<i>Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution</i> (review)

LongingPersonal Effects from the Border Susan Harbage Page (bio) and Bernard L. Herman (bio) Susan Harbage Page's portfolio, Longing: Personal Effects from the Border, is an intervention—at once aesthetic, archaeological, and archival—into the spaces and objects associated with the great migration north across the Rio Grande and into the United States. Page's images are visual conversations about the material culture of the immigrant experience and compel us to consider how we see ourselves through seeing others. Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear. In collecting possessions discarded at the border and photographing them in her studio, Page transforms them, re-contextualizing found objects through a cool and loving curatorial eye. The artist becomes archivist. With the debris-field chaos of riverbank and border fence erased, inner tube, wallet, and shirt take on different associations drawn from the calm and analytical confines of the studio. These images evoke the strange and subdued violence of the museum, the morgue, the catalog. Side by side (imagine a diptych), the juxtaposition of images from field and studio reveal the spaces between the desperation of flight and the stillness of the archive—there, here, lost, found. Longing speaks about power through the operations of borders, places where identities are furtive, hidden, gleaned only via jettisoned artifacts, first discarded and depersonalized, then retrieved and remembered. The visual space Page creates between the inner tube encountered in brush and sunlight and subsequently pedestaled on a shadow-edged blue background, delicately and revealingly lit by studio lamps, forces us to question how we must position ourselves to pursue the always political work of seeing. Page locates that political work in what she describes as "contexts for viewing." It is not just what we see that matters, but how our privileged vantage points contextualize her images and their content. In that gesture Susan Harbage Page makes us aware of how the frailties and vanities of our own habits of seeing reinforce unspoken ideologies of power. [End Page 31] If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron. —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 35] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 36] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 40] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 41] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 44] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 45] Susan Harbage Page Susan Harbage Page teaches studio art and women's studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her art addresses such concerns as the performance of race and gender, identity politics, and immigration. Amongst Page's numerous awards are fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, the Camargo Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Bernard L. Herman Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (2005) and The Stolen House (1992). He has published essays, lectured, and offered courses on visual and material culture, architectural history...

Reviewed by: Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 by Lloyd Kramer Frank Schumacher Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775. By Lloyd Kramer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 272pp. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The amount of scholarly literature on the concept of nationalism is daunting. Rarely does a single volume explore the history and culture of nationalism as concise, precise, and eloquent as Lloyd Kramer’s Nationalism in Europe and America. In this substantially revised, updated, and expanded version of his earlier work, Kramer, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the influence of nationalism on modern history with a focus on the Atlantic world. He argues that the similarities in political themes and cultural underpinnings [End Page 887] of nationalism have outweighed the spatial and temporal differences in the evolution of this concept since the eighteenth century. The author makes his case in eight chapters: the first five explore common political and cultural themes that have shaped most modern nationalisms while the final three chapters provide case studies of early American nationalist thought, the high tide of aggressive nationalism during the first half of the twentieth century, and the evolution of nationalist thought since 1945, with particular emphasis on decolonization movements and the emergence of new transnational forms of political organization. The study’s historiographical and theoretical parameters are laid out in chapter 1. Kramer argues that the twists and turns of nationalism’s complicated history have obscured much of its continuities. He suggests that historically constructed national identities emerged in the late eighteenth century in very similar ways on both sides of the Atlantic through a combination of cultural and political ideas that connected individual welfare to collective identities. Such “imagined communities” gained their enduring cohesion through the cultural production of nationalist narratives in symbols, literature, art, and festive cultures. Chapter 2 explores the discursive origins of the ideology of nationalism from the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau to the American and French Revolutions and respective British and German responses to the new ideological construct. At the heart of nationalism was the notion that each nation should have its state and conversely that states should represent sovereign nations. In addition, liberal nationalism also connected questions of collective political legitimacy to ideas about individual human rights of members of a nation. Despite the concept’s inherent contradictions and its frequent violations, this linkage, according to Kramer, explains much of nationalism’s enduring global appeal into the twenty-first century. The third chapter examines the importance of philosophical, historical, and literary contributions to discourses of difference in writings on the nation up to the mid nineteenth century based on a wide reading of German (Herder, Fichte, Ranke), Italian (Mazzini), French (Gregoire, Michelet), Polish (Mickiewicz), British (Scott), and American (Emerson, Cooper) commentators. Kramer shows how ideas about distinctive cultural and linguistic traits and celebrations of national geographic spaces infused the cultural production of nationalism. Moments of heightened international tensions, such as the wars of Napoleonic conquest, substantially accelerated the spread of nationalist productions. [End Page 888] Chapter 4 connects nationalism and notions of difference to religion. Kramer suggests that nationalist ideologies did not displace religious beliefs but rather drew on religious themes and symbols to create a stronger emotional bond among members of a national group. Nations aimed at a fusion of religion and nationalism through the invocation of sacrifice in times of war and hardship, the narration of sacred texts (that is national constitutions), and the mystification of national heroes and shrines of national significance. In chapter 5 the author demonstrates how nationalist ideals overlapped with individual or group identities in nationalist discourses on gender, the family, and race. Kramer concisely explains how contrasting and connected identities of women, men, and nations reached prominence in the nineteenth century. Discussions of reproduction, sexual mores, gender roles, family organization, ethnicity, and race became a staple of nationalist commentary in Europe and America. Much of those discussions conveniently reinforced notions of exceptionalism that infused all nationalist ideologies and whose long shadow still lingers in much writing on the United States. The author takes issue...

Click for larger view [End Page 74] Grief, fear, pride, love, sympathy, courage, anger, hate. The attacks of 9-11 provoked a mix of simple and complex emotions as our country entered a new era. Americans suddenly found themselves in the middle of a war of a different sort. Enemies were not distinguished by national borders or a formal army. Success, it seemed, might never be declared for fear of relaxing defenses. The adversary in the War on Terror seemed more like a looming, indefatigable abstraction than a tangible foe. Katy Vinroot O'Brien captured America's first footsteps onto this new unsteady ground during the University of Mississippi's Homecoming Weekend in Oxford. A few short weeks after the 9-11 attacks and just days after the first U.S. bombings in Afghanistan in October 2001, she not only snapped scenes of Ole Miss's annual celebration, she also photographed moments from a country in flux. The usual terrain of southern homecoming celebrations—cheerleaders rah-rahhing, smartly clad members of the homecoming court soaking up the crowd, mothers and babies at parade's edge, hastily built fraternity floats—contrasts with markers of heightened national pride and sudden, uncomfortable transformation. Flags and signs, servicemen and on-looking boys alike in military dress, old fire trucks rolled out that evoke the heroism of the New York Fire Department, the foreign-looking men on the steps relegated to the periphery, bystanders seemingly lost in deep reverie—all spoke of an unsure future. We can view O'Brien's photographs, of course, aware of all the particulars of a timeline her subjects had yet to experience. There would be no other large-scale attacks in the immediate wake of 9-11. The U.S. would wage war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq without erasing much fear in this country. Years later, in fact, the War on Terror would remain in full swing. By October 2001 everything was changing rapidly, perhaps permanently. This, maybe, they already knew. [End Page 75] Click for larger view Waiting for the parade. All photographs by Katy Vinroot O'Brien. [End Page 76] Click for larger view [End Page 77] Click for larger view Click for larger view The new outsiders [End Page 78] Click for larger view in-crowd Click for larger view [End Page 79] Click for larger view [End Page 80] Click for larger view On the banner hanging from the building behind the kids: "God Bless the USA and Our Rebels." [End Page 81] Click for larger view Shows of solidarity with New York City's Fire Department, with a nation. [End Page 82] Click for larger view [End Page 83] Click for larger view Shows of strength: the military presence, a boy in fatigues. [End Page 84] Click for larger view [End Page 85] Click for larger view Maybe they knew everything already had changed—perhaps permanently. [End Page 86] Click for larger view Katy Vinroot O'Brien is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina. She has a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina and an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. She lives in Chapel Hill and works for the University of North Carolina Press. ... collapse You are not currently authenticated. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE Authenticate Purchase/rental options available: Rent from DeepDyve Buy Complete Digital Issue for $12.00 (USD) Recommend Additional Information ISSN 1534-1488 Print ISSN 1068-8218 Pages pp. 74-87 Launched on MUSE 2005-02-28 Open Access No Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. About MUSE Story Publishers Discovery Partners Advisory Board Journal Subscribers Book Customers Conferences What's on Muse Open Access Journals Books MUSE in Focus T.S. Eliot Prose Resources News & Announcements Email Sign-Up Promotional Materials Get Alerts Presentations Information For Publishers Librarians Individuals Instructors Contact Contact Us Help Policy & Terms Accessibility Privacy Policy Terms of Use 2715 North Charles StreetBaltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 +1 (410) 516-6989 muse@jh.edu ©2022 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries. Now and Always,The Trusted Content Your Research Requires Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus ©2022 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries. Back To Top This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Dale Kretz (bio) Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. By Rana A. Hogarth. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 290. Cloth, $90.00; paper $27.95.) Rana A. Hogarth's Medicalizing Blackness examines how white physicians in the Greater Caribbean defined blackness as a clinically significant [End Page 140] marker of difference. Their efforts helped to sanction white control over black bodies, both slave and free. However, the writings of these physicians in the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century were not simply a byproduct of the growing proslavery ideology. Although the claims physicians made about the perceived peculiarities of black bodies served those who wanted to justify slavery, Hogarth argues that, before the 1840s, professional authority and financial gain were the most important factors driving such claims. Hogarth divides her study thematically into three parts. Part 1 demonstrates how physicians used blackness as a form of medical shorthand for understanding a person's susceptibility to yellow fever, widely recognized as a scourge of the Americas. In her first chapter, Hogarth shows how the medical theories of John Lining, a physician in South Carolina, were adopted by Benjamin Rush during the famous 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia. Influenced by Lining's assertion that blacks were immune to yellow fever, America's preeminent physician begged Philadelphia's African Americans to remain in the city to assist its victims. The direct application of the black-immunity thesis proved tragic, and Rush later repudiated Lining's claim—though not as strongly as Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in the city's black community. Nevertheless, the theory had remarkable staying power. Chapter 2 explores the attractiveness of the black-immunity claim to the British military, which sought to deploy black troops in service to Britain's Caribbean empire. When eight hundred Africans aboard the Regalia were stricken with yellow fever, British physicians, rather than invalidate the immunity thesis, blamed poor management. They concluded that "blackness, in conjunction with external factors, played a role in how bodies experienced disease" (62) and that diet and work regimens therefore could and should be properly manipulated by the British military. According to Hogarth, both cases—the 1793 epidemic and the Regalia episode—show how the growing corpus of medical knowledge worked to subjugate black bodies and silence black suffering and enabled white physicians to build a transnational professional network based on ideas about black health. The collective gaze of white physicians fell most heavily on so-called slave diseases. Part 2 focuses on how one such disease, Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt eating), allowed physicians to pathologize blackness, earn professional credibility, and mandate tighter white control over enslaved bodies. Whereas the subject has been only a marginal note in many medical histories of slavery, Hogarth places Cachexia Africana at the center of a high-stakes contest. In chapter 3, she argues that white physicians used the disease "to secure their tenuous positions as medical [End Page 141] authorities in the face of competition from enslaved healers, skepticism on the part of overseers and owners, and resistance from the enslaved" (83). In Jamaica, the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice known as Obeah threatened physicians' authority. Unable to master Cachexia Africana, Jamaican physicians blamed the disease on recalcitrant slaves influenced by Obeah and prescribed greater mastery over them. Helpless as these physicians were in treating Cachexia Africana, chapter 4 contends that the professional identities of Caribbean and southern physicians nevertheless "depended on the construction of racial pathologies" (106). By the 1830s, dissertations, medical journals, and plantation guidebooks brimmed with insider information on how to manage enslaved black bodies. Part 3 moves beyond physicians' ideas about black health to explore medical spaces outside the plantation, from workhouses and public hospitals in Jamaica to private and teaching hospitals in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Chapter 5 argues that the Hospital and Asylum for Deserted Negroes in Kingston, Jamaica, became an apparatus of social control over the colony's black population as well as a convenient means to undercut abolitionist accusations of slavery's...

Vimala Cooks, Everybody Eats Shannon Harvey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 96] Almost every week for thirteen years, Vimala Rajendran opened her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to friends and strangers alike to enjoy Indian fare in the heart of the Carolina Piedmont. Supported by donations of time and money, Rajendran and her crew of volunteers fed as many as 200 people at each community dinner. Dinner was served between 5:30 and 10:00 in the evening, and volunteers would arrive early in the day to prep and cook while others stayed late to clean. Food storage and cooking consumed much of the basement and kitchen, as well as the front porch where her husband Rush had set up propane-fueled cooking equipment. Dinner goers found seats in the living room, basement, or yard to eat and mingle, while other folks took containers of food home to their families. The dinners started as a way for Rajendran to support her family after leaving an abusive relationship. In turn, the community that formed around her dinners allowed her to support local farmers, showcase local musicians, and provide made-from-scratch, home-cooked meals for those who might not otherwise be able to afford them. Though she sourced most ingredients locally, Rajendran has also been known to haul suitcases of spices from India. She often used the dinners as fundraisers to support such diverse projects as purchasing fruit trees for the Carrboro Community Garden and providing relief funds for the victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. In these and a myriad of other ways, Rajendran's dinners created a space for people to meet over a common table (or couch, or picnic blanket), make friends, support the livelihoods of others in their region, and imagine how, on any given Wednesday morning while peeling garlic, they could also positively impact global communities. Encouraged by people's enthusiasm for her cooking, Rajendran started a catering business and in summer 2010 opened a restaurant, Vimala's Curry-blossom Cafe. She strives to maintain her sustainable and community-friendly practices through these newer ventures. These photos were taken over the course of several weeks between January 2010 and March 17, 2010, the date of her final community dinner. She hopes to continue the dinners in some form now that her restaurant has opened. If you get a chance to eat at either, make sure to snag a cardamom brownie. [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Vimala Rajendran (here) has fed as many as 200 people at her dinners. [End Page 98] Click for larger view View full resolution With the help of local food activists, friends, and family—including daughter Manju (right, top photo, opposite page), Click for larger view View full resolution Most mornings before her community dinners begin with garlic peeling (bottom, right). [End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 100] Click for larger view View full resolution Pots and space are scarce for preparations, including peeling cardamom (above, right). The seeds are ground for brownies, and the husks are used in chai. [End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolution After a day's preparations and the finishing touches, the guests arrive. Cooking and mingling keep Vimala on her feet the entire evening. [End Page 103] Shannon Harvey Shannon Harvey is a graduate student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include food, agrarianism, and religion in the American South. She has a BA in Studio Art with a concentration in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. Copyright © 2012 Center for the Study of the American South

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean Peter H. Lee (bio) Gesang ist Dasein. —Die Sonette an Orpheus One of the most intriguing and challenging topics in Korean literary history is the love lyrics in Late Middle Korean. By “lyric” I mean a fictional representation of a personal utterance to be sung.1 We do not know when the texts and music were composed. The social settings of these anonymous feminine-voiced songs have almost disappeared. Because the predominant [End Page 201] written language among the learned until the mid-fifteenth century was literary Chinese, the prestige language, no song texts could be written down until Chosŏn officials wrote new texts as contrafactum2 (writing new texts for popular melodies) for well-known Koryŏ songs. Because of the sociolinguistic status of the vernacular, we have memorial (oral) but no written transmission. Moreover, we have no textual history to speak of until the compilation of the Akhak kwebŏm 樂學軌範 (Guide to the study of music, 1493) and two anonymous compilations—Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Notations for Korean music in contemporary use; ca. early sixteenth century; made known only in 1954)3 and Akchang kasa 樂章歌詞,4 an anthology of song texts dating from Koryŏ and early Chosŏn. I consider them diplomatic copies of the songs. These texts must have invited innovation as part of the process of transmission (mouvance = fluidity).5 Thus Koryŏ songs owe their survival to the adoption of their accompanying music for court use in Chosŏn. It is unclear, however, how the texts, dubbed “vulgar and obscene” and expunged by Chosŏn censors as late as 1490,6 managed to survive. Are what we have the precensored or the censored versions? Perhaps these songs were so popular that no one needed to write them down to remember them. Repetition and recurrent refrains—mimetic in origin—of both verse and music made it easy for the unlearned to remember. Oral delivery was the mode of transmission in an orally based poetic tradition, and we can identify the speaker’s gender from verbal [End Page 202] features and textual markers: woman, the locus of unrequited love. Songs are inseparable from their performance. The music composed for performance, together with song lyrics, invites a communal identification of singer and audience.7 But the texts do not encode information about the speaker’s social status and economic class: was she a propertied woman like the Occitan trobairitz of medieval Europe?8 The singer re-creates emotions in a specific context and shares those emotions with the audience. Was the song performed before a mixed audience? Did they identify more with the speaker than with the speaker’s target, the beloved? It was not considered indecorous in the Koryŏ period for women to compose and perform songs of love and to take part in public entertainment—a challenge to male monopoly on desire and language. About the same period (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) in the West there flourished Mozarabic kharjas (“exit”; the oldest known secular lyrics in any Romance language, the earliest ca. 1000);9 songs by the troubadours and trobairitz (ca. 1100–1300) in Old Occitan (Langue d’Oc; Old Provençal)10 and by the trouvères of northern France (late twelfth to thirteenth centuries);11 Galician-Portuguese songs (fl. 1200–1350), cantigas d’amor and cantigas [End Page 203] d’amigo;12 Minnelieder (twelfth to early fourteenth centuries);13 Goliardic songs including the Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren);14 the Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia);15 and the Harley lyrics (compiled ca. 1314–1325),16 to mention a few. These Koryŏ songs have come to us from anonymous women who lived and sang from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. No contemporary comments survive; the living context for these songs seems lost. Has the twenty-first century reader the means to understand the texts—can we reconstitute the feminine speakers’ voices, the first and only voices from that period, the inventors of love lyrics in the vernacular? Background The following observations are offered in the hope of better situating our songs in time and space, that is, in their sociopolitical and cultural contexts.17 My aim is to re-create...

