story.

“Raphael’s claim that Massachusetts had completed the ‘first’ American Revolution in the latter of half of 1774 raises the perennial question as to what was the Revolution and how to periodize it.”

Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures.

A “Topping People” could well be considered the definitive insider’s take on the eighteenth-century Virginia elite.

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.

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye.

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.

What motivated Civil War irregulars?

By 1776, backcountry Indian-hating had become a patriotic virtue as quintessentially American as independence, self-sacrifice, and egalitarianism.

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.

Resistant to quantification or even to classification, emotions are a slippery topic for any scholar at any time, and particularly so for historians.

These documents cover the full range of the American past, from pre-Columbian societies to the present, and represent a wide variety of voices and experiences. Links to more than 600 images, dozens of audio files of speeches, over 150 landmark Supreme Court cases, newspaper articles from the New York Times archives, maps, and a database of annotated links to other collections on the Web are also included.

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.

Capitalism and the state were not (and are not) separate and autonomous operations, and “free trade” was sometimes combined with military aggression.

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.

Death changed America’s relationship with religion and philosophy, but the Civil War fatalities also created a new commodity: the dead.

Krech is concerned with the many spiritual meanings Indians assigned birds, whether as dark omens of sickness and death, symbols of personal power and physical prowess, sources of luck, expressions of love, or embodiments of beauty.

In the early years both Native Americans and Europeans were proud, suspicious, and ill-informed.

That is not to say that the Web offers no substantive food history sites. Hidden between the layers of fat on the Web are some juicy morsels that serious researchers will find worthwhile.

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.

Written to mark the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth, my poems operate within that lacuna, occupying the dissonant threshold between Whitman’s optimistic vision for America, “out of hopeful green stuff woven,” and my own personal history.

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

But when it came to poetry, like many young poets, my first poems focused on myself. It was this exploration of my personal identity that ultimately led me to an exploration of the past. I’d brought several poems about my relationship with my father to a creative writing workshop, and a female classmate challenged me to write about the women in my family.

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.

I first came across Thomas Harriot’s strange and wonderful account, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), in the large, sepia-toned Dover edition—”The Complete 1590 Theodor de Bry Edition”—on the shelves of the university bookstore.

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

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

1. Tracts Trace Fissure I pick up a fragile, aging photo, asking, “Who is this?” “No idea.” Names slip out […]

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product?

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

Gone are the days of poring over microfilm for weeks to find data relevant to particular research interests. With this sleek Website, a few pointed searches can unveil hundreds of pertinent published documents for scholars interested in various topics related to early American history.

The Website provides a taste of the abundant repository of sources available at the various Bethlehem archives.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

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.

As with the Indian treaties portal, the intended audience for this site is not altogether clear. Perhaps the goal is simply to create a platform for further investigation by anyone who wants to learn more about the Omahas.

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.”

One particularly intriguing new feature is the “signature quilt” search function, which features name and location data for about fifty quilts with multiple signatures.

The books under review here all concern power, its loss and its consolidation.

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

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.

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

“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.”

Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities.

A critical awareness of the process of working, and sometimes failing, to conceptualize history and its possible futures, says Klein, is what the humanities can offer data visualization.

I do not see the nation unfolding in a linear progression away from “Britishness” and towards cultural independence. Instead, what my research shows is that in the years following the Revolution […] Americans vacillated between emulation and repudiation of the mother country.

My primary goal was to understand how impressment worked, not to settle once and for all the question of “how bad was it?”

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty.

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.

How could I tell that story for people who lived and died more than a century ago?

“[I]f justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end?”

The pathways our contributors seek are divergent and take myriad forms. As Whitman would have preferred, they describe contradictory perspectives and incommensurable ontologies. And yet, they find common ground in the alternative mobilities they take to reach their destinations.

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

Poet Afaa M. Weaver explores his ancestors’ ability to maintain loving structures despite the pressures of slavery.

We talk with Benjamin Fagan about the first black newspapers in the United States, biblical inspiration for freedom, and the place African Americans sought in society.

My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling.

I entered the archive in Florence in June 2015 looking for one item, and I walked out with something completely unexpected, yet to which I was deeply and personally connected.

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

We talkwith Julia Gaffield about Haiti’s foreign relations in its early years of independence, the place of the Haitian Revolution, and the impact of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.

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

These projects represent different approaches to the larger project of decolonizing archives, ranging from digital repatriation to deeper reflections on the colonial nature of the archive itself.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation. The Indigenous objects that once resided in early American collections present powerful opportunities for institutions to reflect on their own entanglements with centuries-long patterns of dispossession and settler colonialism.

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.”

Carla Mulford’s new book examines Benjamin Franklin’s approach to empire.

James Kidder’s Market Street painting offers rich fodder for a meditation on the complex histories of private profit and public good in the cultural realm.

How did a nineteenth-century woman of means accomplish so much, unhampered and unassisted by a husband, and what sort of life did this strong-willed woman live?

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.

Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts.

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

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.

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

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

Artists painted these Indian men and women for a variety of reasons, but they began with diplomatic intentions.

Slave status, in short, could be reaffixed based on the assumption that a former slave’s “consent” to travel back home reflected an “implied contract” to re-enter slavery.

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

War in Europe set the stage for political crisis, revolution, civil war, and the fragmentation of Spanish America.

Cornwell captures the multivalent nature of the Revolutionary War.

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.

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.

Putting the French in their rightful place in American history, Gitlin insists, requires “put[ting] Parkman behind us.”

To understand African American experience under slavery, it is imperative to consider region, and not just in northern versus southern terms.

A class’s engagement with the account book of a nineteenth-century plantation teaches painful lessons about the erasures embedded in historical records.

In seeing identity construction as a negotiated performance, Alex Myers’s novel reflects the historical literature, as does his representation of eighteenth-century friendship, masculinity, soldiering, and material culture.

Sloane’s embrace of the past ran counter to a stream of thought that was prominent from the beginning of European settlement in North America, one that held that the “New World” represented an opportunity to turn away from the past, and from the ruins and relics of Europe in particular.

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

When did the United States become a global force? A digital history project creates a space for answering this question.

As an abolitionist lecturer, Harper honed to perfection a polemical political style that appears to differ with the seemingly sentimental and religious form of Forest Leaves.

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

Ask the Author invites a group of distinguished scholars of Revolutionary America to participate in a forum on the continuing importance of The Stamp Act Crisis.

Working with publishers, libraries, and archives, digital humanities projects can work to liberate African American history.

History on Trial is the product of collaborations among graduate students, Lehigh faculty, librarians, technical staff, students, high school teachers, and early Americanists nationally.

Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts Common-place asks Michelle Morris about her 2013 book, Under Household Government: Sex and Family […]

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

At this Point, a Confluence Less enterprising men would have left the beautiful ruin of a cityto moulder away and […]

Indigenous and Atlantic Histories Common-place sits down with Brett H. Rushforth to discuss his 2012 book, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous […]

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

La felice victoria: Bartolomé de Flores’s A Newly Composed Work, Which Recounts the Happy Victory That God, in His Infinite […]

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print.

Notetaking and Sermon Culture in Puritan New England

The panorama of women’s lives in colonial Spanish America makes an intriguing counterpoint to colonial North America, where women’s lives—especially those of free white women—seem to have been more emphatically constrained by household work, marriage, and motherhood.

Oldest Windmill on Cape Cod

Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention.

As one of my Clemente students once said in class: “Slavery was America’s original sin, but we’re all still paying for it.”

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

Providing the gamut of contexts for specific musical expressions in America’s past makes them all the more comprehensible, and conveys an appreciation for the ubiquitous importance music had for people long before the age of electronics.

The advent of narrative history in the popular press makes engaging history students seem like a simple task. However, as […]

While many aspects of early American life were bound by geography, many others transcended it.

