Early American Period Research Articles

Narrating Massive Distribution: Climate Stories from Early American Periodicals to Citizen Science Blogging

Narrating Massive Distribution: Climate Stories from Early American Periodicals to Citizen Science Blogging Eric Morel (bio) Scientists who want to share their personal and professional concerns about planetary conditions at the Earth-systems or local ecological level are increasingly advised to engage publics narratively,1 but calls for scientists’ narratives face various headwinds from directions and forces not squarely in scientists’ control. Both the trend toward storytelling and its challenges raise questions of econarratological interest. Econarratology remains, as Timothy Clark remarks, a bit of a neologism (653), but it names an enlarging cluster of scholarship that crosses the bibliographies of eco-criticism and narrative theory. Econarratology is both prompting attention to works not conventionally recognized as environmental literature and raising new questions about canonical texts to the environmental humanities. Beyond its critical deployment to assess texts and narrative techniques, econarratology has, from its inception, also kept an eye on narrative’s uses as a component of “environmental understanding” and medium of encounter, making it a useful orientation within narratologies of science, especially where environmental sciences appear in narratives distributed to broader publics (James and Morel 1). There are several headwinds facing narrative communication of environmental science. Enthusiasm for scientists’ storytelling depends—as do calls for open science and initiatives to move scientific knowledge out of privatized paywalls—on the ethos benefits of transparency, trusting that [End Page 12] humanizing the work of science through its scientists will help dispel denialists’ aspersions about climate science as self-interested and grant-money-grubbing alarmism. Yet that denialist rhetoric, amplified during Donald Trump’s rise to power, now involves not just distrust of individual scientists, studies, or data sets, but of expert authority more generally, reinvigorating long lines of American anti-intellectualism to make the credentialled designation of scientific authority suspect in and of itself.2 From a decidedly different direction, some scholars have raised skepticism of narrative forms and practices to render, adequately and equitably, the cluster of issues that are escalating ecological crises. For example, citing Amitav Ghosh and Claire Colebrook, the coeditors of a recent issue from the journal SubStance note in their introduction that “a growing number of scholars have suggested that not any specific narrative template but rather narrative as such is incapable of reckoning with the scale of environmental change” (Bauer et al. 5, original emphasis). Throwing water on the enthusiasm of the science communication trend, they reason that “narratological inquiry should move beyond grand claims on the representational capabilities of particular forms of narration and instead attend to narrative’s reckoning with its own boundaries” (5). Indeed, a significant boundary worth noting as a third headwind stems from Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s and Eric Morel’s separate studies of cli-fi and its reading, which both underscore the dubious record that even narratives with intentional environmental messaging have of changing readers’ minds. Admittedly incomplete though it is, this sampling of issues clearly demonstrates that use of narrative for communicating environmental science merits thoughtful attention. This essay calls attention to collaborative narrative practices extant in scientific inquiry, more broadly conceived, arguing for these practices’ capabilities to face science communication’s current cultural and formal headwinds. More precisely, I am labelling the collaborative narrative practices I observe as collective narration and corroborative narration. In econarratological fashion, my argument suggests reciprocal value from studying these practices for both environmental and narratological purposes. For environmental purposes, I am interested in these practices’ inclusive elements, which broaden the kinds of expertise invited into the communicative space and the permeability of authorship and readership they convene. While not free from their own limits of narrative representation, they also model possibilities for narrative forms that meet some of [End Page 13] environmental change’s scalar challenges. As a contribution to narrative theory, my argument both elaborates scholarship on distributed forms that expands beyond more familiar digital narrative and engages questions about narrative unity. In exploring its examples of collaborative narration in scientific endeavors, this paper proceeds in two steps, first responding to contemporary claims about narrative’s capabilities and then suggesting a deeper historical tradition that countermands an overly presentist focus for such claims. In the first instance, I survey the ISeeChange app...

Hungry minds: the visual and verbal language of taverns and coffee houses in early American periodicals

Eighteenth-century American periodicals utilized depictions of taverns and coffee houses to aid subscribers in their navigation of complex political environments. Many eighteenth-century artists and publishers drew upon public knowledge of the significance of small variations in drinking habits, imported beverages, and tavern life as a communication strategy. Public knowledge of, and interest in, tavern and coffee-house culture made this subject matter a particularly legible and engaging vehicle for discussions about politics, class, and identity. Editors and artists built on public knowledge to affirm the status of a socioeconomically and geographically limited readership. As connective spaces for the performance of norms and distribution of knowledge, magazines, coffee houses, and taverns served as hubs for knowledge distribution. Depictions of taverns and coffee houses, in contrast to other popular subject-matter in early American periodicals, worked to reaffirm the status and ideals of subscribers during this tumultuous period in American history.

Still Resisting after All These Years

ABSTRACT The impact of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader on the development of feminist literary criticism, particularly of the American literary canon, is well known. The parallels between Fetterley's late 1970s call for women to become resistant readers and the work of literary historians invested in the actual reading practices of women reading women's writing (in novels of the early American period) are at the heart of this personal reflection.

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

Du Baptême à la Tombe: Afro-Catholicisme et Réseaux Familiaux dans les Communautés Esclaves Louisianaises (From baptism to the grave: Afro-Catholicism and family network in Louisiana slave communities)

In Du Baptême à la Tombe Geneviève Piché explores Louisiana, unique in its French, Spanish, and American heritages, and the challenging subject of African Catholicism in slave communities in the early American period (1803–1845). She uses church documents, comparing the urban New Orleans Parish with the rural Saint John the Baptist Parish, but also published sources, travel literature, directories, and registers, in English but mostly in French. Her theoretical stand includes slave agency and cultural negotiation, macrohistory and microhistory, history from below, and the search for the excluded. It also includes female protagonists, and discussions of creolization, hybridity, transculturation, and multicultural processes. She views religiosity as a key socializing practice, including for the subaltern, and considers plurality important in society and in historical interpretation. In local and global approaches, she stresses how slavery in Louisiana has an Atlantic context (American, Iberian, Caribbean, African, and Latin American). Piché deals first with the life of urban slaves in the New Orleans parish, including demographics and stressing a heterogeneous servile population, with the preponderance of female slaves as domestics and merchants. Leisure and amusement play important roles in slave urban life, most of it in tandem with religiosity, officially Catholic yet mixed with African mores. She then turns to the countryside of the Saint John the Baptist Parish, emphasizing the prevalence of males, the growing U.S.-born slave population's use of English, and Protestant features opposed by French Catholic missionary zeal. As most slaves were Catholics, she deals at length with the Church and the slaves in Louisiana. Slaves were active agents in Catholic practice; women, in particular, and some within the clergy opposed slavery. The Church was split and the clergy itself owned slaves. Catholic slave owners often opposed conversion. In any case, most slaves were Catholics, and Sunday was a resting day; priests opposed family split, as the thorny issue of marriage led to common slave church unions. Free black women volunteered to spread the Catholic faith. Piché concludes that voluntary adherence to Catholicism comforted the material and spiritual lives of slaves and free blacks. Even if that is impossible to prove, her arguments are convincing and contribute to understanding the past as inspiring, as even the most destitute can forge their own destinies.

Bilibid and beyond: Race, body size, and the native in early American colonial Philippines

The United States’ occupation of the Philippines began with proclamations of a new era of development and the prospect of local political representation. In coming to grips with what they saw as America's civilising mission, colonial scholars and officials sought information about the peoples of the Philippines by conducting a census and various population studies, using an array of methodologies drawn from criminology and physical anthropology. This article traces and critiques representations of the Philippine population in the 1903 Philippine Census as well as in several related studies published in the early American period, which served to reduce the Filipinos to a state of ‘otherness’ which served to justify colonial projects. Several of these racialised studies used the inmates of Bilibid Prison, both alive and dead, as experimental and documentary subjects to create a record of Filipino ‘sample types’ for various administrative and other purposes, such as the exhibition at the St Louis World's Fair of 1904. Bilibid prisoners’ body size, brain weight, skin colour, facial features and other physical attributes were selectively correlated with other colonial constructions of Filipino individuals and groups, such as ‘wildness’ and political maturity.

“Not of the Modern French School”: Literary Conservatism and the Ancien Régime in Early American Periodicals

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after years of denouncing the French Revolution and the influence of French politics and philosophy on American culture, Federalist writers began to invoke Old Regime France as a symbol of the traditional values that they perceived to be under threat in Jeffersonian America. This essay explores the dialectical relationship between the ancien régime and “the modern French school” in Federalist periodical writing and argues that the concept of the ancien régime emerged in reaction to the embrace of an increasingly democratic, egalitarian political discourse by Jefferson’s supporters. Writers for the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States and Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio invoked an idealized image of France’s Old Regime to legitimize their own political and aesthetic values against the supposed democratization, or “leveling,” of American culture; to argue for the need for a “natural aristocracy” to govern the U.S. republic; and to establish proper taste in literature as one of the standards through which this elite class would distinguish itself. Tracing these uses of the ancien régime in Federalist periodical writing, this essay argues that the emergence of American conservatism as a self-conscious political and aesthetic project owes as much to engagements with French as with British conservatism.

Homeward Bound or, The Chase. A Tale of the Sea

Homeward Bound or, The Chase. A Tale of the Sea

Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic anxiety and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries

Abstract This article focuses on the CW television series The Vampire Diaries (TVD) (2009–17) and explores how the show uses literary tropes from the early American period commonly used to represent Native Americans. The television series reimagines colonial contact in a way that allows for a range of critical interpretations. The show at turns reproduces colonial rationalizations and rhetoric of land claim and discovery that disenfranchise Native peoples but also allows for ambivalent critiques of the colonial project. More particularly, this article asserts that the Mikaelson vampires (also referred to in the series as ‘The Originals’) replace Native Americans through their assumption of a proto-American identity, then displace actual Native American peoples to occupy the position of surrogate Indian, and finally erase what Native Studies scholars term the tribal real by reproducing fakelore that helps legitimize their American roots. The vampire characters in TVD see themselves as both elite and oppressed and position themselves as ‘surrogate Indians’, a characterization that harks back to some of the earliest depictions and records of historical Virginia as a royal colony filled with displaced elite supporters of the English monarchy.

Alternative Histories: Three Activations in the Brooklyn Museum’s Early American Period Rooms

This essay describes various historical references that inform my artwork, specifically my interests in decay and destruction. References cited include Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series, Freud’...

