Massachusetts Press Research Articles

Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker

Reviewed by: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroaded. by Timothy D. Walker Brian Rouleau (bio) Underground Railroad, Fugitive slaves, Maritime history Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Edited by Timothy D. Walker. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Pp. 231. Paper, $27.95.) Of the roughly one hundred fugitive slave accounts published before 1865, over 70 percent describe oceangoing vessels as instrumental to the escape from bondage. Editor Timothy Walker uses this little known but deeply meaningful statistic to introduce a lively and engaging collection of essays on the maritime dimensions of the Underground Railroad. That clandestine network of abolitionist activists who ferried runaway slaves to freedom has typically been depicted as a terrestrial operation. But in so doing, historians have overlooked a critical dimension of the struggle over slavery: the saltwater Underground Railroad. These ten essays, written by a diverse group of scholars and museum professionals, should therefore be seen as a welcome corrective. Once their insights are integrated with the master narrative of antebellum abolitionism, we will gain a greater appreciation of the Underground Railroad's true scope. It was much bigger, more geographically expansive, and more thoroughly immersed in [End Page 159]the day-to-day operation of the country's commercial life than previously appreciated. So often did slaves follow a watery path to emancipation, in fact, that one is tempted to consider the term "railroad" a misnomer. The essays emerged out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. As such, they are a testament to the power of federal support for research, public history, and cross-institutional collaboration. Indeed, several of the book's chapters are noteworthy for their reflections on how scholarly findings can (and cannot) be translated into exhibits that more readily capture the imaginations of the public. Sailing to Freedomis impressive for its thoughtful ruminations on the ways that historians interpret sources and our obligation to make those interpretations more accessible. Here is a group of scholars who aspire to paradigm shifts in the more esoteric realm of academic debate but who also seek to inspire Americans more generally with tales of their forebears' heroism, courage, and perseverance. Naturally, then, storytelling is a major component of the contributors' efforts. Much of their work involved the painstaking task of combing through the archives in search of the oceanic Underground Railroad. It was not an easy thing to do, considering the network's illicit and secretive nature. But the authors' investigations produced some striking revelations and a few key insights. One is the high degree of organization and detailed knowledge exhibited by both fugitive slaves and their allies along the waterfront. Clear lines of communication connected port city activists in both the North and the South, while emancipatory currents emanating out of Haiti and the British Caribbean likewise called men and women to the cause. As several essays make clear, the maritime world proved naturally amenable to abolitionist agitation. Sailors had spent the preceding decades evading press gangs, dodging customs officers, and deserting ships. They were, in other words, practiced in the art of eluding authorities, and they often used those skills to assist runaway slaves. The multiracial character of the maritime workforce, meanwhile, provided an ideal environment into which Black fugitives could blend. Another critical point that multiple essays make is the incredibly diverse composition of the saltwater Underground Railroad. In seaports, swamps, eddies, and estuaries, a variety of people directed their efforts toward freedom. The volume includes a fascinating cast of characters who, given the maritime world's homosocial complexion, do tend to skew male. Protagonists featured in individual chapters include seafarers, [End Page 160]whalemen, fishermen, oystermen, wharfingers, harbor pilots, stevedores, shipbuilders, draymen, and stewards. These were the individuals who secreted escaping slaves at their southern points of departure, but, just as important, they were also the people who sought to settle them into the North's free communities of color. New York and onward to Canada (by way of the Erie Canal) appears to have been one critical pathway, but...

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young and the Culture and Politics of American Militarism.Mark PhilipBradley and Mary L.Dudziak, eds. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.

Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young and the Culture and Politics of American Militarism.Mark PhilipBradley and Mary L.Dudziak, eds. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2021.

Battles of the North Country: Wilderness Politics and Recreational Development in the Adirondack State Park, 1920-1980. By Jonathan D. Anzalone. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. xii + 280 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $32.95.

<i>Battles of the North Country: Wilderness Politics and Recreational Development in the Adirondack State Park, 1920-1980</i>. By Jonathan D. Anzalone. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. xii + 280 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $32.95.