The backlash against these American laws and their increasingly global reach raises a question: does this regime of intellectual property law represent something intrinsic about the United States—not just its economy, but its culture and society?

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.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

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?

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

Given the facts, fiction and truths, what kind of autobiographical voice could I craft for the larger text that would establish the narrative provenance of a surviving pre-Civil War log cabin?

The View from Mount Vernon

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

Contingency is in; inexorability is out.

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

The willy-nilly growth of the nation that had made its postal system a logistical marvel also required the establishment of a hub to process misdirected letters.

Matters related to the history, production, and evolution of a text as a text did not have to be prompted by the professor but figured seamlessly into class discussion and student papers.

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 […]

How should the course move forward, and what should the storyline be?

Dry Creek Valley On the second and third wires over the wireon which forks the zinfandel vine:barbed knotsand spirals of […]

  It’s rare for a single work of scholarship to fundamentally change the way I teach a topic in U.S. […]

Initially, the students tend to dwell on the explicit message of the spirituals. They assert that the spirituals focus on another world and encourage slaves to passively accept their fate . . . Gradually, the classroom dialogue shifts to the implicit messages.

Can less produce more?

In truth, I run with the Atlanticist crowd for a selfish reason: because Atlantic history allows me to be in two places at once. And by “be,” I mean “be,” as in “exist or live,” or better yet, “belong.”

The questions and subjects that bring professional historians together at academic conferences deserve to be discussed in wider circles.

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

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

From the moment we arrived, I could tell I was going to have a hard time making peace with resort culture.

I sensed the spark of time travel, but even the most vaporous spirits seemed unable to slip between the apertures of the past and this particular May evening.

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.

Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments.

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

All the essays in this issue treat music that registers quintessentially American processes of cultural change-encounter, innovation, contestation, reconfiguration, transfusion.

My search for Mehetabel’s diary had entailed a good six months of concentrated—and at times seemingly futile—effort. When I finally held it in my hands, however, every moment of that search seemed worthwhile.

“In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out.”

As with any decent varsity athletic program, an imperative of participation coexists alongside one of competition. At its best, History Day is genuinely inclusive.

But researchers doing only word searches will miss not only context, but also what might lurk just beneath the headlines.

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

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

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”?

I treasure many of the conversations I had with my fellow citizens at their doorsteps, and I think if I had been blessed with musical talent, I could have waxed as lyrical about suburbanites as another Woody did about hoboes and Okies.

History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

…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 inked letters are in Sewall’s hand, dated March 24, 1698/9, and they read, “Nunnacôquis signifies an Indian Earthen Pot as Hannah Hahatan’s Squaw tells me.”

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

Historians recommend American books

The high cost of being poor in America

Norumbega Harmony is a choral ensemble organized at Wellesley College in 1976. Since the beginning we have sung weekly in […]

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.

I’ve found myself feeling restless, and even irritated, with the reluctance on the part of some smart students to make any kind of active value judgments at all.

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.”

I am now intrigued, as a textbook coauthor, by how readily many of my peers still dismiss the enterprise of textbook writing.

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

Hakluyt’s life’s work, to the extent that it is captured in his publications, takes center stage in this history.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Did the tragic consequences of colonialism spring from the original intent of Europeans or were they largely unexpected?

Actually, his recent body of work shows a remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history.

Experience, personal and otherwise, has shown me that it is not just white Americans who need to grasp the full scope of Native history. Native people can also benefit from a more just and accurate depiction of their past.

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

“So when we’ve lost our traditions we can come here and learn them from you.”

Rarely has any figure in modern intellectual life so successfully harnessed the power of private institutions for public good, or achieved the fusion of thought and action, that Sizer did in his remarkable career.

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

“History 263 reverts back three centuries in a kind of Rip Van Winkle in reverse! Freshly awakened, students inhabit the seventeenth century, not the twenty-first.”

“[I]f Joss Whedon, spy in the house of love, isn’t willing or able to wrestle with the legacy of slavery, who is?”

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.

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

“In part, the recurring taste for folk music has to be explained by a recurring desire in American culture: the desire to strip away the awful effects of consumer culture and return to a simpler, harder, more authentic time.”

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

“Richter shows that the effort to transform the traditional narrative of American history from one of the westward expansion of white settlement to one that looks eastward from Indian country is not only possible, but essential for understanding this nation’s past in all its complexity.”

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 […]

What do I want students to get out of this particular hour and fifteen minutes we will spend together—and, more importantly, what do I want them to get out of the study of history?

When you encounter evidence of kinship between owners and slaves you have, first of all, learned something new about the complexity of their world, and next you are confronted with the question: did knowledge of his or her kinship to slaves influence the actions of an owner?

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

The emphasis of our special issue is two-fold: scholarly perspectives on political phenomena that connect the early American republic with the present, on the one hand; on the other […] an expansion of readers’ definition of what counts as “political history.”

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.

What’s old is new again

The past is often portrayed in ways that celebrate the victors, and we are all familiar with versions of history that function as propaganda for those who hold power.

“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?'”

History matters.

The obviousness of reproduction as a frame for hereditary racial slavery did not come quickly to me nor, I would argue, does it come so for most.

Unlike traditional classification systems where texts are fit into preexisting schema (such as Library of Congress subject headings), topic modeling determines the comprehensive list of subjects through its analysis of the word occurrences throughout a corpus of texts.

Social Media Highlights Click here for an eventifier page that has compiled all 700+ tweets and 20+ photos from the […]

“As the war with Iraq loomed through the 2002-03 school year, we heard echoes from conflicts throughout U.S. history.”

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

“Alongside horses and sheep, captives moved throughout the borderlands economies.”

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.”

Is the linear novel the only way one gets lost in a book?

What makes American music American? Is there a distinctive American music? What is the relationship between American music and music […]

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

Taking Native culture seriously requires that we abandon the attempt to put Native wine into European bottles.

Three poems In God’s Altar: The Word and Flesh in Puritan Poetry (Berkeley, 1978), the literary critic Richard Daly writes that, for […]

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.

The collapse of “psychohistory” and “psychobiography” appears to have been nearly total.

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

“The reenactments that run through and, in the end, dominate the film portray the Webster-Parkman principals and events through a gothic lens that does not so much resurrect the past as relinquish it to ways of seeing and telling adopted from Hollywood movies and stylish television.”

“The time had come to liberate the parchment after fifty years, a step fraught with uncertainties and concerns.”

Simple, yet significant teaching moves can result in students who can make informed decisions, who can develop reasoned arguments, and who can engage in problem solving.

With history like this, I thought, who needs fiction?

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.

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

“People expect to find in American Memory every kind of historical documentation possible on every aspect of American history, and they communicate their surprise at discovering otherwise.”

During the early twentieth century, Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943), the most influential early American historian of his time, spent several […]

“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.”

If John Adams recognized Winthrop as a Founding Father, and was joined in that judgment by a growing number of Americans in the nineteenth century, how and when did we manage to forget Winthrop?

Why was this parent so frustrated when the site is full of primary sources? Because those sources too often had no context.

“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.”

“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.”

“[T]he historian doing this sort of research must learn how to build relationships and earn the trust of people–usually historical society volunteers–who might be skeptical of outsiders and inclined to protect their cherished local history from professional revisionists intent on rewriting it.”

“Did the family-owned San Antonio printing company really print the paper money that helped finance the Mexican Revolution, as the current owner has heard rumored? Is the salty old New Englander right when he says that the whaling ship his grandfather skippered out of New Bedford sheltered escaped slaves among its crew?”

“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.'”

This issue marks our last as the editors of Common-place. We founded the magazine five years ago in an effort to […]

“In about their eighth year, children develop a sense of time and an ability to abstract that connect stories with pasts. They begin, that is, to think historically.”

