Join Georgian Papers Programme scholar Angel-Luke O’Donnell for an online version of the popular GPP Coffee Break series at King’s College London.
Join us on January 21, 2022, at 3:30 pm GST (10:30 am EST) for a presentation by John McCurdy (Eastern Michigan University) as he outlines the connections between manhood and military service in Georgian Britain and colonial America in a talk titled “Martial Manhood in the Anglo Atlantic.”
McCurdy states, “We know that warfare is critical to constructions of gender, but we have not considered how changes in the military and masculinity coincided. In the eighteenth century, European armies went through unprecedented technological and organizational transformations as small armies of pikemen fighting for aristocrats were replaced by professional soldiers who warred for empire with muskets and cannons. At the same time, manhood was altered by Enlightenment ideals, shifting from a generative identity based on patriarchal hierarchy to a Lockean notion which presumed an equality of manhood regardless of familial status. I want to see how these two intersected. To date, my research has primarily focused on British regiments in the American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. Specifically, I have unearthed trial transcripts of British officers accused of sexual crimes. In my talk, I will discuss these early findings and how I am using them to think about martial manhood. I am particularly interested advice on how to expand my research using the Georgian Papers as I have not yet been able to travel to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.”
About the series
The Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) coffee breaks are an informal opportunity for researchers throughout the world to gather together virtually to discuss ongoing projects. Each session features a short presentation from a GPP researcher followed by open discussion of the project, suggestions for related material, or general conversation about the archives and research. The presenters in these events are often in the early stages of their project and the coffee breaks aim to facilitate the exchange of knowledge about both the materials in Windsor as well as other repositories throughout the world.
We limit the size of these events to 40 participants in order to encourage discussion among and between participants. No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to create a trusted working environment for developing projects.
Join OI author Robert G. Parkinson for an OI-sponsored session of the National History Center’s Washington History Seminar. Usually convened in person at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the event will take place online.
On December 20, 2021, a roundtable on Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence will take place with author Robert Parkinson from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm.
REGISTER HERE.
Robert Parkinson is associate professor of history at Binghamton University, and the author of the prize-winning The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (2016). He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, and has held fellowships at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History & Culture and the C.V. Starr Center. His current book project, The Heart of American Darkness, is a study of the causes and consequences the gruesome murder of nine Natives on the banks of the Ohio River in 1774.
A joint venture of the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the History and Public Policy Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Washington History Seminar meets each week, January to May and September to December. The Washington History Seminar aims to facilitate understanding of contemporary affairs in light of historical knowledge of all times and all places and from a variety of perspectives.
How do we incorporate scholarship on early America, both old and new, into our teaching–whether that teaching happens in a K-12 classroom, on a university campus, or at a museum? In this every-other-monthly reading group, teachers come together to think collaboratively about how to engage with audiences from a broad spectrum and in a wide variety of contexts.
“Reading for Teaching” explores a wide variety of scholarly texts as possible frameworks for lectures, discussions, and other methods of approaching Vast Early America with different audiences. Each meeting focuses on a single book to be read by all and participants will be encouraged to share their expertise and experience communicating history in different venues.
The group meets on the last Thursday of every other month. Hosted by Melissa Johnson, each session includes a guest who brings expertise in the subject area.
The application period for the current reading group has closed but if you are interested in participating in future iterations of the workshop, please contact us directly at oieahc@wm.edu.
The next meeting is scheduled for October 28, 2021, 7:00 pm ET, and will explore Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution by Michael D. Hattem (published by the Yale University Press in 2020) with guest Rachel Engl (Lehigh University).
Yale University Press is offering a 25% discount to any member of the “Reading for Teaching” group who purchases the book directly from the Press. Please contact the OI at oieahc@wm.edu for a code and instructions.
Rachel Engl received her PhD in 2019 from Lehigh University. Her dissertation “America’s First Band of Brothers: Friendship &, Camaraderie within the Continental Army during the Revolutionary Era,” explores the lived experience of the men who fought the war by uncovering the significance of relationships they developed amongst themselves throughout the conflict and consequently sustained into the years of the early republic. She is a member of the Upper School faculty at Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Melissa Ann Johnson is a historian of women, religion, and communication in early America. Her first book project focuses on watchfulness and women’s gossip in seventeenth-century New England. She is also working on two other projects, one on domestic servitude in colonial New England and another on deception and imposters in the Atlantic world. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2019 and currently teaches history courses at community colleges in Oregon and in Washington state.
Join us for an OI Author Conversation with Kate Carté and Julia Gaffield.
How can we best understand the connections between religion, war, and political upheaval in the Age of Revolution? Explorations into the intersection of politics and religion are often framed in terms of the impact of political upheaval on religious faith and practice. Seen this way, religion figures as a barometer of political and social change. Yet specific denominations were fundamental components of systems that structured relationships within and between nations and empires. Woven into structures of politics and diplomacy at the highest levels, they could serve as expressions of national aspiration and as agents of political change. To understand religion’s role in Age of Revolution, we need to explore the formal connections between religious institutions on the one hand and political and diplomatic processes on the other.
Please join Kate Carté and Julia Gaffield for a discussion about the complex role of religion in the Age of Revolution. Kate Carté is the author of Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (2021), which situates British Protestantism as part of a complex, transatlantic system that bound religion to imperial politics until it was ruptured by the war for American independence. Julia Gaffield, the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World (2015), is currently writing a book about Haiti’s efforts to leverage its diplomatic relationship with the Catholic Church in order to secure a place among the nineteenth century’s “family of nations.”
Kate Carté (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is an associate professor of History at Southern Methodist University. She is the author of Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and she has published articles in venues including Church History, the William and Mary Quarterly, Common-place, and Early American Studies. She has received fellowships from the ACLS, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her new book, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (UNC Press for the OI, 2021), chronicles how that pivotal conflict transformed both protestant institutions and the relationship between church and state.
Julia Gaffield is an associate professor of History at Georgia State University. She received her PhD in History from Duke University and her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015 and won the 2016 Mary Alice and Frederick Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. Gaffield published an article in the American Historical Review in 2020 called “The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty.” She is currently writing a biography of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a history of the Catholic Church in Haiti in the 19th century.