Charles Allan McCoy, Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), pp. 224, $28.95, paperback, ISBN: 9781625345073.

Charles Allan McCoy, Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), pp. 224, $28.95, paperback, ISBN: 9781625345073. - Volume 65 Issue 2

Jonathan Senchyne. 2020. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 176, 10 illustr., $ 90.00.

Article Jonathan Senchyne. 2020. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 176, 10 illustr., $ 90.00. was published on April 1, 2021 in the journal Anglia (volume 139, issue 1).

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Shaker Vision: Seeing Beauty in Early America. By Joseph Manca

Shaker Vision: Seeing Beauty in Early America. By Joseph Manca

Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," by Cathryn Halverson

Reviewed by: Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," by Cathryn Halverson Miranda Hickman FARAWAY WOMEN AND THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY,", by Cathryn Halverson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 272 pp. $90.00 hardback; $27.95 paperback; $21.99 ebook. Halverson's book, Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," offers a vivid overview of the work and adventures of four western women writers, all of whom enjoyed what they saw as the good fortune of publishing their life-writing—developed from correspondences and diaries—in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly under the editorship of Ellery Sedgwick, during his long tenure (1908–1938). Halverson's featured writers are Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Hilda Rose, who wrote of homesteading in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta; Juanita Harrison, whose My Great, Wide, Beautiful World (1936) follows her travels around the world; and Opal Whiteley, whose diary, supposedly capturing her youth as a child prodigy, was reconstructed by Sedgwick into The Story of Opal (1920). These women contributed to the magazine as newcomers to the profession of writing; appearing in the Atlantic Monthly (publishing in which even acclaimed writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James sought as a plume) brought them new cultural status as bestsellers. Sedgwick sought out such "faraway women," as he called them, to bring to the Atlantic Monthly readership the experiences, expressed in "authentic" prose, of women in parts of the United States remote from the magazine's base in the northeast (p. 39). Sedgwick's [End Page 171] decision to feature the life-writing of many such women writers formed part of his strategy for boosting circulation and re-creating the Atlantic Monthly; he was known for shifting the publication's former emphasis on "literature with a big 'L'" (Sedgwick's phrase), preferred by predecessors such as Bliss Perry, to greater accent on "human interest" and "journalistic" directions (pp. 2, 19). Halverson's richly researched, subtly drawn account brings out the allure such writing held for Atlantic Monthly readers. Halverson herself favors the "faraway" designation since it evokes not only the geographical but also the cultural and socioeconomic distance between these writers and their readers, endowing their narratives with glamour, shaping their style, and conditioning the cultural work achieved by their writing. Their accounts conjured what it was like to pioneer new ground either as homesteader (Stuart and Rose) or traveler and adventurer (Whiteley and Harrison), living beyond received ideas about women's lives. Audiences often felt so connected to such long-distance writers that when Rose wrote of her need for economic assistance in northern Alberta, readers actually sent her provisions and money. Halverson's two previous books—Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West (2004) and Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narrative (2013)—likewise brought new serious critical attention to such western women writers, and here she deepens this engagement. Her introduction elegantly articulates the book's contributions. Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly" affords critical revisions of these writers, and it offers the first study focused on early twentieth-century working-class women writers of the American West. Its broader ambition is to provide a "new optic" on western writing by "remapping," "through a sequence of microhistories, the coordinates of American literature," challenging "binary assumptions about East and West, national and regional, cosmopolitan and local, gender and power" (pp. 9, 3). It is also the first study devoted to this era in the evolution of the publication now known as The Atlantic. The book's theoretical framework is constructed from textual scholarship, research on women's partnerships, studies in print culture, and periodical studies. Invoking Jerome McGann, Halverson limns the "textual condition" of these narratives, restoring them to their original periodical context to illuminate their genesis, reception, and impact (p. 10). Her portrait thus features not only these women's writing but also the sociomaterial conditions and collaborative processes generating their work, as well as highlighting both Sedgwick and the powerful cultural phenomenon of the Atlantic Monthly. Tracing the influence of the Atlantic Monthly requires spotlighting Sedgwick himself. Sedgwick's work as editor was crucial to the "making" of these women writers, often right down to the details of preparing their [End...