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

“Public and private money spent amusing the millions with past-based reality television represents money not spent on other kinds of public-history experiments.”

“Too many historians of recent generations, according to Marwick, have been obsessed with theory and with abstractions such as discourse analysis.”

The problem–and the opportunity–as I saw it, was my students’ inclination to focus on these societies’ differences. My job was to get them to understand their similarities.

Common-place asks Victoria Freeman, author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America (South Royalton, Vt., forthcoming November 2002), what kinds of responsibility do descendants of dispossessors have to history and to native peoples today?

From May 30 to June 1, 2013, the David Library of the American Revolution, the McNeil Center for Early American […]

“With respect to federalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a massive increase in the power of the national government, produced above all but not only by the New Deal.”

“The Washington experience is one that my students never forget.”

“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.”

“That Democrats were an impetus behind the [antislavery] amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative…”

“How good is The Founders’ Constitution at what it claims to do? The answer depends in part on what you choose to look at.”

Like Wright’s, my trip to Ghana marked my first time in Africa and combined research with a spiritual homecoming.

“As the Internet continues to enable and encourage possibilities for professional-nonprofessional collaboration, the historian and genealogist may find that the gulf between them has been bridged–almost in spite of themselves.”

“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.”

“Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.”

“The result is that often promised but rarely achieved object: an interdisciplinary project with contributions from scholars of history, art history, the history of science, and literature.”

“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 . . . “

“How do students who have never produced original research papers begin to write about aspects of an important historical figure whose accomplishments have been mostly forgotten over time?”

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

“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.”

“[W]ere there not shared understandings and assumptions that shaped political decisions as profoundly as did conflicting partisan ideologies–on occasion, even more profoundly?”

“All of these books provide extended meditations on the ambiguities of power. Empire itself is an endlessly variant term, always imprecisely invoked and vaguely understood.”

“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.”

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

In the 1970s a number of excellent books, using the same kinds of sources and responding to the same social movements in contemporary American society, began to open up the study of slave life in the British West Indies. The new literature on slave life in the thirteen mainland British colonies and in the antebellum South was even larger and livelier. Did I really have anything fresh to contribute?

Perhaps the bottle traveled to the swamp full, part of a social gathering of African people, rather than empty, as part of a haul of refuse. The bottle could have been a pilfered item, or one reused after Brewton discarded it.

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.

While Davis’s erstwhile contention about the potential symbiosis between history and film is one that most of us can share conceptually, the history of the documentation of slavery as a subject for film is a sad and sorry one . . .

Roll, Jordan, Roll is the locus classicus for some of the most powerful and important ideas that have shaped the discussion of slavery for the last quarter century.

As rendered by Morgan, English-style freedom was naive, arrogant, and ethnocentric, qualities that readers in the post-Vietnam United States might have recognized with shame.

And yet, for all that, I am still troubled by the issue: why was a white person teaching about black history?

Why is there not a more detailed visual record of slavery and even slave life in early America?

Why do history in the form of a comic book? Why use this particular medium as opposed to others? What can the comic book offer in the presentation of the past that is unique and compelling?

    What’s a synthesis? Everyone knows the smart aleck answer: history without original research. This conviction fuels the disparaging […]

From the model of scholarship and teaching he provided, I learned that the greatest of historians–such as himself–do not tolerate intellectual arrogance whether in others or in themselves.

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.

Heroic in its synthesizing, perhaps, but not in its style, this book conceives of people lifelessly and in the aggregate.

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.

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.

Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than […]

Editors’ note: as many readers may be aware, Professor Bellesiles’s research methods and scholarly standards have become the subject of considerable debate since Common-place first published this essay in September 2000, the same month that Arming America appeared in print. In October 2002, Bellesiles resigned his faculty position at Emory University. Both the report of the independent investigative committee whose findings led to his resignation, and Bellesiles’s response are available online.

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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“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.”