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Abstract: In François-René, Comte de Chateaubriand's Atala, ou les amours de deux savages dans le désert (1801), the epilogue reveals Father Aubry's martyrdom at the hands of the Cherokees, as well as Chactas's return to Louisiana and the former site of the mission. The scene turns on this passage, in which a colonized landscape is rendered unrecognizable by the recurrence of its prior environmental state: "II traversa le désert, et arriva à l'endroit où étoit située la mission, mais il put à peine le reconnoître. Le lac s'étoit débordé, et la savane étoit changée en un marais impraticable" (202; He traversed the desert, and arrived at the place where the mission was situated; but he could hardly recollect it. The lake had ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: These four "Captain" poems come from one of the principal threads of World as Sacred Burning Heart, a collection of poems on the Spanish colonization of the Americas. These poems take moments from the lives and writings of various conquistadors—Columbus, Fernández de Oviedo, Las Casas, Cortés, and others—and examine the nature of captaincy. Specifically, they look at how power corrupts and insulates itself with self-justifications. Rather than attempt to control these poems by offering up interpretations, I will, in this brief preface, trace out various literary influences. While still a form of control, it is a more open-ended one. Rather than delimiting a creative text by providing a reading, it places the text ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: How can one reconcile the idea that the moment of severe crisis for the Nahuas of Central Mexico at the turn of the seventeenth century, a moment in which, according to prominent historian Charles Gibson, "Indian society seemed headed for extinction" (407), corresponds to the time another prominent historian, James Lockhart, has identified as the "golden age of writing in Nahuatl" (The Nahuas 70)' The idea that the moment in which a people "headed for extinction" coincides with the time in which these same peoples' literary production flourished is perplexing. Why would a people on the verge of extinction turn to the written word' And why would some of these Nahua tlacuiloque (singular: tlacuilo, "scribe") write ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The London Assurance Company's marine ledger, which today lies in the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives, is an orderly record of the company's daily sales of marine insurance policies. Each entry in the ledger represents a unique insurance policy, covering a specific vessel or parcel of property bound from one destination to another. Though written in old-fashioned script, the entries are clean, legible, and logical, and modern readers can learn to read them quickly. It would be easy to transcribe this ledger and upload it to the internet, where it would become a useful resource for economic historians and humanists using digital methods.As the transcribers and digitizers of the ledger worked ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When Mather Byles delivered a sermon to a young woman about to be executed for infanticide in 1751, he invoked the specter of her deceased child. Using direct address, Byles conveyed the infant's accusations to her: "Ah, unhappy Malefactor! The Voice of the innocent Blood cries aloud from the Ground to Heaven" (16). In doing so, Byles was engaging in a practice with a long tradition: sermonizing infanticide by amplifying the testimony of the "blood cry." The deployment of these interconnected media of bodily conveyance—speech and blood—reflected the belief that a living malefactor's crimes could be brought to light by the bodily expressions, metaphorical and literal, of those they had injured. Embedded within this ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799), a property dispute prompts the eponymous protagonist Arthur to employ an unusual strategy to establish his ownership: he tells a story. When Arthur and Mrs. Wentworth present conflicting claims to a deceased friend's portrait, Arthur "acquaint[s] this lady with the history of this picture" to "convince her of my ownership" (288). Arthur believes that he can "relate the mode in which it was lost in order to prove my title to it" (288). In this way, Brown's novel suggests that the right narrative can function as a form of securing property, making the case for the power of narrative to impact property claims within the legal sphere. As this article will demonstrate ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: With this first issue of the calendar year, thanks are due to the EAL editorial board members who concluded their service in December 2021: Kathleen Donegan (University of California, Berkeley); Laura Stevens (University of Tulsa); Edward Watts (Michigan State University); and Edward White (Tulane University). For half a decade, these individuals played a key role in shaping the journal through close attention to submissions in their fields of expertise. Their presence on the board will be missed, even as their scholarship continues to inform and inspire. On behalf of the journal and the MLA Forum on Early American Literature, I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to our stellar new appointees to the board: Yael ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Domestic literature first acquired prominence in the United States in the unlikely form of prose narratives about unmarried men and their delight in the pleasures of home. Washington Irving popularized domestic writing in this mode, and, though he is best remembered for such tales as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," he frequently lavished attention on domestic spaces, offering fond, detailed portraits of comfortable homes and cozy inns. In all three of his