Early American Research Articles

Awkward History, Awkward Theory

Abstract Based on a contribution to a panel discussion on Dana Logan’s Awkward Rituals, this essay addresses the first chapter of the book, in which Logan discusses the rites of Freemasons in the early American republic. It considers the particular significance of Masonic ritual practice with respect to Logan’s arguments about patterns of change in pre- and post-Revolutionary America; and reflects on the general theoretical import of this notion of ritual awkwardness, embodied by the Freemasons, considered as a form of purposive activity. It raises questions about the broader applicability in comparative religious studies of Logan’s insights, both for studying history and for thinking about ritual.

:Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History

:<i>Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History</i>

Creating and Managing a Radically Edited Cultural Landscape: The Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States

This article explores how a contrived heritage tourism landscape was created, how its identity was marketed, and how it has influenced the culture of the contiguous region in which it resides in. During the Great Depression, the designers from the U.S. National Park Service manipulated the authenticity of the indigenous architecture and radically edited the mountain landscape in Virginia and North Carolina to create an institutionalized super-scenic motorway—the Blue Ridge Parkway (BRP). Spanning over four hundred miles, the BRP promotes early American mountain culture. As it approaches its centennial year of being authorized by the U.S. Congress, this recreational road continues to be a popular heritage site and supports the regional economy through heritage tourism. However, does the planning of the parkway and the management of its identity convey the region’s historic mountain culture or has it always been a created landscape for tourism that is based on a formal construct of a heritage idea, created by its designers? And for the American tourist experiencing the BRP, what is more important: the authenticity of the regional heritage or the authenticity of the contrived artefact simply put, the scenic road?

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

‘Some Agreeable Conversation’: Jonathan Edwards Among Early American Baptists

Abstract Jonathan Edwards has long been recognized for his theology, philosophy, biblical studies, and pastoral ministry. The influence of Edwards’s life and ministry has stretched both far and wide. While his effect among English Baptists has been examined in a variety of ways, less attention has been given to his influence among early Baptists in North America. This article provides a survey of the research concerning Edwards’s influence upon early Baptists in North America. It argues that early Baptists in North America have been more influenced by Edwards than previously recognized. These Baptists looked to Edwards for instruction on Scripture, theology, piety, conversion and revival, preaching and pastoral ministry, and missions. Yet, more work needs to be done to understand the full scope of the reception of Edwards by early Baptists in North America.

Thomas Hallock, A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst

Thomas Hallock, <i>A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst</i>

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Eva Sheppard Wolf Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-756857-6.) In Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Laura F. Edwards marries [End Page 361] two of her longtime interests: her award-winning work in legal history, including in this journal, and her fascination with needlework and textiles. It might seem an odd combination, but Edwards shows that the law interacted in distinct and important ways with textiles, making it possible for people who had no property rights to produce, buy, sell, trade, invest in, and protect their ownership of textiles. The title refers to women and clothing, but the book actually addresses more capacious subjects—all people without full legal standing or on the margins of the economy, especially white women but also enslaved people and poor white men; and textiles of all sorts, meaning everything one wore or could wear on one’s body as well as household items such as sheets and table linens. Useful as a clearly written, engaging, and often humorous introduction to an aspect of early American material culture, Only the Clothes on Her Back also demonstrates the centrality of textiles to economic and social life, and it reveals how important nineteenth-century changes in law and economy diminished the economic power of those who had previously used textiles to their advantage. In Part 1, “Old Clothes in a New Country,” Edwards describes how, in the late colonial period and early republic, those without full rights relied on a long-standing tradition, barely noted in written law but well understood and respected in local courts, that people owned their clothing and also any textiles they made or purchased for later use. In 1842, when Polly, an enslaved woman in upcountry South Carolina, found that some yarn that she had spun was stolen from her yard, she took the matter to court. Her owner’s name was on the complaint, but Polly asserted that the “spun cotton belonged to her” and the court agreed (p. 21). Although Edwards acknowledges that marginalized people owned items beyond textiles, she does not fully explain her assertion that “textiles were different” from other material goods in law and practice (p. 37). The second section, “Protective Coverings in a Hostile World,” opens up a new view of the early American economy by showing how almost everyone used textiles as money, capital, and credit. Historians have largely missed this story because they have looked for economic activity in ledgers and account books, when it can also be found in women’s diaries, pawnshop records, and criminal court cases, which were open to women and enslaved people who could not bring civil suits to recover property. Although the American Revolution did not change how people used textiles, the rights-based legal principles of that era slowly grew dominant in American law and—along with a changing economy in which textiles became more numerous and their value became less stable—altered the fabric of American life. As described in Part 3, “Rags,” behaviors that had once been common, such as pawning or selling one’s clothes in order to leverage their value, had by the 1850s become suspect. The ability of people on the margins to use textiles to advance their economic interests diminished as their status outside the realm of rights-holders became more important. Women remained without rights the longest and after the Civil War were left with “only the clothes on their backs” (p. 289). Edwards’s historiographical point is that if we want to understand “the actual relationship of most Americans to law and economy,” we need to look [End Page 362] well beyond white male property owners (p. 299). She thus contributes to the recent form of economic history that places ordinary, and often struggling, people at the...

The moving image as an instrument of oppression and resistance in Jim Crow Era Jacksonville, Florida, 1907–1917

ABSTRACT This paper will examine the contrasts in racial representations in films produced in Jacksonville at the cusp of the segregation era. These tensions will be examined by exploring how motion picture consumption factored into the politics of race in one of the largest cities in the New South during cinema’s silent era. This will be accomplished by exploring how the marginalized and disenfranchised attempted to assert agency in public and private spaces despite living in an environment of white supremacy and social inequities. By tracing the lived experiences of African American moviegoers in a Southern city at the onset of the Jim Crow Era, a broader comprehension of the early American film industry’s dismissiveness of – and at times outright insensitivity toward – acts of political terror against African Americans can be better understood.

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books &amp; Manuscripts Library

Collecting Sarah Piatt at the Ohio State University's Rare Books &amp; Manuscripts Library

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Joshua Piker This issue of the William and Mary Quarterly is entitled "Colonial Roots/Routes in North America and Latin America" and is jointly published with the Hispanic American Historical Review. The joint issue consists of an introductory essay by Camilla Townsend and eight articles, three of which are published in HAHR and five in WMQ. The introduction appears in both journals. More specifically, in this issue, you will find articles by Jack Bouchard, Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, Margaret Ellen Newell, Matt D. Childs, and Nancy E. van Deusen, along with Townsend's introductory essay. The other articles will appear in May 2023's issue of HAHR (volume 103, number 2): The Echo of Voices after the Fall of the Aztec Empire Alex Hidalgo Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, circa 1600 Laura Matthew "Betwixt Ye Two Rivers": Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Saint Christopher Casey Schmitt I am grateful to the participants in the joint issue for their commitment to this project, which began before COVID-19, was powerfully shaped by the pandemic, and is being published two years later than anyone involved initially envisioned. I thank the authors for their patience and hard work in difficult circumstances, and I thank the peer reviewers for taking on assignments at a moment when no one needed another thing to worry about. I am particularly grateful to Martha Few and her colleagues at HAHR, for being such exemplary partners in this project; to Ryan Kashanipour, for insisting that Martha and I would have a lot to talk about and setting up a meeting for us at the 2017 Southwest Seminar; and to the organizers of the 2019 American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting at Pennsylvania State University, for allowing us to devote three linked panels to the conversation that became this joint issue. [End Page 205] Joshua Piker William and Mary Quarterly Copyright © 2023 Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution by Max M. Edling

Reviewed by: Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution by Max M. Edling Craig Green Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution. By Max M. Edling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 206 pages. Cloth, ebook. Having already written two outstanding books about the early American republic, Max M. Edling revisits this period in Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution, which examines American states and federalism.1 The book promotes what Edling calls a "Unionist interpretation" (15) of the Constitution, claiming that sharp limits on interstate government meant the Constitution was more important for creating union and statehood than for producing democracy, individual liberty, or market economics. Edling's thesis challenges widespread assumptions that the American Revolution and the Constitution directly transformed social, economic, and civic life, demanding instead that scholars should focus on state-law authorities "that actually regulated civic rights" (15).2 Perfecting the Union uses three categories of evidence—international law, American history, and European philosophy—to define the federal government's constraints and the American states' autonomy. Mirroring the book's organizational structure, this review considers those categories in sequence. Edling's first category of evidence to identify original limits on the federal government (chapter 1) comes from international law, but the full scope of his argument is not clear. For example, Edling's Unionist theory claims that national solidarity was an enduring problem for the United States, comparing America to loose-knit confederacies under the European law of nations. But how prescriptive were international analogies for the creation of American statehood and union? Edling cites David C. Hendrickson, who described the Constitution as a peace pact among independent sovereigns, and other scholars have likewise suggested that the Articles of Confederation were a treaty among American states as autonomous international entities.3 Some of those authors have argued not only that the United [End Page 403] States was influenced by international law but also that the United States and the American states were formal creatures of international law. The assumption that American states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania were comparable to international sovereigns such as Spain or France is hard to defend, but perhaps Edling can avoid such exaggerations insofar as he combines international law with other legal sources.4 For example, Edling cites British colonialism as an example of his Unionist thesis, yet prerevolutionary colonists disputed the power of Parliament and the crown exclusively based on British law, not the law of nations.5 When Edling labels prerevolutionary British history as "Unionist," that implicitly suggests at least a possibility that postrevolutionary relationships among states and the United States also were not derived solely from international law. Edling demonstrates that international law was one reference point for the early American republic—alongside British colonial law, Native governance, and colonists' own innovations—but it was not uniquely authoritative for the development of constitutional federalism and American states. Edling's reliance on international law seems more troublesome in his argument that "the federal government was never created to regulate domestic affairs" (14) as opposed to "international affairs" (12). Edling's words "international" and "domestic" are not how most people distinguish the constitutional authority of the federal government and the American states. The conventional adjectives are interstate and intrastate. Congress has always had constitutional power over policies that are "domestic" rather than "international," including interstate commerce, bankruptcy, taxing and spending, intellectual property, counterfeiting, the post office, and more. Each of those powers has had broad practical effects over time, including the production of "a stronger federal union … to stand up to European powers and to conquer the North American continent" (8), but such geopolitical implications do not mean that the federal powers were themselves international.6 The law of nations' distinction between "international" and [End Page 404] "domestic" affairs did not solve the constitutional problems of defining federal power and constitutional statehood.7 In chapter 2, Edling's second effort to specify the federal government's limitations highlights continuities between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. For example, under both regimes, the United States tried to limit threats from European...

How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories by Gabriel J. Loiacono

Reviewed by: How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories by Gabriel J. Loiacono Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan (bio) Poor relief, Welfare, Poverty, Early U.S. history, Local government How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories. By Gabriel J. Loiacono. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 248. Paper, $35.00.) How Welfare Worked in the Early United States explores the lives of five people connected to the poor-relief system of early-republic Rhode Island. In clear, accessible prose, Loiacono assumes the posture of a fly on the wall in council meetings, along small-town sidewalks, and as working-class people interacted with agents of the local government. Using a truly remarkable, and remarkably comprehensive, set of town, county, and state records, he contextualizes the experiences of individuals within a Janus-faced apparatus that was designed to serve one half of the population of a town while expelling the other. In following the lives of William Larned (an overseer of the poor), Cuff Roberts (a free Black Revolutionary War veteran), "One-Eyed Sarah" (a home nurse), Lydia Bates (a laborer caught up in a bastardy case), and William Fales (a literate and ill poorhouse resident) as they intersected with the early American welfare system, Loiacono demonstrates how this system relied on an uneasy balance between the humanitarian desire to provide relief for the needy and the political–economic desire to keep taxes low for those who paid them. They were often merciful toward those with legal settlement, regularly providing real survival assistance in dire cases, and offering stopgap measure that prevented others from following that path. And they were exclusionary and tight-fisted with those who they deemed to be strangers, warning out people who lacked legal settlement in that community. Loiacono argues, carefully amassing his evidence brick by brick, that agents of local government wielded an enormous amount of power in early American communities. This power stretched, effectively, from one's crib, to their wallet, to the sidewalk, to the bedroom, and the grave. While historians have generally tried to explain the structure and implementation of the poor-relief systems in early America as pursuits of either social control or economic control, Loiacono takes a both/and stance. He argues that the police power of the overseers of the poor, derived from the poor law, was marshaled through what was essentially social control, though this occurred largely in service of economic ends. Unique to this study is the close look at the figures who moved within the orbit of the welfare system but whose roles were much murkier than [End Page 171] those providing or receiving relief, such as the people who worked as a nineteenth-century version of home health-care workers, and "hired hands." While the "overseers, literally, oversaw this work," it was "paid women" who "did the work" (118). Loiacono reminds us of the fluidity of early American class status; that nearly all workers bobbed on a mercurial sea, riding waves of illness and national economic crises as best they could. There was very little distinction, on paper, between the socioeconomic status of many overseers and those who helped them carry out their work, and those who received poor relief. The micro-historical nature of this study shows how the welfare system and local government functioned, as that function might have been perceived on the ground. William Larned, overseer of the poor for Providence, Rhode Island, served in this role for several decades, so long that he is in the position of recognizing the faces of people who were warned out and later returned. It is this provincial level of the story that is especially telling, then, when we see how this individual and others in similar roles used their positions and the structures in which they worked to warn out their neighbors. Larned and another Providence overseer, in 1806, used the poor laws to excommunicate dozens of Black people from Providence, leading to mass banishments that marked the experience of Black New Englanders in the period. The construction and destruction of families and social networks is one interesting thread throughout the book. As Loiacono writes, "the poor laws prompted...

To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere

This article contributes to recent scholarship on early American money by exploring the role of print and the public sphere in making local paper currencies meaningful. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, elected assemblies and paper money advocates produced currencies, legislation, and discourse to incite belief in paper money and foster confidence in the fiscal promise that underpinned its value. With the spread of the press and the rise of counterfeiting, colonial governments and established printers turned monetary crime into a force of legitimation, distinguishing genuine monetary tokens from their fraudulent counterparts to authenticate "real" paper money. At a time when threats to the monetary system came less from counterfeiters than from political and economic factors, the authorities used the power of the press to legitimate paper as money and to demonstrate stewardship over the market relations paper money shaped. By the mid-eighteenth century, printers were putting variations of the phrase "To Counterfeit Is Death" on colonial currencies and detailing harsh punishments for counterfeiters in their newspapers, rendering colonial state power visible to abstract subjects. The political basis of paper money's value—the power of the purse—was in the process hidden from public view.

Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic

Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom by Spencer W. McBride

Reviewed by: Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom by Spencer W. McBride Sasha Coles (bio) Mormonism, Latter-Day Saints, Joseph Smith, Religion, Religious history, Religious freedom Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom. By Spencer W. McBride. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 269. Cloth, $29.95.) Roughly one year before the 1844 U.S. presidential election, nearly identical letters reached five men positioning themselves to compete for the highest political office in the land. All five letters contained the same question: "What will be your rule of action relative to us as a people, should fortune favor your ascension to the chief magistracy?" Here, "us" referred to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Latter-day Saints, or Mormons). Joseph Smith, the church's founding prophet and first president, was the one asking. He wanted to know one thing. Would any of the prospective candidates leverage the power of the federal government to defend the right of Latter-day Saints to organize and worship in peace? Martin Van Buren and Richard M. Johnson ignored Smith completely. In their responses, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Lewis Cass offered no guarantees. These results would ultimately lead to a fascinating moment in American political history: Joseph Smith's own presidential candidacy. This is the subject of an impressive new monograph, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom. In this book, author Spencer W. McBride's depth of expertise in the historiography of American religion is on full display. So is his command of source material related to Mormonism's early years. In roughly 200 well-paced, detail-rich pages, McBride uses Joseph Smith's campaign to inoculate readers against the enduring myth that universal religious freedom [End Page 195] has been respected and protected since the nation's founding. In fact, there is a long history of religious inequality in the United States that, by many measures, endures today. This trajectory can be explained by attachments to one principle in particular: the doctrine of states' rights. In McBride's words, "the states' rights strategy was as effective at impeding efforts to establish the full citizenship rights of religious minorities as it was at blocking efforts to establish the personhood of men and women of African descent enslaved in the American South" (209). The role of states'-rights ideology in maintaining inequality becomes clear when confronted with the marginalization Latter-day Saints experienced during the early American republic. As McBride explains, after the church's founding in 1830, Mormons established tight-knit settlements in Ohio and Missouri, proselytized among Native Americans, and extended church membership to some Black people. To outside observers, these activities proved that Latter-day Saints were insular religious "fanatics" threatening slavery and white supremacy. Sparring between the Mormons and their critics bubbled over in 1838, when Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued an executive order calling for Joseph Smith's followers to be "exterminated or driven from the state if necessary." Emboldened vigilantes and militia members assaulted Latter-day Saints and destroyed their property. The Mormons who survived became landless refugees. In the minds of the perpetrators, this opposition did not constitute a violation of citizenship rights. They saw Mormons as "waste people" beguiled by a "fake" prophet. But what they really meant, as McBride describes, is that Latter-day Saint beliefs "were too different from their own." This "skewed, but pervasive, view of religious freedom . . . justified the discrimination and violent persecution of religious minorities because it protected the privileged place of Protestant denominations in American society" (200–201). Much scholarly attention has already been paid to the church's outsider status in the nineteenth century. Where McBride's narrative really thrives is in his rich analysis of how, after the Missouri confrontation, church leaders pursued "every possible avenue for redress and protection" (81). They met with President Martin Van Buren, petitioned Congress, and launched a public relations campaign. They also sought out a fresh start in Nauvoo, Illinois, where they established a muscular city...

Breathing, Nostrils, and the Press: Rethinking the Hebrew–Yiddish Axis in the United States, 1870–1900

The early American Yiddish and Hebrew presses had various affinities and bonds. This essay seeks to examine the connections between newspapers written in the Hebrew alphabet in the United States between the 1870s and 1890s and highlight the parallel process of growth undergone by periodicals in both languages. Diverting from standard research in this area that treats the Yiddish and Hebrew presses in the United States as two separate entities, this essay emphasizes the points of contact and proximity between them. It reviews the interconnectedness of the Hebrew and Yiddish presses during its first two decades, emphasizing personalities and material culture, and situates the phenomenon against its broader cultural background. More specifically, it presents a case study—Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals published in Chicago in 1889—and compares the periodicals' content and form. The essay then traces the geographical and cultural bilingual heritage of the publications' founders. By analyzing the features and origins of these contacts, this essay offers a different and more nuanced consideration of the historical perception of Hebrew and Yiddish in the American context.

A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz

Reviewed by: A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz Kara M. French (bio) William Walcutt, Art, Early American art, Nativism A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art. By Wendy Jean Katz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022, Pp. 226.) Questions of who gets to call themselves a "real" American and whose histories should be centered have saturated the political arena in recent years. In the atmosphere of these heated debates, Wendy Jean Katz's analysis of nativism's ties to nineteenth-century art and artists appears very relevant. Examining the career of popular nineteenth-century artist William Walcutt—a man Katz accurately describes as "nativist adjacent" if not a card-carrying Know-Nothing—and his circle allows for a deeper understanding of how pervasive nativist ideals and symbols were in the illustrations, engravings, banners, and sculptures in the visual vernacular of the 1840s and 50s (xii). A True American goes beyond the more familiar and obvious tropes of nativist ideology—exaggerated caricatures of Irish and German immigrants or scheming Jesuits locking women in convents—to show how even seemingly innocuous displays of the eagle or Thanksgiving celebrations were part of a larger nativist symbology. Katz argues that "the most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about American democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary ideas about citizenship" (xiii). It was an art that centered the heroism of white Anglo–Saxon Protestant men while relegating women, the enslaved, and people of color to supporting roles, often ushering them out of the frame entirely. William Walcutt and his fellow working artists are likely not as familiar to scholars of the early republic as their fine art contemporaries in the Hudson River School or notable historical painters like John Trumbull or Daniel Huntington. Katz, however, makes a strong case that these men (and they were almost entirely men) represent a kind of "norm" in antebellum art, a norm that was increasingly becoming suffused with nativist ideas of "true Americanism" (xiii). Though Walcutt did gain some fame as a sculptor and illustrator in his own time, he and his circle were more aligned [End Page 187] with what today would be described as commercial art. To be clear, A True American is not a strict biography of Walcutt per se, but a larger study of a circle of artists whose sympathies were more aligned to those of their fellow working-class artisans than fine artists supported by elite patrons. Walcutt was born in Ohio, the descendant of frontiersmen and Revolutionary-era veterans. After working in the Midwest alongside his two brothers who were also artists, Walcutt arrived in New York City in 1847, an environment flush with artistic patronage as well as one in flux from both immigration and the disruptions of the market revolution. One of the most notable contributions of A True American is Katz's detailed analysis of the overlapping circles of working artists like Walcutt, fraternal orders, and nativist organizations. While the rise of fraternal organizations as well as the new cultural industries of the early republic have been well documented, Katz's work allows us to re-envision artistic societies like Walcutt's New York Sketch Club as fraternal organizations rather than just as gatherings of creatives. In doing so, the first two chapters of A True American help expand notions of who counts as a working-class artisan—beyond the usual shoemakers and tailors displaced by industrialization, one must include artists themselves. Not only did this circle of artists often contribute illustrations to nativist publications like America's Own and paint banners for Odd Fellows' lodges, they also provided mutual aid and shared a sense of their own artistic "brotherhood" standing against both capitalist and foreign tyranny. This was particularly acute for American-born artists like Walcutt who believed that American art should be native-grown and commissions reserved for native-born Americans, rather than more well-known European artists who had trained in academies abroad. Walcutt's circle was opposed to the creation of academies of fine arts within the United States, believing them to be hierarchical and anti...

Reconsidering Theory and Accountability in Early American Studies

The words we use matter, and our terminology is of great importance for the kind of scholarship we produce, and the audiences to which our work is legible. But the words themselves are more the means than the end of this analytical work. Each of the scholars writing in this issue of JER explains the importance of their assigned terms within a broader set of methodological and theoretical questions and framings, and so these terms act as a kind of shorthand for interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches that are bringing new questions and perspectives to early American studies.

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike