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.
Hosted by Melissa Johnson, each session includes a guest who brings expertise in the subject area.
The next meeting has been POSTPONED is scheduled for April 21, 2022, 5:00 pm ET,
We will schedule a new date as soon as possible to explore All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Penguin Random House) by Tiya Miles (Harvard University) with guest Morgan McCullough (Omohundro Institute).
Morgan McCullough is a PhD candidate in History at William & Mary and the Material Culture Fellow at the Omohundro Institute.
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.
OI Colloquium with Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera
This paper approaches the image of children with piebaldism in New Spain concerning the issue of skin color, and the conception of the blackness of the period. Guerrero-Mosquera also will present visual representations and descriptions about the Afro-descendants, and will analyze the intersections on how these images circulated and impacted different social sectors. She will interpret the interstices that conjugate the perception of race and monstrosity in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Andrea Guerrero-Mosquera received her PhD from the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Mexico). Her PhD thesis analyzed the evangelization of Africans in Cartagena de Indias from an Atlantic perspective (1605-1698), especially exploring the Jesuit missionary project carried out in that port and comparing it to the type of evangelization shaped, especially by Capuchins, in Central Africa, during the same period. Exploring records in archives scattered across the Atlantic from Lisbon, Madrid, Évora, Seville, Bogotá, and Mexico City, the thesis demonstrates an important Atlantic connection between the evangelization processes of Africans and their descendants in America during 17th Century. She is currently expanding this research in a project that explores how European representations of monstrous Africans and Blackness solidified the idea of commercializing blackness during the height of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
She also is interested in disclosing and discussing the research findings in social networks through the Red Iberoamericana de Historiadoras (RIH: https://www.facebook.com/RIHistoriadoras/), a network that she directs along with other two women historians. Started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, this network is designed to reach the intellectual community, including Afro-descendant, Indigenous leaders and teachers.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). 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 encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
OI Colloquium with Casey Schmitt
Following the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, Spanish forces maintained a toehold on the island over five years of guerilla warfare in large part because of the food and shelter they received from three different semi-autonomous Afro-Jamaican communities on the island. While historians discuss two of the three Afro-Jamaican villages, they also often repeat the claim that Afro-descended peoples from one of those communities, the region around Porus, either “died out in the 1670s, fled to Cuba, or merged” with the Windward Maroons in eastern Jamaica. Reading across imperial archives, however, reveals that the Porus captives did not disappear or die out, they were trafficked off of the island by an English ship captain. This chapter is part of a larger project on human trafficking in the seventeenth-century Caribbean and focuses specifically on the experiences of captives trafficked across imperial boundaries during moments of war.
Casey Schmitt is a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In her research and her teaching, she is interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690, which analyzes the ubiquity of human trafficking and captivity in the greater Caribbean and North America from the 1530s until the 1690s and what that meant for colonization, trade, and warfare in the region. At Cornell, she teaches classes on colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and corruption.
ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). 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 encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith for your copy.
OI Colloquium with Tara Bynum
“‘A Curious List and a Trip to Sierra Leone:’ Or, Why Obour Tanner Bought Rev. Hopkins’ The System of Doctrines in 1793” takes a look at an oddly placed list of subscribers. It’s among the subscribers to Hopkins’s System of Doctrines, and its title is “Free Blacks.” While it might be easy to ignore the curious list because of its lack of information, there is far more to learn about who these “Free Blacks” are and what they hope to accomplish with the purchase of Hopkins’ lengthy tome.
Tara Bynum is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa where her research and teaching seek the many ways black people feel good in the eighteenth century. Her monograph, Reading Pleasure, is under contract with University of Illinois Press’ New Black Studies Series; it was made possible, in part, with the generous support of fellowships at the Library Company, John Carter Brown Library and Washington College, the American Antiquarian Society and Rutgers University.
About OI colloquia
The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues. Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.
When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). 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 encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.
COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.
Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.