collections of the 1820s, Irving depicted both the estates of prosperous English gentry and rural cottages alike, describing everything from their gardens to their household clutter. As such critics as Matt Cohen, Laurel V. Hankins, and Jeffrey ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The ghost of Frank Luther Mott continues to haunt the study of early national poetry. Eighty-three years ago, in the first (1938) edition of his influential history of American magazines, Mott dismissively opined that "in verse, the period was deficient, so far as America is concerned" (176). While Mott was generally correct in noticing the preference among late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American readers for classic and contemporary English writers—including Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and especially Scott—he unfortunately failed to appreciate the American poems that ran beside the imports. For decades, Mott's characterization encouraged literary historians to disre- gard ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There are some inexterminables we tolerate as best we can: death, taxes, nuclear bomb-proof cockroaches, and New England Puritanism. Of this quartet, the last strikes me as the most historically contingent and least natural. New England Puritans are difficult to get rid of, no matter how unpalatable many may find them, and whether one is sympathetic, antagonistic, or somehow agnostic. But from whatever angle, they are always contenders for sustained and renewed attention.Consider: under travailing circumstances of 2020, "America's Hometown"—Plymouth—did its level best, masked and distanced, to celebrate the quadricentenary of that first deadly winter of the Mayflower's arrival, and in ways that equitably honor and ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 relocates its peripatetic female subjects from the periphery to the center of our vision in order to expand our generic and geographical horizons. The ten essays assembled here traverse the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth and consider genres from natural science to letters to fiction and regions from Peru to Newfoundland to Calcutta. They address a rich variety of primary sources featuring historical and fictional women whose experiences enlarge our sense of the possibilities transatlantic journeys provided for women's identity, for their interpretations of new cultures and interventions into their own, and for the scope of what might constitute a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: "The Federalist era started well," Wendell Bird begins chapter 1 of Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, before pivoting: "However, divisions were quick to appear" (10). This book exists firmly within the space of that "however," and in so doing it aims to contextualize and complicate the Federalist legacy by focusing on the true scope and impact of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. As Bird notes in his introduction, that legacy has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, which adds even more weight to considering its history, as the question "Do the Federalists deserve their newfound popularity'" is one that has implications for the future as well as the past ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Brigitte Fielder's Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America expertly navigates new discussions centering on nineteenth-century representations of racialization in the United States. Particularly, Fielder unpacks constructions of race to show their relations between racialized bodies and domestic spaces of family and nation. Race should not merely be traced biologically, she argues, but through "interpersonal relations at multiple scales" (4). She builds on the critical race scholarship of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Omi, and others who have paved the way for critical attention to the social constructions of race. Literature and visual culture from the nineteenth century ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the summer of 2001, with biographies of various Founding Fathers topping bestseller charts and capturing Pulitzer Prizes, journalist Evan Thomas coined the term "Founders Chic" to describe the newfound popularity of the founders and their stories. Scholars have since adopted the term—though in academic circles, Founders Chic is a pejorative. Trained historians criticize these hagiographies written, most often, by journalists for their uncritical celebrations of elite White men and their lack of scholarly rigor and analysis. Founders Chic centers individual personalities as the key drivers of history and elevates its subjects as examples of the genius, character, and integrity allegedly lacking in current ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher have assembled a fabulous collection of essays in Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century. Composed of an introduction, ten carefully written essays, an epilogue, and an afterword, Gosse and Waldstreicher's compendium is firmly held together by an argument that places the politics of Black people at the center of early US history. Gosse and Waldstreicher persuasively argue that from the Revolutionary era, Black Americans and their allies have shaped the US political system. Through formal political activity and protests, Black people and their allies have pushed the US political system forward in the shadow of slavery and white supremacy. The ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Wendy Raphael Roberts's Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelism masterfully argues in clear, elegant prose that poetry was not ancillary, but primary to the development of evangelical religion in colonial and early republican America. Roberts reveals that where we might have once considered evangelical verse secondary to other genres, like the sermon or conversion narrative, the linguistic effects of such texts emerge out of a poetic culture that viewed poetry as a crucial vehicle for religious expression. Marshalling an impressive array of archival and print sources to stage its argument, Awakening Verse stands as a landmark achievement in the literary historiography of early American ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Does reading lead to liberalization' If so, what reading, or kinds of reading' As Beth Barton Schweiger argues, what she calls "the ideology of literacy," which insists on a connection between literacy and liberalization, has been firmly entrenched in American culture since the middle of the nineteenth century. While it can seem obvious that a literacy-liberty correlation does not always hold historically, studies of the nineteenth-century US have long operated under the assumption that the North's higher rate of literacy was a contributing factor in the turn away from slavery, and that the South's relative lack of print publishing infrastructure enabled public opinion to support slavery. Schweiger's careful ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When, during his Western adventures chronicled in Roughing It (1872), Mark Twain passed through Salt Lake, he picked up a book "all men have heard of … but few except the 'elect' have seen." The Book of Mormon is, for Twain, a "sleepy" affair. The text's resonance with Old and New Testaments, its mix of antiquated prose and modern forms, and the abundance of repetitious phrasing all lead Twain to his infamous conclusion: "It is chloroform in print" (127).A new study by William L. Davis would have us revisit these supposedly soporific structures in a new light, or rather with the help of older ears. In Visions in a Seer Stone, Davis makes a significant contribution to the growing field of study surrounding early ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Theories of the archive in early American literary studies and critical race studies often converge on the boundary between archival scarcity and abundance. Scarcity: the textual scraps, silences, fragments, or outright exclusions of marginalized narratives in the early national archives of the United States. Abundance: in possibilities, for the unruly knowledges and theories that we might derive from such archival remnants and spaces; and for methods of interpretation that thwart structures of archival constraint that occlude racialized and otherwise marginalized lives. Theories of archival scarcity and abundance both feed early Americanist desires for expanding our horizons of knowledge about the past and modes ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: However much colonial Virginia or Massachusetts Bay have played outsized roles in the history of the United States, for scholars of English imperialism, the early seventeenth century tends to be overlooked. There was no coherent imperial policy driving colonialization, and James I has traditionally been portrayed as uninterested in empire. Lauren Working's exceptional book, The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis, offers a compelling case as to why we should pay greater attention to the early 1600s when exploring questions about the significance of the early English empire. The book focuses on how imperial experiences in the Americas transformed concepts and practices of ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Few books on Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century's world-famous explorer, scientist, and popular writer, are fully equal to their subject; this one is. It was created to accompany the exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, which opened in March 2020—just days after COVID-19 shut down the nation—and ran through July 2021. Fortunately the exhibit lives on, thanks to the online materials which include an illuminating video tour and a trove of additional educational materials, suitable for classroom use from elementary grades through college courses.Even more fortunately, the exhibit will live on for decades to come in ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Disasters are hard to avoid these days. Accounts of environmental, political, social, and technological (to name just a few) catastrophes inundate our newsfeeds with stories and images of suffering, loss, and death. Though each disaster is situated in a unique time and place, every disaster's narrative seems to follow a familiar arc. The earliest reports provide quantitative data and scientific analysis. Human interest stories about the victims and villains are then followed by accounts of rescue, resilience, and the inevitable postdisaster investigations charged with ascertaining causes and identifying interventions. Along the way, disasters as varied as warehouse fires, hurricanes, mass shootings, and global ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Colonial encounters were fraught with misunderstanding: what first reads like a colossal understatement becomes a testable proposition in historian Céline Carayon's stimulating, wide-ranging study of how the French and Indigenous Americans conversed other than verbally before 1700. In the history of Euro-Native relations in the Americas, the prevailing impression, in recent decades, at least, has indeed been one of misunderstanding. By turns ethnohistorical, postmodern and postcolonial, skepticism toward self-congratulatory colonial narratives has carried the day. Even the "middle ground," which Richard White memorably defined as a fragile but lasting rapprochement between the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Charles Walker and Liz Clarke's Witness to the Age of Revolution is a formidable teaching tool. This graphic history recounts the transatlantic "odyssey" of Juan Bautista Tupa Amaro, who was to spend forty years exiled in Spain and North Africa after his involvement in the massive revolt that, spearheaded among others by his much more celebrated halfbrother José Gabriel, shook the foundations of colonial rule in the Andes between 1780 and 1783. A prisoner between that year and the year 1822, and the sole survivor of the Tupa Amaro clan, Juan Bautista published an account of his captivity after regaining his freedom and traveling back to South America. Unable or unwilling to return to his native Cuzco, he died in ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Volume 2 of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (BA) is the sixth of ten volumes to appear since volume 1 (Genesis) was published in 2010. The first volume, also edited by Smolinski, set a high standard for those to follow (more anon). Taken as a whole, this ambitious publication project has made available for the first time Mather's massive synoptic commentary, a six-volume holographic manuscript of 4,500 folio pages housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Given that the present volume under review is part of the larger project, readers who want to the gain the most from BA and the recent reappraisal of Mather should consult Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America's First Biblical Commentary (Mohr Siebeck ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00 Issue No:Vol. 2 (2022)
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Abstract: It is the common lot of all who specialize in early American literature to have a complicated relationship to the discipline of history. On the one hand, in historians of early America we find some of our sharpest, most knowledgeable interlocutors, individuals who have vast experience reading many of the obscure genres and sources that sustain our field, and who are highly skilled at interpreting them. In historical scholarship, we find rich, sensitive portraits of the social and political worlds that witnessed the creation of our most critical primary sources and that formed the context for their circulation and reception. But on the other hand, in our exchanges with historians we risk being reminded of the ways ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Founded as "The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe (CRE)" (1972), which later changed its name to "The Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750–1850" (2005), in recent years this conference has expanded its focus globally, to include the Americas, Asia, and the Caribbean. Proceedings from this conference will be published in cooperation with the peer-reviewed online journal Age of Revolutions. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, this February event was the CRE's first virtual conference, spread over two weekends to combat "Zoom fatigue." As noted numerous times, one advantage was the truly international range of participants and guests. This fit well with the goals of this particular meeting, as the CRE, in soliciting ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There is something appropriate about a Zoom conference organized around the theme of diasporic experience. Historians, literary critics, and scholars of religion gathered virtually in early April—despite being scattered all over the globe—for a conference jointly hosted by the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. The conference centered on the complex role Jewish individuals and communities played in Atlantic trade, settlement, and revolutions between 1500 and 1900 and invited scholars to rethink the ways in which Atlantic Jewish history and early American studies might better mutually inform one another. The result was a ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In April 2021, former US Senator Rick Santorum declared to a conservative youth convention that "[white Christians] birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly, there isn't much Native American culture in American culture" (Philip Bump, "In Rick Santorum's Simplified Version of American History, Native Americans Are a Footnote," Washington Post, April 26, 2021). Pretending to mourn a cultural erasure even as he performed it, Santorum delivered these remarks during a pandemic that forced many people to rethink the notion of cultural and political "presence" during periods of enforced physical absence. In several respects, then, Santorum's obtuse ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: By now, it may be clichéd to remark on the resonances between academic work and the state of life during the pandemic, but a conference about the future of scholarly editions could not help but foreground alternative ways of conducting and disseminating research. At a conference hosted by the American Antiquarian Society in late May 2021, commemorating in part the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Spy, scholars of literature and history discussed their efforts to widen the scope of textual editing, whether by challenging limits of the canon or by conceiving of alternative forms of presenting and creating edited texts. Over two days, the conference's presenters and ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: ajay kumar batra is a postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. His research illuminates the heterodox visions of liberation and of the good life that Atlantic African diasporans generated during early modernity and the Age of Revolutions. His current book project examines how Black diasporans in the United States and the British Caribbean theorized abolition during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021.josé carlos de la puente luna is associate professor of history and director of graduate studies at Texas State University. He is the author of Los curacas hechiceros de Jauja: ... Read More PubDate: 2022-02-09T00:00:00-05:00
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