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Journal of the Early Republic
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.19

Number of Followers: 15

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ISSN (Print) 0275-1275 - ISSN (Online) 1553-0620
Published by Project MUSE

[305 journals]

Seeking Abolition: Black Letter Writers and the Pennsylvania Abolition
Society in the Era of Gradual Emancipation
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  Abstract: On June 11, 1804, James Gipson, a slave, addressed a letter to the secretary of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), Thomas Harrison, seeking an explanation for why the Society had been slow to help him secure his liberation. Gipson employed a conventional opening: "I now take this opportunity to let you kow that Iam well and Hope Ing thes few lines will faind You thesame[.]" After his polite greeting, however, Gipson's tone changed abruptly. He told Harrison, "I am very sory thaht You think so litle of me If it was In my power as it is in yours I would Dow more for yu but I am A Slave and ever expect to be[.]" "[F]or all You mean to do for me dear sisters And brothers I am sory that you Think so litle of me . ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Mourning a Murder: The Death of John Pierce, Local Politics, and
British-American Relations
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  Abstract: On April 25, 1806, the sailor John Pierce was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sailing off the coast of Sandy Hook, near the entrance of New York City's harbor, Pierce and the rest of the crew of his brother's coastal sloop Richard encountered a trio of British warships blockading the harbor. The Royal Navy stationed the warships, the HMS Leander, Cambrian, and Driver, off the shores of New York in order to search every craft entering the harbor for contraband. Intent on forcing the Richard and other vessels approaching the harbor to come about to be searched, Captain Henry Whitby of the HMS Leander fired three warning shots at the sloop. Jesse Pierce, master of the Richard, and Hezekiah Pratt, master of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction: "What's in a Name'"
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  Abstract: The words we use matter, yet they undergo constant change in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. Pick up a text, and without looking at the publication date you can place it within its era based just on the words it uses (or omits) to describe human actors, the standards for capitalization, and the use of hyphens. In turn, current terms root us in our own era with attendant questions, concerns, and historiographical conversations. Scholars strive to use words that describe group or individual identity in ways that navigate between the words contemporaries themselves used and words that seem to us to be clear, accurate, faithful, respectful, and, frankly, helpful. To this last point, one answer to our forum's ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian' The Limitations of
Broad Terms
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  Abstract: On election night of 2020, CNN aired a report on voting patterns in the United States. The graphic, which the news station used to display electors' decisions by race, showed the presidential selections of white, Latino, Black, Asian, and "something else" citizens. Over the next days, Native people took to social media in a virtual giggle–fest and generated a wealth of viral critiques of the "something else" label. Indigenous grandmothers, teens, and tribal leaders posted memes renaming archetypal American books and movies featuring Native Americans—time–honored classics like The Something Else in the Cupboard and Daniel Day–Lewis in the Last of the Something Elses—and sharing images of themselves smirking in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
"I was born a slave": Language, Sources, and Considering Descendant
Communities
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  Abstract: We were reverent as our moment of silence acknowledged, very briefly, how much our work together would never be able to recover. It wasn't my first time in a county clerk's office looking at official documents for traces of African Americans' lives. It wasn't Shea Brown's first visit either. He is a deputy county clerk in Fayette County, Kentucky. His work requires him to preserve, organize, and comb through government records daily. When we paused, Brown and I had spent a little more than an hour looking at the pages of a sample of county deed books from the early nineteenth century. "Who was he'" my colleague at the Fayette County Clerk's office asked, "Nathaniel' We just don't have . . ." We took a beat. I ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Black and African American
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  Abstract: In June 2020, the Associated Press and The New York Times finally conceded that Black people, their political movements, and cultural and intellectual productions were worthy of a capital "B." When they could no longer ignore the pervasive white supremacist violence, public health crises, and economic precarity facing Black Americans, mainstream media companies decided to capitalize the "B" in "Black." The change recalled the hollow performance of "recognition and respect" associated with their decision to capitalize "Negro" nearly 100 years earlier. What Black intellectuals said over a century ago remains true today—semantics will not "solve the race problem." Nevertheless, American racial grammars are always ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
White/white and/or the Absence of the Modifier