Modern Historians and Jewish Transnational Perspectives

Modern Historians and Jewish Transnational Perspectives Eli Lederhendler (bio) The idea of reframing American Jewish history in a transnational perspective, as I understand it, aims chiefly to include Europe inside the frame. That, as I and a growing number of other writers have urged, is a most useful expansion of the classic focus by Jewish Americanists on the United States alone. In fact, this proposition no longer requires a novel and robust defense, since the transnational gaze is already a fairly established feature in some parts of American Jewish historiography. That is true with regard to the early American period of the Sephardi Atlantic diaspora and it holds true, as well, for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century mass Jewish migrations out of Eastern Europe.1 It has taken somewhat longer for a similar approach to develop in relation to Central Europe—Germany in particular—as yet another theater of an integrated Euro-American Jewish history, but that sphere is also beginning to find its way into the literature (though mainly propelled, I should add, by German-trained scholars and not yet integrated into American Jewish historical training and discourse).2 This recent burgeoning of transnationalism in Jewish historiography is actually an exercise in revisiting much earlier thematic and ideational paradigms. Moshe (Murray) Rosman and Nils Roemer, respectively, analyzed this layering effect in two useful discussions that were published [End Page 557] a decade ago. They historicized the process by which a wave of territorial-based studies succeeded an earlier genre of pan-Jewish historiography as the regnant form of Jewish social and cultural history. (Actually, Rosman used the term “hybridity” to inquire into the relationship between Jewish and co-territorial histories and cultures, whereas Roemer used “transnationalism” to analyze similar currents in Jewish historiographical development.) Focusing on national Jewries delineated by the political borders came to be seen, especially in the decades after 1950, as a better way to understand Jewish histories (in the plural). The national approach looked at Jewish populations in their natural habitats and in their wider, non-Jewish contexts. Before that national-territorial trend set in, however, pan-Jewish and wide-canvas approaches were far more common.3 Indeed, even in more recent decades, prominent Jewish historians persisted in addressing the cross-continental inter-relations that shaped modern Jewish life. Michael Meyer’s now-classic work on the history of Reform Judaism, for example, very aptly fits that description, as did Jonathan Frankel’s equally magisterial work on Russian Jewish politics before 1917, which included a portrait of left-wing and Jewish-national politics in the immigrant Jewish community in the United States. The sense of such works, and others like them, is that Jewish populations, communities, and movements retain an inherent complementarity—not simply a parallelism of coeval and roughly analogous phenomena, but rather a cluster of distinctive Jewish phenomena that find diverse expression across various geographies.4 Europeanists (I include here American-based scholars of European Jewry) have forged somewhat ahead of the Americanists in this regard. Seminal works on early modern and modern European Jewish life have departed from the national-boundary format and afford ample scope to cross-national and cross-cultural social, economic, and intellectual networks. One thinks here of scholars like Jonathan Israel, Yosef Kaplan, Lois Dubin, David Ruderman, Mitchell Hart, Derek Penslar, Abigail [End Page 558] Green, Francesca Trivellato, Lisa Moses Leff, and more recently Iris Idelson-Shein, to name just a few.5 Optimally, some critical synthesis between the two approaches or a dialectical scheme that sheds light on both types of historical narrative might possess the key. My guide, in this and in other, more general senses, has been the venerable American Jewish historian, Henry L. Feingold, who once reflected on the dualism in which the American Jewish past is caught, as it were, between two conceptual realms: the American social realm and the Jewish world-diasporic realm. “The two strands are so tied together that it is almost impossible to determine to whose history the American Jewish experience belongs.”6 Pursuing this thought a bit, I would add that there are, inevitably, some differences and some hurdles to be negotiated. For instance, the transnational historical...

Abortion in the Early American Press: Secular and Catholic Approaches to the Pre-Born Child

When discussing abortion, the contemporary press commonly focuses on the political and reproductive-rights aspects of the issue, ignoring the person-hood of the unborn child. Many logically assume the dehumanization of the unborn child began with the 1973 Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion. It is equally logical to assume that before 1973, when most forms of abortion were crimes, the press and governments acknowledged and sympathized with the unborn child victim. However, newspapers, secular and Catholic, from the early American period until the dawn of the Civil War, differ markedly in their approach to the unborn. The secular media largely failed to acknowledge the personhood of the unborn, even as news reports about murders, rapes, and robberies customarily acknowledged that those crimes had victims. The early Catholic press, however, demonstrated more recognition of the unborn children aided by theological developments, including the teaching on the ensoulment of the unborn from the time of conception.

