Talking In The Library

Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences: Abolition and Empire in the Post-Revolution Atlantic World Emily Casey, Art Historian and Educator

The first half of the 19th century was an era of upheaval. The United States nearly lost the War of 1812. Partisanship became endemic during violent clashes regarding States’ Rights and the abolition of slavery. The battle between Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the Second Bank of the United States epitomized a nation in turmoil: Biddle, the erudite aristocrat versus Jackson, the plain-spoken warrior. The conflict altered America’s political arena. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vowed to kill the Central Bank, setting in motion the infamous Bank War that almost bankrupted the nation. Under Biddle’s guidance, the Second Bank of the United States had become the most stable financial institution in the world. Biddle fought Jackson with tenacity and vigor; so did members of Congress not under the sway of “Old Hickory.” Jackson accused Biddle of treason; Biddle declared that the president promoted anarchy. The fight riveted the nation. The United States is experiencing a reappearance of deep schisms w

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and soc

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London lab

In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance. Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives,

A conversation with Orchid Tierney, author of A Year of Misreading the Wildcats; Jena Osman, author of Motion Studies; and Andrea Krupp, curator of Seeing Coal.

In Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, Sarah L. Swedberg examines how conceptions of mental illness intersected with American society, law, and politics during the early American Republic. Swedberg illustrates how concerns about insanity raised difficult questions about the nature of governance. Revolutionaries built the American government based on rational principles, but could not protect it from irrational actors that they feared could cause the body politic to grow mentally or physically ill. This book is recommended for students and scholars of history, political science, legal studies, sociology, literature, psychology, and public health. Sarah Swedberg is a Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University where she has taught since 1999. She is a regular writer for Nursing Clio. Her book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, 2020) began with a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Professors on th

In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. Julie Miller earned her doctorate in United States history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2003. She taught in the history department at Hunter College, City University of New York, before moving to Washington DC. Her first book was Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (NYU Press, 2008). Her second book, Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York, was published by the Three Hills Imprint of Cornell University Press in October, 2020. It was begun with a Bernard and Irene Schwartz postdoctoral fellowship from the New-York Historical Society in 2006-2007. She is the curator of early American Manuscripts at the Library of Congress. Her chapter, “British Beginnings,” in The Two Georges: Parallel

When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation’s leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invent

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freed people strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation’s post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves

In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation. Michael Hattem received his PhD in History from Yale University. He has taught at Knox College an

Chris Kuncio, creator of Young Ben Franklin, discusses his efforts to reintroduce Benjamin Franklin to new audiences (including his own students) through walking tours, modern editions of his writings, curricula, and even his own four-part "hip-hopera," B. Franklin: Corrected and Amended. Visit http://franklinforprez.com to learn more about the unfolding project. Chris Kuncio is a born and raised Philadelphian who has spent the last seven years teaching twelfth-grade English at Mastery Charter Lenfest in Old City. For the same period, he has run a tour company where he has portrayed Young Ben Franklin. As the character, he produced rap album that covers Ben Franklin's entire life. He is currently trying to animate the album and generate more entertaining content around American history and civics.

What can we make of the fact that Robinson Crusoe was invoked in an 1835 issue of Mechanics’ Magazine in an article extolling the economic power of labor? Or that Harriet Jacobs patterned parts of her autobiographical slave narrative after Samuel Richardson’s Pamela? Or that The American Sunday School Union issued a cautionary poem about little girls’ tendencies to misread Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as an adventure tale and strike out on their own unsupervised pilgrimages? “On the Margins” examines how early novelistic fictions made their way into the reading lives of American readers who were disempowered along lines of race, gender, age, and economic status, and argues that we can begin to answer the questions posed above by attending to the material reconfigurations of these works in the emerging mass-print marketplace of the antebellum United States. This project sits at the intersection of novel theory, histories of reading, and histories of the book, and like many transatlantic studies of popular

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique

New Books for a New Nation: Jesuit Library Building in 19th-Century Chicago Exiled European-born Jesuits founded a network of Catholic colleges across the United States in the century following the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. At the heart of these colleges were libraries. Dr Kyle Roberts will talk about a collaborative teaching and research project to reconstruct the library of one such school, St Ignatius College (precursor to Loyola University Chicago). Working at the intersection of library, urban, and religious history, Roberts will explore how these libraries reveal the centrality of print to nineteenth-century Catholicism and the transnational, hybrid identities of urban American Catholics, balancing allegiances to the state, homeland, and global Catholic Church. Kyle Roberts is the Associate Director of Library & Museum Programming of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum. Prior to coming to the APS, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Public History and New Medi

Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites is organized around these sometimes chaotic and often generative forms and their most famous practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe and the magazine review; Ralph Waldo Emerson and the quarterly essay; Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the literary anthology; Margaret Fuller and the newspaper book review; and Frederick Douglass’s editorial repurposing of criticism from other sources. Revealing the many and frequently competing uses of criticism beyond evaluation and aesthetics, this insightful study offers a new vision of antebellum criticism, a new model of critical history, and a powerful argumen

In her Fireside Chat, Agnès Trouillet examined how the surveying of the city of Philadelphia and the province of Pennsylvania, notably under first Surveyor General Thomas Holme, laid out the map of governance imagined by William Penn. The use of property survey profoundly reshaped the space, ensuring land tenure but also granting proximity and access to the seats of political power. Dr. Agnès Trouillet is an Associate Professor of British Studies at University Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on contemporary and colonial political history, more specifically on Pennsylvania with which she has a special relationship after having taught four years at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the issue of division as generative of power, and her current project examines the role of William Penn’s settlement design in reshaping space and sovereignty in the Delaware Valley. She has a forthcoming article on the boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the volume from the American Philoso

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Mag

After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on—and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. The government was broke and paid its debts with loans from France. Political rivalry among the states paralyzed Congress. The army’s officers, encamped near Newburgh, New York, and restless without an enemy to fight, brooded over a civilian population indifferent to their sacrifices. The result was the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, a mysterious event in which Continental Army officers, disgruntled by a lack of pay and pensions, may have collaborated with nationalist-minded politicians such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Robert Morris to pressure Congress and the states to approve new taxes and strengthen the central government. A Crisis of Peace tells the story of a pivotal episode of George Washington's leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between sol

A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books. It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived e