Tag: public

Reading for Teaching: A Vast Early America Book Club

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, we will 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” will explore 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 will focus 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 will meet on the last Thursday of every other month. Hosted by Melissa Johnson, each session will include a guest who brings expertise in the subject area.

To APPLY: email an abbreviated c.v. to oievents@wm.edu by June 15, 2021.

Our first meeting is scheduled for July 23, 5:00 pm EDT, and will explore Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith (published by the Omohundro Institute with partner the University of North Carolina Press in 2018) with guest Michael Witgen (Columbia University).

Subsequent meetings will be scheduled every other month.

Michael Witgen is a professor in the Department of History at Columbia University as well as the Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race there. He is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. His publications include “An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and “American Indians in World History,” in the Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed., Fred Hoxie, (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, April 2016). His work explores the juxtaposition of Native and European experiences and responses to the process of mutual discovery that created the New World in North America, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes and Great Plains. His current research examines the intersection of race, national identity, and state making in the Old Northwest of the early republic, and includes the essay “Seeing Red: Race, Citizenship, and Indigeneity in the Old Northwest,” published in Journal of the Early Republic in 2018, and awarded the Ralph D. Gray prize for best original article by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is also the author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America forthcoming with the press of the Omohundro Institute for the Study of Early American History & Culture.

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.

Schoolhouse Rock for a New Generation

The animated children’s television series Schoolhouse Rock has been teaching children about math, grammar, science, and history since the 1970s. Middle-aged women and men can still quote the program’s lyrics about conjunctions (“Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses”), the nervous system (“there’s a telegraph line, you got yours and I got mine, It’s called the nervous system”), and the Preamble to the United States Constitution (“we the people, in order to form a more perfect union”). Unlike their math and grammar counterparts, though, many of the America Rock history episodes of the series have not aged well. Songs like “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” and “Elbow Room” celebrate rather than investigate the national past, and overlook and oversimplify the experiences of most Americans. In this time of heightened disinformation and struggles for racial justice, the looming fiftieth anniversary of Schoolhouse and the 250^th birthday of the United States offer the opportunity to celebrate with a new generation of programming that teaches children how to engage with difficult subjects like slavery, immigration, and racial segregation. In this talk, Dr. Ringel will examine the history presented by Schoolhouse Rock during the 1970s, and then consider subsequent strategies for teaching history to children that can serve as models for the new type of programming he hopes to introduce through this project.

Paul Ringel is an associate professor of history at High Point University. He is the author of Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918 (2015) and numerous articles about children’s literature and American children’s consumer cultures. His current work includes The William Penn Project, a public history project on a segregated black high school in High Point, North Carolina.

Making History through Handwriting: An Introduction to Manuscript Transcription

Are you interested in archival transcription and the mysteries it can unlock? Join us on January 13th as Julie Fisher and Sara Powell discuss transcription, its importance today, and tips you can use when transcribing manuscripts. Learn about transcription projects taking place across the United States and how to join them.

About our speakers

Julie A. Fisher holds a PhD from the University of Delaware and specializes in Early American and Native American history. She has been developing digital humanities projects over the past four years including serving as the Members Bibliography and Biography Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Philosophical Society (APS) and as a consulting editor with the Native Northeast Portal (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project) at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Before that she was the primary investigator for a National Park Service grant at the Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island. She first began transcribing and learning paleography skills for her first book, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. She is currently working on her latest project which examines language acquisition in seventeenth century southern New England.

Sara Powell is the assistant curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library at Harvard University, where she supports the development and use of the library’s pre-1800 collections, with an emphasis on medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Sara earned an MS in Library & Information Science from Simmons University and an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York. She has previously held research librarian positions at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and at Swarthmore College Libraries.

“From New Cultures to a New Regime: Washington and Cuzco in the 1810s”

OI Colloquium with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

This paper comes from a chapter of a book-in-progress, a wide-angle cultural history of the age of revolutions, ca. 1760-1825. Interweaving the stories of cities in North and South America, it argues that a synchronous and inter-related set of cultural changes took place in multiple Atlantic regions around 1800–spanning sociability, urban space, and family life–which created strikingly similar cultural foundations for the “second wave” of Atlantic revolutions post-1808.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a faculty fellow at the University of Southern California and a historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with a strong interest in law and empire. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and then in 2015 published a first book on a different topic: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard). His current book project is a cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, from the 1760s through the 1820s, which aims to rethink the era’s putative role in creating modern democratic politics.

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.

“The Evolution of Freedom: Free People of Color in the Revolutionary South”

OI Colloquium with Warren Milteer

This paper explores the changes in the social and political situation of free people of color in the U.S. South as well as the colonies of Louisiana and Florida during the age of Revolutions. It investigates the explosion in manumissions across the U.S. South as well as the backlash to the growing numbers of free people of color in the region.

Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. is an assistant professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and is the author of North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). He is currently working on a broader study of free people of color in the U.S. South, which is currently under contract. His publications include articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. He was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

“Preemptive Property: Native Power, Unceded Land, and Speculation in the Early Republic.”

OI Colloquium with Michael Blaakman

U.S. governments began selling future rights to huge swaths of unceded and unconquered Indian country in the 1780s and 90s, creating a form of property claim that shaped the land business. Situating public finance, land policy, and speculation within transnational debates about sovereignty and territoriality, Professor Blaakman will trace how white Americans of the early national era sought to circumvent Native power and persistence by forging an abstract property regime in real estate that did not yet exist—except in the teleology of settler colonialism.

Michael Blaakman is an assistant professor of History at Princeton University. A historian of revolutionary and early national America, his scholarship focuses on politics, empires, and North American borderlands, and his interests extend to include gender history, the history of capitalism, and microhistory.

Professor Blaakman’s first book project, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, investigates the political and financial culture of a frenzied land rush that swept the new republic in its first quarter-century. The project received the 2017 Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. With Emily Conroy-Krutz, he is editing a collection of essays that explore the imperial dimensions of the early American republic.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

Slavery and Freedom in the Era of Revolution: The Patriots’ Common Cause

OI Virtual Conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard University) and Robert Parkinson (Binghamton University).

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997). Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan. (PublicAffairs 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, most recently, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018-2019 President of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation.

A selected list of her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfeld-Wolf Book. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Robert Parkinson (Binghamton University) specializes in early American history, especially the American Revolution. His first book, The Common Cause: Creating Nation and Race in the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute with UNC Press) explores how questions of race collided with pressing issues of nation building at the Founding. It won the James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on American race relations. An abbreviated version, entitled Thirteen Clocks: How Race Made America Independent, is forthcoming from UNC Press in the spring of 2021.

Professor Parkinson was the 2006-2008 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow and also has held fellowships at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Library Company of Philadelphia, among several others.

His current book project, The Heart of American Darkness, is a microhistory about how the grisly murder of nine Indians on a tributary of the Ohio River in 1774 exerted a surprisingly powerful influence in the political and rhetorical life of the early American republic.

“Asserting Pregnancy in a Colonial Prison: Resounding Silences in Cecilia’s Record”

In 1784, Cecilia Conway—a maroon woman arrested in New Orleans—asserted that she was pregnant, thereby altering the trajectory of the state-sanctioned sexual violence and capital punishment inflicted upon her in response to her marronage. Cecilia was imprisoned at the height of a Spanish campaign against communities of cimarrones living outside New Orleans. The exchanges between officials and Cecilia noted by the men in power retain glimpses of how she navigated her capture, interrogations and multiple “medical” examinations. A restrained consideration of her life lays bare the local nexus of plantation slavery, medical “practices,” the prison and marronage.

Sarah Jessica Johnson‘s research and teaching are concerned with how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native people in the Caribbean and North America shaped textual and visual production in the colonial period. Her book project, provisionally titled , Forms of Escape: Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Maroons and Marronage, considers the lives of individuals who decided go maroon, the importance of kin and chosen family in those decisions, and some of the unexpected places that maroons are located when they trigger the archive. She has published in the journals Transition and Portable Gray and has a chapter on François Macandal and translation forthcoming in the book Carribean Literature in Transition, Volume One: 1800-1920, Oxford University Press, 2020.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

“A Curious List and a Trip to Sierra Leone:’ Or, Why Obour Tanner Bought Rev. Hopkins’ The System of Doctrines in 1793?”

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

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

Slavery and Freedom in the Era of Revolution: Freedom, Critical Caribbean Perspectives

OI Virtual Conversations with Laurent Dubois (Duke University) and Natasha Lightfoot (Columbia University)

Additional resources on this topic recommended by Professors Dubois and Lightfoot

Laurent Dubois (Duke University) specializes in the history and culture of the Atlantic world, with a focus on the Caribbean and particularly Haiti.

Professor Dubois is the co-author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books and the author of seven monographs, including A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean (Omohundro Institute with partner UNC Press) which won the 2005 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Called “a milestone in the ever-expanding historiography of Atlantic slave emancipation” (The International Journal of African Historical Studies), A Colony of Citizens examines the profound effect the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean had on concepts of universal rights. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean, co-authored with Richard Turits (UNC Press).

He is currently beginning work on a history of the French Atlantic. He served on the OI Council 2008-2011.

Natasha Lightfoot (Columbia University) specializes in slavery and emancipation studies, and black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History.

She is the author of Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press). Called “a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the aftermath of emancipation” (Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877), Troubling Freedom tells the story of how Antigua’s newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation.

Professor Lightfoot is currently at work on Fugitive Cosmopolitans, a study of enslaved people born in the British Caribbean but illegally traded to islands of other empires who attempted to use their British subjecthood to emancipate themselves after the 1834 British abolition.