Early American Periodicals: Looking Back—and Forward

Early American Periodicals: Looking Back—and Forward

A Novel View of Periodicals in Early America

A Novel View of Periodicals in Early America Robb K. Haberman (bio) Jared Gardner. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. xi + 203 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $50.00. Jared Gardner’s The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture joins a growing body of recent scholarship that foregrounds the magazine’s participation in national and transatlantic conversations about literature, politics, and economy. Expanding on the bibliographic foundations provided by Frank L. Mott’s A History of American Magazines 1741–1850 (1930) and Lyon N. Richardson’s A History of Early American Magazines, 1741–1789 (1931), scholars in the past decade have raised new questions about the organization and operation of a public sphere, print, and American identity, and the performative nature of early American communications. For example, Patricia Okker’s Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) investigates the relationship between the production and reading of serial fiction within periodicals and the creation of multiple publics in the new nation. Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris’ edited collection Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (2005) illustrates that the diversity of magazine content helped establish this medium as an ideal platform for political debate, social dialogue, and intellectual exchange. Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan’s Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (2008) traces the efforts of Federalist magazine editors and authors to refine the American character through a steady offering of wit, sensibility, and learning. As typified by three of the current authors named above (Okker, Kamrath, and Harris), literary scholars working in the United States have produced the lion’s share of current research on early American magazines. This topic has nonetheless proven to have wide appeal, as those working in economics, sociology, communications, and cultural studies, as well as history, have put their distinctive stamps on magazine scholarship by adopting different methodologies and interpretive schema. Two essays within the past decade, for instance, have used economic and sociological models to analyze success and failure in magazine proprietorship through the Civil War.1 The era’s magazine publications have also attracted increasing attention from academics outside [End Page 633] the United States. The scope of international contribution is evidenced by the University of Nottingham’s Knowledge Networks: Nineteenth Century American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities, a year-long research project that included an interdisciplinary symposium held in May 2011, and the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz’s sponsorship of Life Writing in Early American Periodicals, 1790–1830, a recently completed research project that mapped out the centrality of biographical texts for magazine production in the decades following American independence. Broader technological developments and intellectual currents further explain the resurgent interest in early American magazines, not least of which is the emergence of periodical studies as both an independent field and a subfield of the history of the book. The formation of such interdisciplinary institutions as the Research Society for American Periodicals and its attendant 1991 publication, American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Biography, points to the growing awareness that magazines (and newspapers) constitute “autonomous objects of study” within the humanities and social sciences.2 The creation of online archival databases has further facilitated the professionalization of periodical studies by providing digitized access to hundreds of magazine titles. The prodigious search and indexing capabilities of ProQuest American Periodical Series Online and EBSCO American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection has especially benefited early American scholarship by expanding analytical enquiry and fostering innovative research methods. Moreover, the advent of social media technologies and the participatory nature of platforms such as wikis (collaboratively edited websites) and blogs have spurred a reassessment of the processes by which magazines and other publications helped people form communities by facilitating the assemblage and sharing of ideas and information. Scholars have paid particular attention to the ways that print media operated within a broader communications network in early America, and they have also emphasized that the magazines of this era are best understood as collaborations realized through the integrated labors of readers, editors, and authors. Gardner has produced a nuanced and sophisticated work that both reflects on...

Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary LondonErrands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London. Jonathan Beecher Field. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xiii+154.

<i>Jonathan Beecher Field</i>, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London<i>Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London</i>. Jonathan Beecher Field. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009. Pp. xiii+154.

Reading the Early American Legal Profession: A Study of the First American Law Review

This note seeks to demonstrate the ripeness of early American legal periodicals as a subject of further inquiry by reading the American Law Journal (1808-1817), the first American law review, as a reflection of the changing nature of the legal profession at a crucial time in American history. Close analysis of the content and editorial choices of the Journal suggests that the Journal both reflects and addresses three early nineteenth century professional needs: the need to practice in a variety of jurisdictions and areas of law; the need to give voice and content to the emerging idea of a professional self-consciousness, which some scholars suggest developed only later in the century; and the need to respond to the internationalization of American legal and political affairs, which undercuts the arguments of many legal historians that the period marked an increasing tendency in American jurisprudence to look inward. The few scholars who have attempted to paint a picture of legal affairs in this transformative period have typically focused on the dockets of particular jurisdictions while overlooking legal periodicals. But such sources can more accurately portray the state of the national legal profession given that a journal editor, unconstrained by state or regional boundaries, can incorporate cases and sources from a wide range of jurisdictions and on a varied array of topics. Furthermore, the fact that periodicals are necessarily dependent on a subscriber base suggests that such editors had to touch on issues of interest to subscribers from all across the country in order to stay afloat.