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  Abstract: On January 6, 2021, a crowd of mostly white men took advantage of the privilege of their whiteness. When they rammed through gates and guards, ambled through the U.S Capitol building, grinned and took selfies, waved a Confederate battle flag, and destroyed federal property, they did not meet the same swift, brutal response from law enforcement that Black Lives Matter protestors experienced just months prior. In the summer of 2020, multi-racial crowds, led by Black activists, marched to stop the murder of Black people by police and to call for greater equity in American institutions. The white protestors on January 6 opposed these very changes, displaying anger, fear, and anxiety about the potential fragility of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
"What's in a Name'": They/Them
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  Abstract: They and them are not, of course, names—these are pronouns, a class of linguistic subtleties that draw little attention but convey a great amount of information in English and many other languages. Pronouns indicate many things, among them ownership, a person or thing's relationship to action, and—central to my inquiry here—gender. In English, most verbs bring gender with them; she hauled the suitcase out of the trunk, he went to the store. In historical scholarship, it is common, even expected, to assume a person's gender and thus pronouns based on a name; a birth, death, or marriage record; or facts about a person's life, such as whether they gave birth to a child, owned property, etc. These assumptions are so ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Disability
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  Abstract: In her exceptional book Birthright Citizens (2018), Martha Jones begins with an extended reading of William Yates's 1838 treatise Rights of Colored Men. Jones glosses Yates's argument: "Racism had led to 'legal disability': exclusion from militia service, naturalization, suffrage, public schooling, ownership of real property, office holding, and courtroom testimony." The language is Yates's, but the punctuation grammatically suggests something uncomfortable about the phrase "legal disability" even as Jones works to capture a quality of Yates's argument by using it. On the surface, the phrase reads like an ableist metaphor used toward the ends of exposing racist legal barriers. And yet, Yates almost certainly ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Survivance: About Process and Historical Structures
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  Abstract: Expanding, updating, and renewing our methodological, linguistic, and pedagogical toolkits enriches both our fields and our work; historical analysis is at its most exciting when informed by previously unconsidered contexts and possibilities. No one methodology asks all there is to ask. By attending to and being open to learning from the innovation, ethical inquiry, theoretical reformulation, and experimentation in complementary fields, it is possible to refresh or cultivate new points of inquiry. Scholars and practitioners in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) have much to offer their colleagues working in the fields of colonial America and the early U.S. republic. Sitting with unfamiliar words or ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Reconsidering Theory and Accountability in Early American Studies
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  Abstract: In his 1969 masterpiece on modern Native life, Dakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. lambasted academics who studied American Indian peoples. The fourth chapter of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, which is ironically titled "Anthropologists and other friends," begins by pronouncing that "Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. [Because] Indians have Anthropologists." With his trademark biting wit, Deloria bemoans scholars clad in "Bermuda shorts" and "Australian bush hats" for viewing Native people and nations as objects for "PURE RESEARCH" and producing esoteric theoretical debates that were completely divorced from Dakota intellectual traditions and concerns. As he put it "Academia ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Names, Terms, and Politics
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  Abstract: What is the duty of the historian to this particular moment in human history, and how do we align that with our duty to recounting the past' All of these essays are rooted in deep historiographical knowledge and deep knowledge and experience of the politics that produced these historiographies. At every level, they challenge us to consider what we take for granted in our writing, from audiences to contexts to words and language; and how that taking-for-granted implicates us in what is at stake in our current political moment.Some of these authors push back against gatekeeping masquerading as professionalism. Such grammar or framework policing has the potential to obstruct new ways of conceptualizing our world and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Creatively Anachronistic Grammars of Power
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  Abstract: A decade and a half ago, Eric Slauter identified "a trade deficit" between literary and historical studies of the early modern Atlantic world. "Even as literary scholarship has become markedly more 'historical,' " he lamented, "it has apparently become less marketable to historians." However economically depressed the early republic department of the Atlantic paradigm might be today, the two literary contributors to this historian-dominated forum, Sari Altschuler and Greta LeFleur, have shifted the balance of payments. Altschuler reminds historians that disability began as a legal term with no reference to physical bodies or medical diagnoses, pointing to the power dynamics embedded in all of the words discussed in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick
Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano (review)
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  Abstract: This volume is the fruit of a conference held to examine Ireland and America as places that were both shaped by, and actively shaped, empire and revolution. Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano have done an excellent job in selecting and drawing together thirteen broadly ranging, both chronologically and geographically, contributions to achieve their aim of complicating current understandings of both places. Written by renowned experts in Atlantic history, the essays employ a wide range of sources to interrogate various aspects of empire and revolution, all engaging with the central comparative of the volume to frame their studies. The essays in Part One provide direct comparisons between Ireland and America on ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
North of America: Loyalists, Indigenous Nations, and the Borders of the
Long American Revolution by Jeffers Lennox (review)
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  Abstract: Jeffers Lennox has given us a fresh, interesting, and in some ways a novel perspective on the shaping of the American revolutionary struggle and the birth of the new republic. North of America makes a multi-faceted argument that comprehending the revolution must take into account the actions and motives of territories and groups who rejected the patriot cause. Specifically, this meant loyalist populations and a range of Indigenous nations to the north of the thirteen rebellious colonies. In concert or acting independently, these groups rallied to hold the Canadian provinces for the Crown and traditional homelands for the tribes. In so doing, they forced the rebels to consider the nature of their revolution and of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin (review)
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  Abstract: After a demonstration of Jacques Charles's hot air balloon in Paris in 1783, skeptical observers asked Benjamin Franklin what good the invention might do. "Eh!" Franklin supposedly replied. "Of what use is a new-born baby'" We might ask Serena Zabin a similar question about The Boston Massacre: A Family History: of what use is a family history of the Boston Massacre'Zabin takes a refreshing new look at the residents and relationships of late-colonial Boston as British troops arrived in autumn of 1768. With her rich knowledge of Boston's physical and social geography, she sets the scene in a small but tempestuous town of 16,000 people, where the arrival of "roughly 2,000 men, 380 women, and 500 children" made a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories by
Gabriel J. Loiacono (review)
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  Abstract: How Welfare Worked in the Early United States explores the lives of five people connected to the poor-relief system of early-republic Rhode Island. In clear, accessible prose, Loiacono assumes the posture of a fly on the wall in council meetings, along small-town sidewalks, and as working-class people interacted with agents of the local government. Using a truly remarkable, and remarkably comprehensive, set of town, county, and state records, he contextualizes the experiences of individuals within a Janus-faced apparatus that was designed to serve one half of the population of a town while expelling the other. In following the lives of William Larned (an overseer of the poor), Cuff Roberts (a free Black ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution
by Max M. Edling (review)
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  Abstract: Americans have never fully agreed on the nature of the U.S. Constitution. As jurists and legal scholars have debated and re-interpreted concepts like originalism and the extent of executive power, historians have long argued over the ideological and economic motivations of the framers as well as their racial and gender politics, imperial ambitions, and countless other considerations. Recent scholarship has demonstrated just how long a genealogy these debates have had, tracing their origins to the first decades after ratification as the framers themselves changed their positions and revised their interpretations of the document they drafted to reflect changing political realities.1 From James Madison to Samuel ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 by
Ricardo A. Herrera (review)
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  Abstract: The privations endured by the Continental Army during the Valley Forge winter encampment have been well documented by historians, yet efforts by General George Washington and his staff to alleviate the lack of provisions, supplies, and clothing have rarely been the focus of the numerous books that address Valley Forge. For example, while Bob Drury and Tom Clavin's book Valley Forge (New York, 2018) describes the transformation of the Continental Army during this winter encampment, highlighting Baron von Steuben's training of the troops, Alexander Hamilton's supporting Washington in the face of attacks by political rivals, and the Marquis de Lafayette's lobbying France for assistance, it does not address the crucial ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 15, March 1801–October 1804 ed. by
Hobson Woodward et al. (review)
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  Abstract: The previous Volume 14 of the peerless Adams Family Correspondence concludes with the departure of John Adams from Washington after his defeat for a second term as president in 1800 and prior to the inauguration of his successor. Volume 15 takes up the Adams family saga from the years 1801 until 1804. For the first time in the entire series, there are no letters between Abigail and John Adams; they would spend the final eighteen years of their marriage living together. There are many letters from John Adams to his surviving sons, John Quincy and especially Thomas Boylston; however, the majority of letters in this volume were written by Abigail. These letters recount plenty of family drama.To the great relief of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
  Issue No: Vol. 14 (2023)
Minds and Hearts: The Story of James Otis, Jr. and Mercy Otis Warren by
Jeffrey H. Hacker (review)
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  Abstract: "Siblings," wrote C. Dallett Hemphill, "are humanities' great shock absorbers, especially in times of accelerated change."1 Of the siblings that might provide a test case for such a dynamic, James Otis, Jr. and Mercy Otis Warren certainly fit the bill. Otis and Warren were two of the leading voices of the American Revolution in Massachusetts. James Otis, Jr. is best known for his 1761 denunciation of writs of assistance before the Massachusetts Superior Court. The writs case rendered Otis an "instant hero with restive Bostonians" (17). He served in the state legislature and became renowned for his oratory against imperial overreach. Unfortunately, Otis's career shined bright, but short. By 1773, Otis's listing as a ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their
Arabic Letters, & an American President by Jeffrey Einboden (review)
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  Abstract: Did Thomas Jefferson have knowledge of the presence of Muslims in the territories over which he presided' Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives is an admirable attempt to decisively answer this question with a "Yes." While digging in various archives for Arabic writings from antebellum America, Einboden discovered two Arabic manuscripts that had been written by "runaway" slaves detained in rural Kentucky. A "frontier pioneer" named Ira P. Nash carried the manuscripts to Washington and handed them to the president on October 4, 1804. Based on his communications with Nash, Jefferson thought that these manuscripts "'contained' the Africans' own 'history, as stated by themselves'" (178). He thus sought to have them translated ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by
Wendy Jean Katz (review)
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  Abstract: Questions of who gets to call themselves a "real" American and whose histories should be centered have saturated the political arena in recent years. In the atmosphere of these heated debates, Wendy Jean Katz's analysis of nativism's ties to nineteenth-century art and artists appears very relevant. Examining the career of popular nineteenth-century artist William Walcutt—a man Katz accurately describes as "nativist adjacent" if not a card-carrying Know-Nothing—and his circle allows for a deeper understanding of how pervasive nativist ideals and symbols were in the illustrations, engravings, banners, and sculptures in the visual vernacular of the 1840s and 50s (xii). A True American goes beyond the more familiar and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the
Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch (review)
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  Abstract: Daniel Diez Couch's book American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic explores why people were interested in reading and writing fragments between 1787 and 1813. The argument is that fragments "pushed readers to move beyond their texts and imagine new ways of being for those with disabilities, seduced and ruined women, prostitutes, and the poor, among others" (164). The book's goal is to "recove[r] the history of a neglected aesthetic form that articulated distinct sociopolitical ramifications in the United States" because, Couch says, they "played a major role in reshaping the artistic and political landscape after the Revolution" (4). The book is excellent. If American ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil
Rights in the North by Zöe Burkholder (review)
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  Abstract: An African American Dilemma is Zöe Burkholder's third book about the history of racial inequality in American education, and like her previous offerings it provides a rigorous, insightful, and unsparingly clear treatment of its subject. The book's title refers to Gunnar Myrdal's classic, An American Dilemma, which examined the cycle of hatred and dispossession that sustained American racism during the early twentieth century. 1 Confronting the issue from the perspective of Black students, parents, and community leaders, Burkholder introduces a second dilemma: namely, whether to pursue civic equality through racially integrated schools or to build sustaining communities in racially separate schools. Both approaches ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for
American Religious Freedom by Spencer W. McBride (review)
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  Abstract: Roughly one year before the 1844 U.S. presidential election, nearly identical letters reached five men positioning themselves to compete for the highest political office in the land. All five letters contained the same question: "What will be your rule of action relative to us as a people, should fortune favor your ascension to the chief magistracy'" Here, "us" referred to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Latter-day Saints, or Mormons). Joseph Smith, the church's founding prophet and first president, was the one asking. He wanted to know one thing. Would any of the prospective candidates leverage the power of the federal government to defend the right of Latter-day Saints to ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00