Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States

In Word or Deed:Practices of Print and Citizenship in the Early U.S. Nathan Jérémie Brink (bio) THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP: BLACK POLITICS AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. A LITERATE SOUTH: READING BEFORE EMANCIPATION. By Beth Barton Schweiger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. The third chapter and seventeenth verse of the book of Colossians encourages its readers that their word and deed must be unified practices of faith. The scripture mentions shared songs and teachings, but also suggests the ethical model of Jesus demands peace and mutual concern overriding the marks of religion, people groups, and states of freedom or bondage. This scripture would be familiar to many of the antebellum urban Black activists and rural White female southern readers explored in new monographs by Derrick R. Spires and Beth Barton Schweiger. Both Spires' The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States and Schweiger's A Literate South: [End Page 7] Reading Before Emancipation consider not only the words their subjects' read or wrote, but rather examine their literary activities as culturally and politically significant practices. For their subjects, word and deed were not distinct categories but enmeshed practices demonstrating what they thought, how they encountered ideas, and the ways they enacted them in the world. However, these books reveal that readers of the nineteenth century did not uniformly interpret what this text's proposition that in Christ there is neither slave nor free meant in their own context. They show the divergence between communities of interpreters, with some who celebrated Black humanity and fostered revolutionary social restructure, and others whose tacit or overt support upheld ideas of white superiority and the institution of slavery in the early United States. In the early nineteenth-century United States, to read, talk about, recite, or share printed material sometimes took on significant civic meaning. Spires and Schweiger each contribute to an expanding field of studies on the practices of literacy and print culture during this period that push the field beyond the literary and print culture of White cosmopolitan elites. The Practice of Citizenship and A Literate South both problematize the view that literary culture was a normative, uniform, or straightforward building block for citizenship and public virtue in the early American republic. Neither relies upon discussion of the public sphere initiated by Michael Warner that serves as a dominant paradigm for understanding the broader subject of literacy and print culture in this period.1 Spires examines the practices and agency of African American thinkers and activists and Schweiger explores the access and agency of rural, mostly White women in Southern states. Each show how their subjects' reading, writing, and participation in print culture represented important cultural and political practices. The Practice of Citizenship was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. It offers an exceptional balance between recovery of under-examined sources and a powerful framework for understanding the significance of Black ideas and practices of citizenship in the early-nineteenth century United States. Spires, an associate professor of English at Cornell University, takes care to recognize literary historians such as Frances Smith Foster, Jocelyn Moody, Carla Peterson, and others, on whose work he builds. In contrast to asking where Black print culture of the nineteenth century fits within theorization of the early American public sphere so commonly considered since Warner's application of Jürgen Habermas' theory, or as creating a what Joanna Brooks has theorized as a Black counterpublic in print, Spires method of "black theorizing" takes Black writers of the nineteenth century at their word.2 Instead of considering how Black ideas of the period fit scholarly paradigms "in a largely white-defined discourse," Spires pays close attention to primary sources, textual details, and social practices of Black writers, preachers, authors, and their communities whose thought and action developed "a practice of citizenship." Spires offers a refreshing suggestion to "base our working definitions of citizenship on black writers' proactive attempts to describe their own political work."3 This method of "black theorizing" in Spires draws upon the [End Page...

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

Reviewed by: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States by Whitney Martinko Richard Longstreth Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. By Whitney Martinko. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. x, 291. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5209-5.) Over the last quarter century, historic preservation has emerged as a major phenomenon in the reshaping of communities in the United States, but only much more recently has it begun to emerge as a significant factor in American intellectual thought—that is, how attitudes toward the physical past relate to a sense of identity and culture. The pioneering, and still very useful, volumes on the history of preservation in the United States written by Charles B. Hosmer Jr. are more a documentary narrative than an analytical exploration. Beginning with the remarkable studies of David Lowenthal, subsequent scholarship has begun to depart from examining preservation in a vacuum and to address its broader implications. As a result, we can begin to see how preservation entails much more than the documentary, legal, organizational, and technical frameworks established for protecting, repairing, or restoring historic buildings, structures, and landscapes. Preservation is a multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory, outlook toward how we retain things from the past that we consider significant through tangible or intangible means. Whitney Martinko's Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States is an important addition to this growing corpus of scholarly investigations. Hosmer's first book drove home the [End Page 330] fact that preservation efforts in the United States, far from being a new phenomenon, began well before the Civil War and generated a rich array of endeavors by the early twentieth century. Martinko reveals that veneration of colonial architecture was widespread by the 1820s, and active measures to protect portions of ancient Native earthworks in the Ohio River Valley were taken well before the early republic. Preservation, as she presents it, did not simply entail rescuing threatened vestiges of the past, as in the well-known case of George Washington's headquarters at Newburgh, New York, where efforts began in 1838 and were successfully consummated in 1850. Preservation could also mean keeping a country estate intact and in the family. While rebuilding the main house in a more modern vein, preservation could also entail saving fragments and undertaking visual documentation, including images in publications. While we would like to think that we are far more accomplished at saving historic properties today than two centuries ago, Martinko's investigation shows how contemporary some of the attitudes in the early republic seem today. The Native earthworks were partially saved to enhance the appeal to attract settlers to the Ohio Company's real estate venture in what became Marietta, Ohio. Some merchants in the Northeast sought to capitalize on their "ancient" buildings as preferable to the new commercial buildings of the 1830s and 1840s (p. 22). Many persons sympathetic to the past assumed a moral high ground, insisting that the most financially lucrative development was not necessarily the optimal one. Others sought to adapt old buildings as a means of remaining economically competitive. Martinko presents the many aspects of considering the historic built environment between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries in such a clear, thoughtful, and often engaging way that it can be easy for readers to lose sight of what a formidable endeavor this study represents. Some of the work discussed is well known to specialists in the history of preservation, but much of it lies in previously unexplored territory, and even finding the material was no mean feat. The result is not only a very rich investigation but also a revelatory framework for understanding how Americans have considered their physical heritage. Richard Longstreth George Washington University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Book Review| March 01 2015 Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution the Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. By Rozbicki, Michal Jan. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2011. x, 288 pp. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $24.50; e-book, $24.50.The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945. By Olwell, Victoria. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. 288 pp. Cloth, $59.95; e-book, $59.95.Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. By Cahill, Edward. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. 318 pp. Cloth, $65.00; e-book, $65.00. Michelle Neely Michelle Neely Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2015) 87 (1): 187–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865247 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michelle Neely; Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution the Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the United States, 1860–1945 Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States. American Literature 1 March 2015; 87 (1): 187–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2865247 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States by Sari Altschuler Kelly L. Bezio (bio) The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States. By Sari Altschuler. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Cloth, $55.00.) When tasked with writing the history of American medicine, it may seem counterintuitive to say that imagination, genre, and literary devices supply an integral part. We might concede that the body beset by diverse ailments in the early years of the republic provides excellent fodder for fiction. Think, for example, of American gothic thrillers about yellow-fever epidemics, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799), or a girl rendered strangely emotionally numb from a snakebite in the womb, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner (1861). However, we might also ask, don't such fictions simply reflect medical attitudes of the day about anesthesia or a devastating outbreak? In this monograph, Sari Altschuler makes the argument for why literature and literary study should not been seen as mere handmaidens to American medical history. Without a nuanced analysis of what she calls the medical imagination, our understanding of the healing arts in the early United States remains incomplete and impoverished. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States provides a fresh, provocative approach to medical history by uncovering how doctors in the early republic relied unquestioningly upon creative critical thinking and literary form in their pursuit of knowledge about health and well-being. Altschuler makes a valuable methodological intervention with this argument and introduces a new way to "move beyond a version of the field that principally uses empirical methods to study the rise of empiricism" (5). She questions a tendency to privilege historiographical narratives that are oriented toward unpacking the turn from medical rationalism and its heroic measures of bleeding, purging, and blistering patients to empiricism's reliance on clinical observation and scientific experimentation. Such a focus might bolster our confidence in what we see as the contemporary successes of medicine by recounting a progress narrative about how it all began. But is that shift how American physicians saw the driving force behind medicine's evolution in the nineteenth century? Altschuler's answer to this question is a resounding "no." The strength of Altschuler's method lies in bringing the critical tools [End Page 583] of science studies to bear on her analysis precisely because it exposes the different epistemological commitments of this earlier era. Its epistemic crises were not our own, which is why the imagination played such a crucial role—and why we can't continue to rely on rationalism and empiricism as the only conceptual frames for writing American medical history. Altschuler eschews looking to "important figures, milestones, and breakthroughs" to define the contours of this history (5). Instead, she draws on the work of Thomas Kuhn and other historians of scientific knowledge by focusing on epistemic crises during which "a central precipitating event, such as an untreatable epidemic disease, a significant discovery, or a political crisis, unseats central ideas about the health of the human body" (13). Developing a history around moments when knowledge was challenged and innovation demanded establishes the inseparability of literary and medical pursuits. American practitioners relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" to construct new medical knowledge. Five chapters each focus on a specific "precipitating event": the American Revolution, yellow fever, global cholera pandemics, emerging sciences of anatomical difference, and the discovery of anesthesia. In each case, imaginative experimentation complemented either rationalist explanations of embodied phenomena or empiricist observations of the physical world. For example, physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush sought to solve the problem of how to re-conceive of health in republican terms. Instead of depicting the heart as a king or ruler over the body, he envisioned it as an empty ocean to be filled with blood only after blood vessels did their work. Another chapter discusses the unpredictable movements of cholera across the globe, which led to the fear that mapping alone could not account for the disorder as a dynamic, living system. Gothic forms allowed friends Edgar Allan Poe and John...

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States, by Noelani Arista The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States. By Noelani Arista. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 300 pp.) Joy Schulz Joy Schulz Metropolitan Community College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2020) 89 (1): 159–160. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.1.159 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joy Schulz; Review: The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai‘i and the Early United States, by Noelani Arista. Pacific Historical Review 1 February 2020; 89 (1): 159–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.1.159 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires Peter Wirzbicki (bio) Keywords Print culture, Citizenship, African American thinkers, Political theory, Literary analysis The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Derrick Spires, an associate professor of English at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States in part to respond to the sense that discussions about print culture, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation had left out black participants and visions. The resulting work, though, is far more interesting than if Spires simply had applied the theories of Jürgen Habermas or others to early African American literature. Instead he develops his own theory of how black thinkers and writers developed what he calls a "practice of citizenship." Scholars working on black radicalism, American print culture, and antebellum politics will find this a provocative and fruitful read. The book uses a rich diversity of sources, a wide array of theoretical perspectives from [End Page 379] contemporary critical theory, and close readings of both well-known and sometimes unfamiliar sources to establish that antebellum black thinkers were developing novel ways to think about power and citizenship through engagement with a literary public sphere. At the center of Spires's argument is a convincing and important re-theorization of citizenship. Black thinkers and activists in the antebellum period—men and women like Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, James McCune Smith, William J. Wilson, Francis Watkins Harper, and many others—conceived of citizenship, he argues, less as a formal legal right defined by the state and more as a practice, something that is produced through energetic and engaged political activism, especially through an assertive print culture. Black thinkers conceived of citizenship as what you do, in other words, not who you are or how the state sees you. By adding a valuable literary-studies perspective to such recent historiographical studies of the history of citizenship by legal historians like Barbara Welke and Martha Jones, Spires's work shows how the creation of citizenship was a cultural and literary project as much as a political one. The black press plays a central role in this construction of citizenship. Spires sees the emergence of a black print culture as a central "space" in which "black writers constituted community outside of the nation-state form" (9). It was in pamphlets, newspapers, and short fiction that black writers theorized these new practices of citizenship. He begins in the immediate post-revolutionary period with an analysis and discussion of the "neighborly" ethos that black Philadelphians preached in the wake of the famous yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. Spires argues that black Philadelphians sought to mobilize under the hegemonic banner of civil republicanism while simultaneously expanding this notion of civic virtue by incorporating "neighborliness," a trait that had a "more democratic ethos of equality and inclusion" than white thinkers tended to (56). The relatively restrained and deferential citizenship of Jones and Allen is soon supplanted by the more assertive "circulating" citizenship of the Colored Convention movement. Spires shows how accounts of these conventions were meant to be printed and published, "circulating" well beyond their immediate contexts. Historians may be interested in how Spires centers debates about state citizenship, in contrast to some historiographical interpretations that have tended to focus on the creation of [End Page 380] national citizenship. Black thinkers also increasingly engaged with questions about "economic citizenship." Spires discusses debates between William J. Wilson and James McCune Smith about "black aristocracy" and the "best average colored citizen" (143). Together, Spires shows that a rich and vibrant debate about the meaning of republicanism, market life, and economic citizenship occurred in the black press. Next, Spires turns his attention to "critical citizenship," especially as modeled by the briefly lived Anglo-African Magazine. For Spires, "critical citizenship" disrupts and unsettles otherwise fixed and unified norms of white supremacy and white citizenship. Critical citizenship is "intrusive"; it invades the settled spaces of white politics that seek to...

Summary This work addresses the circulation of legal literature from the Hispanic world into the British Atlantic during the 18th century and within the broader context of the Americas. It wants to break free from the dichotomy between British and Hispanic Atlantic by looking at the early Americas as a space where legal literature moved across borders. The case study analyzed in this work is that of the 17th century Spanish jurist Juan de Solórzano Pereira and its circulation in the British Atlantic. By analyzing the writings of a number of legal practitioners from the British Atlantic (such as James Otis, James Abercromby, and Adam Smith), I discuss the extent to which their knowledge of Solórzano’s work showed a transnational approach when discussing the relationship between the thirteen American colonies and their British mother-country. This study calls scholars’ attention to a number of networks of circulation for legal literature that possibly had more influence than has usually been acknowledged on the legal history of the United States of America. Ultimately, the article shows that much is left to discover about the practical, generative, aspects of legal history in an early modern scenario where Europe and the Americas need to be seen in more nuanced and balanced ways.

Reviewed by: Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America by Karen A. Weyler Katy L. Chiles (bio) Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America. By Karen A. Weyler. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. 311. $69.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $24.95 ebook) Thanks to scholarship such as Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic (1992), Christopher Looby’s Voicing America (1998), and Sandra Gustafson’s Eloquence is Power (2000), scholars generally understand the role that the written and spoken word played in the culture of the early United States. However, what we have not known in great detail—and what Karen Weyler so eloquently describes for us—is specifically how people outside of the middle and upper classes used the power of the printed word to carve out a place for themselves in early America. Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America recounts how many persons considered “outsiders” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries entered into the world of print and, in so doing, expanded what we might think of as traditional notions of authorship. In her book, Weyler focuses on Phillis Wheatley, a young African American female poet enslaved in Boston during the Revolutionary era; Briton Hammon and John Marrant, two African American men who composed wildly popular Indian captivity narratives; Samson Occom, a well-known Mohegan sachem and Presbyterian minister who traveled extensively both in British North America and in Indian country; Deborah Sampson, a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to fight in the Revolutionary War; and Clementia Rind, a Williamsburg, Virginia, [End Page 497] widow who inherited and began editing her late husband’s Virginia Gazette; and mechanics—those self-employed as printers, barbers, and metalsmiths, among other things—who published in association with their professional societies. Empowering Words gives us a panoramic view of the kinds of writing and publishing we can see when we broaden our horizons beyond the writing taking place in and around the State House in Philadelphia in the 1770s and 1780s. Empowering Words generates a number of key insights. One of the things that it does particularly well is situate the works of each of these figures within the broader context of their genres. For instance, many scholars—myself included—have noted how unique Phillis Wheatley was because of her age, gender, race, enslaved status, and provocative poetry. But Weyler asks us to consider Wheatley as one of many practitioners of the broadside elegy, a very popular print format in early America. Drawing upon her extensive archival research, Weyler helps us understand how Wheatley’s famous 1770 broadside edition of “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of . . .George Whitefield” partakes of a much broader tradition of elegies and of broadsides. This chapter gives us not only a new perspective on Wheatley and her famous elegy but also the print history of early American broadside elegies. The same holds true of her work on Samson Occom’s A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772). Here, we learn not just about Occom as an “exceptional” Native American who chose to write and publish in English alphabetic print, but also as one of many ministers who used the popular form of the execution sermon to his own ends. Empowering Words will be of interest to those who have more “literary” leanings, those who have more “historical” leanings, and those who have a mix of the two. The book gives us a meticulous and archivally rich history of each of these texts; it exemplifies, particularly on the level of print culture, a version of what Franco Moretti has termed “distant reading.” But at the same time, this wide perspective does not sacrifice a close look at the texts, both in terms of their material form and their linguistic complexity. Additional payoffs [End Page 498] include expanded and more complex ideas about authorship, collaboration, and publication. Weyler’s book will be important to those interested in early American history, literature, and print culture; this book engagingly demonstrates not how the powerful use words, but, rather, how cultural outsiders become empowered by the process of empowering words. Katy L. Chiles...

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewSiân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.Bridget M. MarshallBridget M. MarshallUniversity of Massachusetts, Lowell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSiân Silyn Roberts’s book is one response to Leslie Fiedler’s classic question about why American literature is so very gothic. She argues against Fiedler’s notion that the American gothic’s appeal lies in our collective national guilt about events of the past (destruction of native people, slavery, etc.) with the very logical response that it seems unlikely that the gothic’s popularity is the result of readers dwelling upon such unpleasant thoughts; indeed, as Roberts aptly says, such an activity seems “the very antithesis of an appealing pastime” (27). Instead, she suggests that what fueled the popularity of the gothic in early and nineteenth-century America (and what emerges from American gothic novels specifically) is a complicated and then-emergent idea about the individual that questioned Lockean subjectivity and offered new options for citizens of a new nation. Roberts posits that “the gothic form thrived in the decades following the Revolution because it offered new narrative possibilities at the level of social relations and psychological life” (27). Roberts opens her argument with a thorough and nuanced reading of Locke and other philosophers on the figure of the modern individual. She then traces the contradictions to these notions of subjectivity throughout a wide array of early American fiction (both novels and short stories). Her selection of fiction is expansive, with a mix of now-canonical texts along with underread texts, providing a considerable depth of examples demonstrating her view of this new individualism’s emergence.The first chapter focuses on a significant but obscure novel, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800), an American gothic novel that employs every classic British gothic convention of the Radcliffe/Walpole school. Facing off against Charles Brockden Brown (who issued his edict on the American gothic’s intentionally autochthonous origins just one year prior), Wood set her novel in France rather than on US soil. As Roberts argues, “Wood does not distance herself from the task of literary autochthony; rather, she shifts its terms to include a reconfiguration of British cultural materials for an American audience” (32). Roberts is right to point out that for readers of the late 1790s, American gothic was British gothic since the earliest gothic novels available in the United States were British reprints. This fact about literary culture in the early United States, and the centrality of circum-Atlantic trade to culture in this period, is one of the aspects that feeds into the larger argument that Roberts makes in the book, which is that the early United States was a hybrid place, with writers and readers from numerous and divergent cultural backgrounds. Roberts identifies a new idea about the individual appearing in the gothic novels produced in the early United States, particularly in evidence in her reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), where she suggests that “Gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body” (41). Through close readings of all of Brown’s major novels, along with other American gothic tales, she proposes that “as a national literary style, the gothic form has less to do with [Fiedler’s theory of] repression and return […] than with imagining ways of making a nation out of disparate and diverse parts” (57). Perhaps American gothic is a kind of Frankenstein—both the doctor who created the creature and the creature itself—in that it assembled itself from assorted parts and then took on a life of its own. Roberts understands this hybridity to be not just within the form of the gothic but constitutive of American national character.In chapter 2, Roberts deftly connects captivity narratives by Mary Jemison and Mary Rowlandson with several of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, using Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to show how these texts convey the idea that community is more significant than individuality. Her use of rhizomes is effective in the exploration of familial and social relationships in Brown’s novels, but it also functions at a conceptual level for her book, in which she unpacks American gothic as a concept greater than the individual texts that comprise it. As she shows, American gothic is distinct but not for the reasons that have been claimed before (by Brown, or Fiedler, or any number of other critics).Chapter 3 pursues the history of “common sense” philosophy in America and the way gothic texts—including Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” (1820), several stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836)—question whether such a philosophy can make sense of a new American culture of diverse populations; her selected stories, frequently featuring characters capable of metempsychosis, “address the challenge of cross-cultural understanding for a national community that thinks of itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts” (87).The final two chapters focus on individual novels rather than the groupings of texts that were so intriguing in the earlier chapters of the book. Chapter 4 focuses exclusively on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), concentrating on the exclusion of Hester and Pearl from sympathy, from community, and ultimately from subjectivity. Continuing the inquiry into excluded outsiders, chapter 5 concentrates on slavery, using William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) as the primary text.Roberts finally accounts for the popularity of the gothic form on the grounds that “it prepared a culturally diverse readership to think of itself as very much part of a transatlantic world of exchange” (171). Readers interested in US intellectual history, political philosophy, and the history of the novel generally or the gothic specifically will be particularly interested in Roberts’s study. Her selection and close reading of a wide array of literary texts is engaging, drawing intriguing connections to demonstrate a curious coherence around a set of profound questions about nationhood, selfhood, and citizenship. 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Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Betsy Klimasmith (bio) Keywords Fiction, Literary history, Print culture Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States. By Thomas Koenigs. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Cloth, $45.00.) [End Page 672] With Founded in Fiction Thomas Koenigs sets out to write a literary history of the United States before 1865 that de-centers the novel genre even as it "recovers the array of theories and varieties of fictionality that early U.S. writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing political and social questions of their moment" (2). Koenigs calls attention to the multiplicity of fictional forms from the period that are not novels and convincingly argues that retrospectively labeling them as such obscures their richness and diversity as well as their distinctness from the novel genre. Koenigs explores a wide variety of texts: novels and other fictions along with the reviews and paratextual material that, he argues, explain to us not just how the texts were read, but the reasons why fictionists, as Koenigs calls them, wrote the kinds of texts they did. Bringing Catherine Gallagher's influential focus on fictionality to the U.S. context, Koenigs argues, allows him to make visible the range of roles fictional texts played in their uneven and incomplete movement from instrumental form to literary art. Founded in Fiction makes a convincing argument that readers and writers of the varieties of extended fiction that proliferated during this period understood fiction's worth and impact in many ways—didactic, political, and aesthetic, to name a few. In addressing the early U.S. print landscape, Koenigs explores familiar and forgotten texts as he moves through the decades, at first chronologically and then thematically. He persuades that a diversity of strange and rich fictional forms and aims makes early American literature exciting, especially when we take seriously and at face value responses to fictional texts, including sermons and reviews, but also the paratext and responses to fiction found within the works themselves. Though arguing that readers should not "back project" ideas about genre and reading onto older texts seems to run counter to the project of literary history, the wealth of material Koenigs presents underscores his point that we need to look more closely at fiction in the U.S. through a frame that encompasses the period's strange diversity. The first half of Founded in Fiction looks at U.S. literary production through 1820, an era whose strange and unwieldy fictional texts benefit most from Koenigs's approach. The categories into which the texts are divided are familiar: Chapter 1, for instance, puts "Tales of Truth"—or what Koenigs terms "nonfictional novels"—like Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy in conversation with one another, while Chapter 2, "Republican Fictions," considers Modern Chivalry, The Algerine Captive, and Wieland. These chapters read the literary texts in [End Page 673] conversation with reviews, paratext, prefaces, and comments about fiction—especially novels—expressed within the text by narrators and characters. Chapter 3 explores the least familiar group of texts and authors: the numerous extended fictions including Margaretta, Dorval, and Female Quixotism written by U.S. women between 1800 and 1820. This chapter offers a useful catalog of the decades' many overlooked fictional productions, but the sheer number of the texts mentioned means that attention to any single work (besides Margaretta), remains limited. In the second half of the book, which covers the decades during which novels became a more familiar and recognizable form (1820–1850), Koenigs moves to a more thematic treatment of fictionality, with chapters on historical fiction, hoaxing, social criticism, and enslavement. This approach pairs texts and authors—sometimes in expected ways, like Cooper and Sedgwick (history) and Sheppard Lee and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (hoaxes), and sometimes with more surprising duos, like the juxtaposition of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lippard's The Quaker City (social criticism). While it was heartening to see Koenigs attend to the thorny question of whether novels could provide white readers unmediated access to Black consciousness, which Frederick Douglass...

What was American welfare like in George Washington’s day? It was expensive, extensive, and run by local governments. Known as “poor relief,” it included much of what we would now call welfare and social work. Unlike other aspects of government, poor relief remained the same, in structure, between the establishment of British colonies in the 1600s and the New Deal of the 1930s. How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories tells the story of poor relief through the lives of five people: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was repeatedly banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor, an unwed mother who cared for the elderly and struggled to remain with her daughter, and a young paralyzed man trying to be a Christian missionary inside a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders’ life stories show how poor relief actually worked. For them and for millions, all over the United States, poor relief was both generous and controlling, local and yet largely uniform around the nation. Two centuries ago, Americans paid for—and relied on—an astonishing government system that provided food, housing, and medical care to those in need, while also shaping American families and where they could live. Students of history and of today’s social provision have much to learn about how welfare worked in the early United States.

Reviewed by: The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires DeLisa D. Hawkes Derrick R. Spires. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2019. 352 pp. $49.95. Mary Helen Washington began her 1997 address to the American Studies Association asking the pivotal question: What happens when scholars put African American studies at the center of American studies? Literary historians can extend this question by asking: What happens when scholars stop approaching works written by African American authors as always in response to the discrimination and violence enacted by white Americans? What happens when we finally understand Black print culture as independent from white establishments and the ideologies that created them? Derrick R. Spires demonstrates in The Practice of Citizenship (winner of numerous prizes, including the MLA Prize for a First Book) that early Black writers have always been at the forefront of directing rather than merely responding to the conversation concerning the concept of citizenship in the United States. Early Black writers theorized not only what citizenship meant but also what actions it entailed as they demonstrated the practice of citizenship in their daily lives. Early in his Introduction, Spires establishes the importance of attending to both collective and individually written works as part of the "collaborative, multimedia, polygeneric cultural and intellectual process" of understanding "citizenship (and blackness itself) as a self-reflexive, dialectical process of becoming" (3). Spires invites readers engaged in fields such as literature, history, and political science to understand the work of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black writers as arguing for more than mere recognition by the white legal establishment; instead, relying on texts produced by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the Black state conventions, William J. Wilson, James McCune Smith, and Frances E. W. Harper, Spires argues that Black writers theorized and practiced five interrelated themes of citizenship in their political work. These themes include neighborliness, participatory politics and circulation, economic citizenship, critique, and revolution. "From the perspective of black theorizing," writes Spires, "states do not make citizens—active and involved individuals and collectives create citizens" (16). Thus, Spires places early Black theorists at the center of US citizenship studies. Early Black print culture proved vital to creating and illustrating citizenship's actual practice rather than its mere idea. In the first chapter, Spires examines neighborliness—or "the ability of fellow citizens to engage each other on terms of mutual responsibility and good faith through 'real sensibility'"—as a citizenship practice in Jones and Allen's 1794 Narrative of the Proceedings of Black People (27). A text more commonly understood as written in response to Matthew Carey's A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), which focused on the elite and depicted Black Philadelphians in a negative light, Jones and Allen's Narrative, Spires argues, corrects the horrific racial and economic assumptions about Black people's "real sensibility," or ability to achieve civic republic citizenship through depictions of neighborliness occurring between ordinary "poor black" women and men (35). Jones and Allen's Narrative achieves a racially and economically inclusive depiction of citizenship [End Page 239] through neighborliness by restaging scenes from Carey's Account. As Spires puts it: "Narrative interrogates late eighteenth-century theories about the ethical relation between citizens by thinking about the kinds of relations the good citizen should actively produce rather than the inverse, how to produce or identify the good citizen" (36). In other words, Jones and Allen are less concerned with what white Americans claim citizenship to be and are more concerned with what actual civic republic and fellow citizenship look like—in other words, less with the talk and more with the walk. This perspective challenges the very capitalistic nature of citizenship and serves as the basis for the other themes that Spires examines in the later chapters. While neighborliness makes participatory civic engagement an everyday practice that anyone can exercise, participatory politics and circulation counters "arguments that black people were … irredeemably inferior or too dependent on waged and manual labor to warrant full citizenship" (29). Spires examines the Black...

Reviewed by: Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry John Fea (bio) Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States. By Seth Perry. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xv, 195. Cloth, $35.00.) Seth Perry joins scholars such as Peter Thuesen, Paul Gutjahr, Mark Noll, Lincoln Mullen, Timothy Beal, Candy Brown, David Nord, and John Fea in examining the centrality of the Christian scriptures to American politics, civil society, public discourse, and lived religion. Perry's monograph is deeply theoretical and perhaps unnecessarily dense. The fascinating stories he has uncovered in the archives and elsewhere often take a backseat to his methodological musings. But scholars willing to wade through the academic jargon will be challenged to think differently about the use of the Bible by ordinary Americans in the early republic. Some of the earliest Bible societies in the United States, including the American Bible Society (ABS), claimed to publish the scriptures "without note or comment." In 1824, Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College and a trustee of the ABS, asked, "Should not the Scriptures … be accompanied with notes and comments? So far as commentators enable us to understand what we read, we may be grateful for his aid. But we [End Page 572] are not to look for improvements on a revelation from heaven."1 Comments like Day's are representative of the way American Protestants have understood the Bible for more than three centuries, but as Perry notes, this "Bible alone" mentality does not represent the way most Protestants engaged the scriptures. As Perry reminds us, "the Bible was never, ever alone" (dust jacket). Perry examines the Bible not as "source" of religious authority in the early republic, but as a "site" of authority, "a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships" (dust jacket). His book draws heavily on what religious-studies scholar Vincent Wimbush has called "scripturalization" in his book White Men's Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford, UK, 2012). According to Wimbush, the study of sacred texts should focus "not upon texts per se (that is, upon content-meanings), but upon textures, gestures, and power—namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics, and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and uses of 'scriptures.'" Scripturalization, according to Perry, implies an "ongoing, dialogic process, replacing 'scripture' and its connotations of fixity" (5–6). Perry applies this theory of scripturalization to five different moments in the religious history of the early republic. In Chapter 1, he introduces us to what printers believed to be the ideal American Bible reader. This reader was white and Protestant but also "some combination of marginally literate, lower-class, and often female." She read the Bible in the context of family prayer. While printers often hoped that their Bibles would contribute to a white Christian nation, readers often made their own meaning of the text, suggesting that "real and imagined readers exist always in dialogic relationships" (39). Chapter 2 deals with "paratexts," the commentaries, cross-references, illustrations, concordances, and children's Bibles that "carried scholarly, ecclesiastical, social and state authority into the text itself" (41). These texts, what the ABS used to refer to as "helps," allowed readers to assert their own authority of the scriptures. In the process, they were creating new texts and "refracting the scripturalized status of the Bible in new directions" (62). In his last three chapters, Perry examines forms of biblical citation in [End Page 573] the early republic that "expanded upon rather than referred specifically back to the Bible itself." For example, when Denmark Vesey led his famous slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, he employed a Bible-based rhetoric of resistance and violence that Perry calls "performed biblicism" (xx). Evangelical itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow often performed in the role of "apostle" to "cultivate relationships of authority with audiences" (77). His wife Peggy expanded the scriptures for her audiences by publishing a memoir that built upon biblical models for women such as Martha and Mary. Visions, Perry writes, were another way the scriptural text was extended beyond the printed word. Published accounts of spiritual visions—Perry calls them "visionary...

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States