Security, Two Diplomacies, and the Formation of the U.S. Constitution: Review, Interpretation, and New Directions for the Study of the Early American Period

The making of the Constitution was an international event consisting of envoys from the thirteen states seeking to devise a solution to two diplomatic and security crises, that amongst the units (states and regions) of the Confederation with one another and with foreign powers. Early America is often structured as a fixed “nation” in studies of the period, but it is perhaps more accurate to classify it as comprising a state-system, one which was part of a larger international system. This article reviews how this dynamic and the role of diplomacy factored into constitutional reform in the 1780s by surveying the extant scholarship in the area and through analyzing debate at the Federal Convention and the reaction of the founders to the threat of internecine and foreign war during the Confederation. It concludes by discussing how its findings point to new lines of inquiry into the early American political experience.

Waniyetu Wówapi: Native American Records of Weather and Climate

Pictographic calendars called waniyetu wówapi or “winter counts” kept by several Great Plains Indian cultures (principally the Sioux or Lakota) preserve a record of events important to these peoples from roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. A number of these memorable events include natural phenomena, such as meteor storms, eclipses, and unusual weather and climate. Examination of a selection of the available winter count records and related interpretive writings indicates that the Lakota and other native plains cultures recorded many instances of unusual weather or climate and associated impacts. An analysis of the winter count records in conjunction with observational and proxy climate records and other historical documentation suggests that the winter counts preserve a unique record of some of the most unusual and severe climate events of the early American period and provide valuable insight into the impacts upon people and their perceptions of such events in the ethnographically important region of the Great Plains.

Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies

The title of this jointly authored essay is meant to evoke new strategies in Native literary studies: the reaching back across time from the contemporary present to the historical past, the examination of the relationship between the academic fields of early and contemporary Native literature, and the growing recognition of the importance of alternative textualities. These strategies are joined by a network of relationships: intellectual, geographical, and textual, all of which gesture toward land as the glue that binds Native communities. Our collaboration is similarly linked. As scholars, we are situated at opposite ends of the field of Native studies: temporally, Fitzgerald in the present, reaching back through the centuries to uncover Native voices and communities; Wyss situated in the early American period, recovering Native voices that for too long have been left out of contemporary literary histories. Spatially, we are situated differently as well, with Wyss working on New England material culture and Fitzgerald working on fiction from Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, and Sophia Alice Callahan. In this essay, we raise the following questions: How do we see each other at the edges of Native literary studies? Perhaps more importantly, where do we meet? How do these two subfields, early and contemporary, intersect, even while recognizing that increasingly, they are part and parcel of the same intellectual and textual moment? How do they inform each other, and what are the implications of this for the broader field and beyond? Scholars in contemporary Native studies draw a number of important connections between the past and the present through

Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785–1800

Americans did not have the luxury of merely contemplating the Muslim world between 1785 and 1800. Over a hundred American sailors were captive in Algiers in this period. The escalation and temporary resolution of this dispute informed the imagery of Muslims in hundreds of articles published in American magazines. These Muslim people and places ranged across centuries of time, thousands of miles, and multiple ethnicities, and the images did not conform to one or even a few models. American magazine readers learned that Muslims were as diverse and complex as they themselves. This study considers much of the magazine archive from this period and finds clear patterns that parallel the historical experience of America with Algiers. Though the non-Barbary regions (Persia, Arabia, and Turkey) remained objects of fascination and even delight, the Barbary Coast (generally, the northern African coast) emerged as a pragmatic political concern by the mid-1790s. These magazines are a significant source about a crucial moment in American nation-formation. Muslims were an ethnic, religious, and cultural Other by which Americans began to imagine themselves. Though nineteenth-century Americans learned to think of Muslims through the familiar Orientalist categories, this periodical archive reveals an anxious, uncertain dance before the eventual swagger.