Reviewed by: Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania by Patrick Spero Keri Holt (bio) Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania patrick spero Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 343 pp. Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania takes a fraught term and redefines and contextualizes it in ways that illuminate its importance as the British American colonies transformed into an independent nation. The frontier, Patrick Spero writes, "was a politically potent word in the eighteenth century," and, using the colony of Pennsylvania as [End Page 262] a case study, Frontier Country examines how the complexities of "governing frontiers was … essential to the success or failure of colonial projects" (7, 8). By carefully reexamining this term and the role it played in American political discourse, print and popular culture, and day-to-day lived experience during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spero offers significant arguments about the causes of the American Revolution and the influence of the frontier on early US nationalism, as well as the need to carefully historicize the terms we use to study the political and cultural dynamics of early America. For Spero, recognizing the importance of the frontier in colonial American and early national politics requires fundamentally reorienting and reinterpreting the term frontier itself. Conventionally, frontier has been understood as a spatial term marking the border or limit of a sovereign space. Although the location of a frontier can change, particularly in the context of national expansion, we typically assume frontiers to be sparsely populated spaces defined by activities of settlement and development located at the (relatively distant) boundaries of a state or nation. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the term frontier marked a much more situational and transitory space defined not so much by set borders but by feelings of fear and uncertainty. During this period, writes Spero, "[f]rontiers formed—people and places became a frontier—when people felt a specific type of fear: invasion" (115). Although colonial borders were more susceptible to invasion than other spaces, the term frontier did not necessarily mark a clear boundary line but, instead, operated as a plural term that could mark multiple locations anywhere within a colony, depending on perceived threats. As a result, during the colonial period, frontiers were understood not so much as a location but as a particular kind of experience. "For those colonists who lived in fear of invasion, a frontier was more than a geopolitical abstraction that drove policy decisions. It was a personal experience that shaped their actions and beliefs," writes Spero (114). By examining this "traumatic process of becoming a frontier," this book offers a new lens for examining the causes of the Revolution and the changing expectations that the colonists had for their government over the course of the eighteenth century. In the end, argues Spero, "[t]he failure of the British Empire to provide for frontiers—indeed, its apparent turn against such zones and their inhabitants—became a central argument for independence" (222). [End Page 263] To make this argument, Spero offers an extensive analysis of the plural and shifting dimensions of frontiers in colonial Pennsylvania, focusing specifically on the experiences of people living on these frontiers and the growing distance between their experiences and the expectations and actions of the British Empire and the Pennsylvania colonial government. Pennsylvania experienced a much greater variety of frontier experiences than other colonies, particularly regarding its efforts to manage and defend these varied locales, and these diverse frontier experiences and policies were well documented in letters, newspaper articles, court cases, government proceedings, Quaker records, pamphlets, broadsides, and formal histories written throughout the colonial period. Spero provides a thorough and impressive assessment of these texts and contexts, assembling them into an engaging narrative history that traces Pennsylvania's transformation from a pacifist colony that was antithetical to the concept of frontiers to one whose government was increasingly preoccupied with frontier management. The politics of Pennsylvania's frontier management were exceedingly complicated and contradictory, and Spero does a masterful job explaining the varied and changing perceptions of invasion in colonial Pennsylvania, as well as the competing responses from the colonial governor, the Assembly...

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814

Reviewed by: American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World Andrew J. Lewis, assistant professor of history American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. By Susan Scott Parrish. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 321. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; Paper, $22.50.) The Atlantic turn in the historiography of British America aims to destabilize the traditional categories of colonial American history. No longer, this scholarship urges us, should scholars think dichotomously, in terms of colony and mother country, peripheries and center. Rather, historians should be working in terms that are integrative—transoceanic networks of commerce, ideas, peoples, and things—in short, a cohesive Atlantic world created by actors on all sides of the ocean. Such a reorientation brings to the fore exchange as an organizing metaphor for the region's and the period's history and focuses attention on the ties that bind, rather than divide, the Atlantic coasts. While dealing a blow to American exceptionalism, the emphasis in Atlantic historiography on exchange highlights as well the interpersonal dynamics and cultural imperatives that define trade relationships—negotiation and posturing, misunderstanding [End Page 175] and flattery, appropriation and prejudice—and makes these a focus of its attention. In this vein, Susan Scott Parrish argues that the New World, as an imaginative category based on its material artifacts, was the work of many hands: European obviously, and provincial particularly. This is a story of the exchange of specimens and information, books and letters that made the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries' "cultures of natural history" a vibrant trade relationship. Whereas previous scholars asked what kinds of natural history colonial Americans pursued and how it resembled European practices, Parrish eschews metropole–periphery metrics and argues that provincials were central and essential to the process and products of natural knowledge. It was colonials who allowed Europeans to indulge their appetite for the "polycentric curiosity" of the New World (7). It was colonials who transmitted the samples, gathered the testimonies, and answered the queries that Europeans asked. In return, colonials could satisfy a hunger for "institutional connections, for print matter and scientific equipment, and in certain ways for publicity" (106). Natural history was a vehicle through which (mostly) American male colonials could gain access to a genteel Atlantic conversation, cultivate epistolary friendships, and establish a reputation for erudition among correspondents locally and abroad. Parrish argues that in matters of natural history at least, the imperial–provincial dynamic "bespoke a mutual sense of dependence and necessary laterality—rather than hierarchy—of relations" (106). The English, "so curious about America—so eager to see and possess its natural splendors" (22), granted colonial naturalists and Americans with an interest in nature great latitude to make natural knowledge and, as a consequence, to challenge the imperial flow of power. An Atlantic world empiricism and an English demand for facts about America, Parrish argues, "gave [colonials] authority where political empire took it away" (22). Yet the identities colonial naturalists fashioned through nature and the possibilities for challenging imperial political dynamics via the natural world were unstable, ambiguous, and fraught with anxiety. Colonial testifiers and collectors had the luxury of first-hand access to specimens and phenomena. But confidence in their abilities to observe and report nature accurately was tempered by their real and imagined distance from English centers of learning and by persistent and gnawing fears of "creolean degeneracy." Were English bodies adversely altered by the New World's environment? Might the observational faculties be occluded by [End Page 176] America? Were colonials with their fragmentary experiences, their isolation from "scientific sociability," their "lack of leisure, of skill, and of curiosity" even capable of disinterested observation (118)? Parrish argues that over time colonials answered these questions—with qualifications—as no, no, and yes. In fact, it was in observation and reportage of the natural world that some savants began to detect and articulate a difference between England and America. Readers of the Journal of the Early Republic will be intrigued by Parrish's history of an emerging American identity born of provincial resentment and resistance to a pernicious and dismissive European empiricism. The dispute over the New...

The Interests of the Passions J. M. Opal (bio) Nicole Eustace . Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 613 pp. Appendix, illustrations, notes, acknowledgements, and index. $45.00. This is an enormously important book that uses eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as a case study of emotional politics in colonial and revolutionary America. Unlike many studies of affect, feeling, and sentiment in the human past, Passion is the Gale not only seeks to compliment prevailing themes of political, social, or economic history but also to place emotion and "spirit" at the core of those understandings. Among the best reasons to do so, Eustace points out, is that eighteenth-century Americans would have recognized this approach as their own. Drawing from a treasure trove of printed, archival, and visual sources, she shows that colonial Pennsylvanians were deeply invested in the governance and portrayal of emotion and passion, indeed that they saw themselves within the fine distinctions of honorable resentment and unthinking rage, dutiful mourning and petulant sorrow, authentic love and passing affection. "The signals of dominance and deference encoded in the regulation of emotional expression," she writes, "were extremely subtle but nonetheless real and recognizable to eighteenth-century actors" (p. 78). By explaining how clergymen, widows, statesmen, slaves, Indians, and revolutionaries betrayed their feelings and why their emotions mattered to the nation's genesis, Eustace offers something truly original and profoundly relevant. In essence, this is an intellectual and cultural history of the broadest variety—not a study of professional thinkers and formalized creeds but of the interplay between available ideas and various audiences. During the course of nine chapters, some focused on seminal events and others devoted to signature passions, Eustace offers keen readings of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Tom Paine's Common Sense. She also peers into the personal correspondence of Philadelphia couples, the choreographed diplomacy between whites and Indians, and the brutal commerce between slave-owners and their human chattels. She manages to cover this wide range of texts and actors by embracing the organic interdependence of the personal and political and by applying new technologies of finding and [End Page 500] decoding historical sources. The cumulative result is a fresh understanding of "the reordering of Anglo-American life" during the Revolution (p. 15). Eustace bases her study in a strategy of "collapsing distinctions between the personal and the political" (p. 6). This approach, she argues, not only throws light on her elusive quarry but also approximates an eighteenth-century cosmology in which modern categories of power and behavior held little meaning. The personal was assumed to be political in that world, which was poised along the well-studied frontier between communitarian and individualistic mentalités. This does not mean that Eustace would have us conflate emotional encounters within households with those unfolding between nations or empires. Rather, she invites us to explore the political and diplomatic implications that emotional displays and exchanges carried in eighteenth-century milieus.1 The book opens with a study of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which was published in 1733 and available in Philadelphia by 1735. Long overshadowed in many historiographies by Bernard de Mandeville's more cynical Fable of the Bees, Pope's book-length poem clearly resonated in the colonial metropolis. It also offended the conventional wisdom of Christianity and moral philosophy by announcing that the passions were universal, irrepressible, and not all that bad. Reason may be the chart of the human soul, Pope noted, but "Passion is the gale." Moral philosophers could debate the excellence or depravity of Man, he averred, but the truth was simpler: "Man's as perfect as he ought." In letters and commonplace books from the 1740s and 1750s, Eustace finds repeated and direct references to these and other lines of the poem. At length, they began to appear without attribution, so that phrases approving human passions and excusing human nature became ambient voices. But if more and more Pennsylvanians were ready to approve passion's gale and shrug with Pope that "whatever is is right," they also assumed...

Reviewed by: The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by Kevin D. Greene Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy. By Kevin D. Greene. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 226. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4649-7; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4648-0.) Origin stories that anchor blues authenticity to tropes of culturally isolated African American male guitarists from the Mississippi Delta region remain so deeply ingrained in American popular music memory that it is reasonable for scholars to approach blues biographies with an air of skepticism and genuine hope for repurposing stories that challenge biographical caricatures. Kevin D. Greene’s thoughtful depiction of Big Bill Broonzy (born Lee Conley Bradley) sidesteps these trappings by mapping American demographic shifts and commercial music developments onto Broonzy’s lived geography. Greene describes his research as a recovery act that stretches public memory of this Chicago bluesman beyond Broonzy’s influence on white rock musicians during blues revivals. The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy carefully situates Broonzy in a continuum of twentieth-century black [End Page 500] intellectuals and meditates on the development of a modern African American musical consciousness in relationship to Jim Crow urbanization. The most salient lesson Greene imparts is that Broonzy’s life story offers one route to understanding how black music flourished under the weight of Jim Crow. The book captures Broonzy’s conscious fashioning of sound and image, while moving between cosmopolitan centers and reacting to music industry shifts, during a period when social structures were designed to subordinate black men. Drawing from interviews, archival manuscripts, and memorabilia, the book follows a chronological framework that reconciles Broonzy’s public and private identities while describing the social impact of musical celebrity in Chicago and white fascination with black bluesmen. Greene’s overview of the Great Migration depicts the birth and circulation of early commercial blues as an employment path for those with little economic mobility, thus complicating the genre’s relationship to race, gender, industry, and leisure. Broonzy was one of thousands of African Americans to relocate to Chicago at a critical moment during the Great Migration, when the blues craze transformed the city into a national music center. The blues emerges as a story of contested urban encounters and purposeful melding of preexisting ideas and musical practices from tent shows, vaudeville, churches, and sheet music rags. Professional music making was understood as an opportunity for greater autonomy and as an escape from hard manual labor for a talented few, but it required careful timing and socialization during racist, anti-immigrant, and antilabor movements that segregated Chicago’s South Side and West Side neighborhoods. Music did not enable Broonzy or his contemporaries to transcend social struggles, but it provided an alternative mechanism with which they navigated perilous terrains. Greene details Broonzy’s command of the Chicago music scene when unemployment patterns pushed working-age men to other cities, technological developments caused record sales to surpass live performance revenues, and consumer preferences leaned toward the grittier sounds of Muddy Waters. Greene argues that Broonzy gets lost in dominant blues histories because he refused to abandon established black fan bases and his urban blues stylings in pursuit of more lucrative white music communities. Broonzy’s departure from dominant music industry trends makes this biography a compelling case study about musical agency. Musicologists know well the troubles of tracking music biographies with chameleon-like narrative shifts, archival holes, exaggerations, and offensive racialized promotional materials. Yet contemporary biographers who confront these challenges illuminate the depth of political, cultural, socioeconomic, and artistic change that is indexed by individual musicians. The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy dissects our motivations for remembering or forgetting individual musicians and ethically documents social and cultural networks that can aid our ability to understand human creativity in relation to the passing of time. [End Page 501] Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment University of Virginia Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Articles and Publications Julie C. Swierczek This edition of "Articles and Publications" uses the format of a bibliography rather than a bibliographic essay. Feedback about this change may be submitted to fha@haverford.edu. Abolition, Manumission, Slavery Carson, Marion L. "In Whose Interest?: Ante-Bellum Abolitionism, the Bible, and Contemporary Christian Ethics." Perichoresis 16, no. 1 (2018): 41-60. Daniels, Jason. "Protest and Participation: Reconsidering the Quaker Slave Trade in Early Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia." Pennsylvania History 85, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 239-265. Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Holcomb, Julie. Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017. Israel, Adrienne M. "Free Blacks, Quakers, and the Underground Railroad in Piedmont North Carolina." North Carolina Historical Review 95, no. 1 (January 2018): 1-28. Kershner, Jon R. "Anthony Benezet's (1713–1784) Revolutionary Rhetoric: Slavery and Sentimentalism in Quaker Political Remonstrance." Quaker Religious Thought 130 (March 2018): 5-15. Kershner, Jon R. John Woolman and the Government of Christ: A Colonial Quaker's Vision for the British Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Lasser, Carol. "Conscience and Contradiction: The Moral Ambiguities of Antebellum Reformers Marcus and Rebecca Buffum Spring." Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (Spring, 2018): 1-36. Makovi, Kinga Reka. "Structural Avenues for Mobilization—The Case of British Abolition." Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7916/D81G1T2C Nash. Gary B., and Miles Albrook Stanley. "The Travail of Delaware Slave Families in the Early Republic." Slavery & Abolition. April 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1462301 Peyper, Audrey. "Bound for Slavery? A Quaker Humanitarian Critique of Waged Labour at Koloa Plantation, Hawaii, 1836." Labour History no. 113 (November 2017): 79-102. Richardson, Sarah. "Abolitionist's Album Now a National Treasure." American History [End Page 73] 53, no. 2 (June 2018): 7. Richardson discusses the history of the 19th century photo album owned by U.S. Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland. Ritchie, Daniel. "'The stone in the sling': Frederick Douglass and Belfast Abolitionism." American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 3 (2017): 245-272. Sassi, Jonathan D. "The Legacies of James McCarty: The Story of How Quakers Secured One Family's Emancipation and Its Ramifications for Revolutionary-Era Antislavery." Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 282-316. Winchester, Jonathan. "Friends in the Meetinghouse and Masters in the Fields: Seventeenth Century Quakers in the Slave Society of Barbados." M.A. thesis, East Carolina University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10342/5343. Wood, Bradford J., and Larry E. Tise. "The Conundrum of Unfree Labor." In New Voyages to Carolina: Reinterpreting North Carolina History, edited by Tise Larry E. and Crow Jeffrey J., 85-109. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. American Civil War Whitacre, Paula Tarnapol. A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur's Struggle for Purpose. Lincoln: Potomac Books, 2017. Wilson, Gregory P. The Adventures of Jonathan Roberts, the Union's Quaker Scout in Northern Virginia, 1861–1865. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2017. Anti-Quakeriana Chalmers, Hero. "'But Not Laughing: Horsemanship and the Idea of the Cavalier in the Writings of William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle." The Seventeenth Century 32, no. 4 (2017): 327-349. One of the populist works discussed is John Berkenhead's ballad "The Four-Legg'd Quaker," which is an example of the accusations of bestiality made by royalists in the 1640s and 1650s to satirise their opponents. Hitchcock, David. "'He is the Vagabond that Hath No Habitation in the Lord': The Representation of Quakerism as Vagrancy in Interregnum England, c. 1650–1660." Cultural & Social History 15, no. 1 (February 2018): 21-37. Reeve, Hannah. "Research Note: To What Extent Were Quakers Being Persecuted after 1670?" Quaker Studies 23, no. 1 (2018): 109-120 Tuccillo, Alessandro. "'La Liberte de Penser en Hommes' Quaccherismo, Tolleranza Religiosa e Virtú Politica Nell'histoire Des Deux Indes di Raynal." Studi Storici 57, no. 4 (October 2016): 753-772. In Italian. Focuses on the importance and circulation of Quaker myth in 18th-century European culture. [End Page 74] The Arts...

Reviewed by: Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War Douglas Shadle (bio) Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. By Christian McWhirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 321. $39.95 cloth) Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns paints a richly textured portrait of musical life during the Civil War. McWhirter has adopted the methodology of reception history, an approach that explores the shifting meanings listeners ascribe to specific musical works—here, vernacular songs—in their changing cultural and historical contexts. This focus on meaning, as opposed to the music itself, sets Battle Hymns apart from other standard books on the subject such as Music of the Civil War Era (2004) by Steven Cornelius and The Singing Sixties (1960) by Willard A. and Porter W. Heaps. The main chapters of the book detail the important roles music played as patriotic expression for both the Union and the Confederacy, political propaganda on the home front, a source of energy and entertainment for soldiers, a site of identity formation for African Americans, an emotional release at war's end, and a tool for reimagining history. Since topics such as nationalism, slavery, hardship, and death reappear in each chapter, this thematic organizational structure allows the reader to view the same phenomena from several different perspectives and to develop a sense of the intriguing and clever intertexuality found in many songs from the period. McWhirter deliberately focuses on widely popular and still-familiar tunes, such as "John Brown's Body," "Dixie," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and others that inspired multiple retextings (i.e., new words set to the same tune) or direct musical responses (parodies, "answer songs," or sequels). His refreshingly accessible prose likewise never approaches esotericism. The vast array of primary-source material that McWhirter has [End Page 602] carefully amassed is another of the chief strengths of the book. The scope of his sources speaks directly to his thesis that music was a powerful medium of political and emotional expression during the war. Its ubiquity in common discourse strongly suggests that it was an equally important feature of everyday life for soldiers, current and former slaves, and families on the home front, all of whom left documentation revealing their feelings about and experiences with music. McWhirter skillfully weaves their voices into his narrative. At times, however, the diffuseness of the sources may leave the reader wondering how representative a particular experience or opinion might have been. McWhirter's claims about the uniqueness of his topic are overstated and reveal his inexperience with areas outside of the scope of the book. Music was no less important during the Revolutionary War or the two world wars, for example. Composers, performers, and listeners alike confronted the particular cultural challenges posed by each. McWhirter also largely ignores the thriving musical cultures that were less directly affected by the war itself—music at theaters, beer gardens, or concert halls—thus potentially leaving the reader with the impression that the war was a singular musical obsession; it was not. Lastly, McWhirter's focus on meaning leaves questions about precisely what sounds elicited such strong responses. Perhaps he will consider creating a companion website that includes streaming musical examples. These weaknesses notwithstanding, Battle Hymns convincingly combines historical and musicological perspectives by illustrating the mutual enrichment of music and extramusical culture. A song written and printed first in Chicago, for example, could be sung at a political rally there, purchased at a music store by a rally attendee, mailed to her brother on the front lines, arranged by the regimental bandmaster for use at an evening performance, and finally retexted by drunken soldiers before bed. Such rapid movement and adaptation of music was made possible by the increased nationalization of the economy, transportation networks, and the musical marketplace, all [End Page 603] of which enter McWhirter's analyses. Battle Hymns is filled with many more stories like this (and much more compelling) and thus deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the Civil War. Douglas Shadle Douglas Shadle is a visiting assistant professor of music history at the University of Louisville. He is...

Reviewed by: The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl by Sarah D. Wald Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2016. 297 pp. Cloth, $90; paper, $30. Blending literary history and environmental cultural scholarship, Sarah D. Wald's The Nature of California examines an extraordinarily broad range of literary and artistic works focused on California's multiethnic agricultural experiences from the Great Depression to the twenty-first century (1929–2014). Wald's interdisciplinary study provides a fascinating examination of the interconnectedness among representations of citizenship (national belonging), race (whiteness and racial otherness), and the environment (land ownership and agricultural labor). Wald returns to Thomas Jefferson's "Query XIX" in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to identify two dominant discourses about American national belonging. Jefferson imagined American citizenship as belonging to the farmer (white, male, free, and landowning). This citizen farmer, however, is constructed through the negation of its racial other—the African slave. Crèvecoeur imagined American national belonging through the language of nature—European immigrants as plants to be "replanted" in the United States, a process of "naturalization" resulting in a "new race of man" (8). Wald deftly explores how California's literature and art have focused on agricultural experiences that reinforce, contest, or reimagine the racialized and gendered discourses of national belonging articulated by Jeffersonian agrarianism and Crèvecoeur's "politics of the natural." Wald examines representations of Dust Bowl migrant workers in various texts of the Great Depression—Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field (1939), Ruth Comfort Mitchell's Of Human Kindness (1940), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (written in 1939 and published in 2004). These texts dramatize the displacement of landless Dust Bowl migrants as "a crisis of white citizenship" (74). In response to this crisis, McWilliams, Mitchell, and Steinbeck reinforce white land ownership (Jeffersonian agrarianism) at the expense of racialized [End Page 350] others—Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipinos, and Mexican Americans. Babb, however, dramatizes the ability of Dust Bowl migrants to form solidarity with working-class African American and Filipino characters, thereby denaturalizing the racial hierarchy inherent in Jeffersonian agrarianism. Hiroshi Nakamura's posthumously published Treadmill (1996), a novel about Japanese American internment written during internment, functions as a critique of Jeffersonian racial scripts in representing Japanese American life. Treadmill envisions antiracist activism and international solidarity between oppressed peoples as keys to addressing the crisis of racism and citizenship within the United States. Read in relation to the Catholic Worker movement, Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories—"Seventeen Syllables" (1949) and "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951)—reveal how interracial working-class solidarity is central to denaturalizing race, citizenship, and patriarchy. Representations of Filipinos and Mexicans laboring as abject aliens are examined in works by Carlos Bulosan and Ernesto Galarza. Wald reads the American landscape in Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) within the context of his anticolonial literary imagination—his "desire for democracy and land in the Philippines" (144). Ernesto Galarza's Strangers in Our Fields (1956) critiques the Bracero Program as a process of denationalization. For Bulosan and Galarza interracial working-class solidarity is key to addressing the exploitation and denationalization of Filipinos and Mexicans as a colonized labor force. Wald reminds us that working-class solidarity between Filipinos and Mexicans launched the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s. Wald examines the cultural texts of the UFW (the work of El Teatro Campesino and images from the UFW newspaper El Malcriado) within the context of 1960s and 1970s environmentalism in a way that historicizes and engages contradictions within the contemporary alternative food movement. While a consumer-focused approach privileges twenty-first-century notions of neoliberal citizenship (individual consumption), a worker-focused approach provides a systemic understanding of health and wellness within society. The latter approach is central to Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and the cultural production of artists [End Page 351] involved in the contemporary migrant...

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures Joanne van der Woude (bio) Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Rolena Adorno. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 148 pp. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Mónica Díaz. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 229 pp. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Sabine MacCormack. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 320 pp. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Yanna Yannakakis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 290 pp. Michel de Certeau wrote: "By an art of being in-between, he draws unexpected results from his situation"—an intriguing expression that opens Yanna Yannakakis's book. In her work, the citation applies to Native intermediaries, but it seems just as pertinent to scholars and teachers who (seek to) work comparatively. They, too, must distance themselves from their monolingual training and expertise in order to tackle new fields in the hope of "unexpected," or even enlightening, "results." This is true not only for those who work across languages but also for anyone who cultivates [End Page 201] a transatlantic, transcultural, or transhistorical perspective on early America—and so, suddenly, nearly everyone can be called a comparativist, in some sense of the word. I make this point in order to argue for the importance of Latin American scholarship to North American studies. The flourishing field of Latin American literature and history should be taken into account not just out of a sense of duty but because it offers real methodological and theoretical advantages. For those who still wonder why they should care, this review begins by pointing out specific genres and themes that are shared across the colonial Americas, and that would benefit from comparative consideration in criticism as well as in the classroom. Teaching, to be honest, is still complicated: there are few, good, affordable editions and translations of Latin American sources that can be assigned to undergraduate classes and professors harbor an understandable reluctance to assign many texts in translation or are simply hesitant to change time-tested syllabi. Rather than add another voice to the extensive debate about whether early American culture is best taught transatlantically, hemispherically, or both—let alone try to convince or castigate anyone about the need to assign more diverse texts—this overview begins by delineating productive pairings of Spanish writings with more canonical (and therefore usually English) texts. The idea behind this arrangement, which is followed by brief summaries and reviews of the four listed books, is to spark interest instead of inducing guilt, stressing the relevance of Latin American texts to current perspectives on North American literature and history. Fictional dialogues are a popular genre across the American colonies. John Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1671) comes most immediately to mind, as well as its scholarly readings by Kristina Bross, David Murray, and Thomas Scanlan. Although this tract was purportedly written to aid future missionaries, Eliot uses the opportunity to stage wishful exchanges that speedily convert Native leaders while also assuaging the fears of "a colonial audience concerned about the outbreaks of violence with coastal Algonquians" (Bross 119). (For the sake of realism, this piece is perhaps best read alongside another less fictional Eliot tract, though its obvious fakery also, arguably, constitutes its charm.) Christoph Saur's A Dialogue between a Newcomer and a Settler in Pennsylvania (1751), translated from the German by Patrick Erben for Carla Mulford's Oxford anthology (735-44), is a promotional piece for the Middle Colonies, which contains a wealth of information [End Page 202] on colonial Pennsylvania as well as on eighteenth-century Europe. It includes a spirited defense of Pietism, alongside such endearingly honest questions as: "If it would happen to me as it has happened to many people in this country [Germany], and I could not pay everything in cash and had to go into debt, would that be a big issue?" (Mulford 739). Helpful additions to this pair might be Manuel da Nóbrega's Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians (Castillo and Schweitzer 1556-57) and the dialogue written by Fray Bernardino de...