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III

Reviewed by: Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III Sarah Sillin (bio) Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States david j. dzurec iii University of Massachusetts Press, 2019 236 pp. David J. Dzurec III's Our Suffering Brethren traces a history of white American captivity from the American Revolution to the end of the Barbary War. Throughout this era, the British navy and Barbary corsairs repeatedly captured American ships—whether to impress, imprison, ransom, or enslave those aboard—thereby evoking a sense of American vulnerability (7). Dzurec's history demonstrates that captivity profoundly influenced early US politics by eliciting widespread public concern; it thereby became a source of nationalism that served complex, sometimes contradictory interests. Americans' loss of freedom offered a key justification first for the Revolutionaries' cause and then for a stronger federal government. Yet rather than simply unifying the country, captivity became the subject of fierce political debates. Indeed, Dzurec argues that Federalists' and Republicans' responses established a key pattern in US politics: each party asserted its unique ability to provide national security, even as both invoked the same nationalist rhetoric by playing on fear of a foreign threat (194). In examining such rhetoric, Dzurec develops a nuanced reading of how international encounters shaped the government's relation to citizens. Federalists and Republicans alike located political capital in American captives' suffering, as they claimed authority to enter into new wars, negotiate for US captives, or forge treaties. But even as politicians played on voters' anxieties, he suggests, so too did public discourse inform US politics. The apparent arbitrariness of captivity, which elicited concerns that "any American could be taken captive," also thereby fostered a sense that "any American could join the debate about the nature of Independence" (38). Though the nation's early presidents responded to this sentiment with [End Page 300] calls for limiting public involvement—like the private fundraising efforts to redeem Americans captive in Algeria—public opinion and political policies continued to shape one another. To understand the reciprocal influence of public opinion and political rhetoric, Dzurec explores a rich historical archive. His readings of sailors' letters and narratives (with particular attention to Ethan Allen's and John Dodge's memoirs) highlight the influential role of their accounts in circulating news of captivity and shaping Americans' impressions of these events. Moreover, he delves into Americans' responses to such accounts by analyzing the more official discourse of political policies and representatives' correspondence, alongside public commentary in news editorials, plays, and printed accounts of local festivities. Together, these texts allow him to argue that politicians' and private citizens' responses informed one another, while considering how they shifted over time. Captivity became first a touchstone in arguments for American independence and confederation in the late eighteenth century and then a lightning rod in early nineteenth-century political debates as the Federalist and Republican parties both purported to be the party of national security. Dzurec moves chronologically, so that the first half of Our Suffering Brethren identifies how captivity fostered American nationalism, starting with British impressment. Of course, captivity was not a new experience or trope; rather, Dzurec contends, colonial-era captivity narratives provided revolutionaries with "a historical precedent for the type of threat they faced" (37). Moreover, he suggests that stories of captivity became a means for revolutionaries to claim sympathy. Yet rather than halt captivity, the end of the war left Americans unprotected by British treaties with Barbary states. When Algerian corsairs captured American merchant ships in 1785, captivity took on new importance in US politics by fostering interest in a stronger federal government. Even as Americans' captivity strengthened arguments for the federal government, though, it also raised new possibilities for individual Americans to participate in foreign relations. Dzurec explores how such private involvement ebbed and flowed. In the 1780s, Americans began fundraising to help ransom their countrymen, then paused this involvement when the Constitutional Convention afforded the government more power to act on their behalf. Although Washington and the Federalists believed "public sentiment ought not play a role in politics outside of election" (63), the [End Page 301] formation of Democratic...

A Sound Archive

A Sound Archive Alex Lichtenstein (bio) Steven P. Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xii + 240 pp. Figures, notes, index. $27.95. Steven P. Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xii + 240 pp. Figures, notes, index. $27.95. Those of us who have done research on the history of the Communist left in the United States, on the culture of the 1930s, or on the history of southern chain gangs, have almost certainly come across a small 1936 songbook of two dozen "Negro Songs of Protest" compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Graced with a striking cover illustration by Lawrence's more famous brother, the Communist artist Hugo Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest remains a quintessential example of Popular Front culture and a radical complement to the much-better-known material collected by Alan Lomax across the South during the same period and deposited at the Library of Congress. But, as Steven Garabedian's book A Sound History proposes, the Gellert story is even far more complicated—and interesting—than it might seem at first glance. Gellert and his fieldwork, Garabedian shows, experienced a "trajectory of celebration to defamation" (p. ix). During the 1930s, the African American protest songs Gellert collected across the South made a signal contribution to what Michael Denning has called "the cultural front," exposing radicals to a taste of Black vernacular culture aligned with the politics of the moment.1 During the Cold War years, however, Gellert's association with the Communist Party (CP) and its publications—his brother Hugo was an editor at the New Masses, and some of Gellert's material initially appeared in its pages—made his work suspect. Now what had been lauded as an amazing feat of recovery of a buried folk expression was derided as "an example of white leftwing propaganda…rather than Black vernacular creativity and resistance" (p. 9). The CP, once the alleged champion of African American rights, most famously in its global campaign to free the "Scottsboro Boys," came to be regarded during the Cold War as preying on Black discontent for its own nefarious ends. Gellert's once-laudable efforts to collect and disseminate an authentic protest culture located among the most oppressed group of African Americans living under Jim Crow was now dismissed as manipulative, at best, and outright fakery at worst. [End Page 583] So, Garabedian's book asks, was the material unearthed by Gellert merely a "product of white propaganda" or rather an authentic expression of "Black vernacular creativity" (p. ix)? Astutely, Garabedian frames his discussion of the early reception of Gellert's work within the trope of "romantic racialism."2 Dating to the nineteenth century, this tradition served equally well the celebrators and the detractors of African American culture. "The romantic racialist mindset," Garabedian observes, made it possible to "favor Black music while still denying Black intellect or agency" (p. 6). As Garabedian puts it, in the romantic racialist tradition, "People of color have been expected [by whites] to sing with open hearts, but not openly speak their minds" (p. 6). Though associated primarily with nineteenth-century abolitionism, the cultural left of the 1930s was not immune to this outlook, and indeed could be said in some quarters to have revived it. Nevertheless, Garabedian resists placing Gellert himself in this camp. Instead, he regards the left-wing amateur ethnomusicologist, "audodidact[,] and self-styled bohemian radical" (p. 21) as "a sincere broker in the cause of racial justice and radical change" (p. 14). Following in the footsteps of southern white collectors of "Negro songs" like Howard Odum, Guy Johnson, and John A. Lomax, Sr. (Alan's father), Gellert's ear seemed attuned to something quite different. "Where they heard primitivism, plantation nostalgia, [or] racial nostalgia," Garabedian notes, "Gellert heard Black resistance" (p. 54). John Lomax in particular had established a template that allowed white collectors to treat Black folksong as an inexplicable expression of "Black self-pity." "Why this should be true," Lomax had written in 1917, "is difficult to say." To this astoundingly obtuse remark in the "romantic racialist" vein...

"For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart

Reviewed by: "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country by William B. Hart Darren Bonaparte (bio) "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country By William B. Hart. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Native Americans in the Northeast. 288 pages, 6 halftones, 6" x 9". $90.00 cloth, $26.95 paper, $26.95 ebook. I grew up in Akwesasne, one of the three Mohawk communities in the valley of the St. Lawrence River. My ancestors left the old homeland in the seventeenth century to be a part of the mission villages of New France. They forged a new alliance with the Natives already there, placing themselves at the head of it. It is said that two out of three Mohawks were in Canada by the end of the century, but those who remained in our homeland did not dwindle away and disappear. The fire of the Mohawk Nation continued to burn just as brightly back in the old Mohawk Valley. The Mohawk Valley Mohawks, as I tend to call them, loom large in the history of the century that followed. They were a vital factor in how events unfolded in the colony of New York, first with the military conflicts with the French and then in the American Revolution. The people of these relatively small villages played such a critical role in the Revolutionary War that they had to stop living in them. Their descendants are now in Canada at the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River and the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory at the Bay of Quinte. [End Page 420] When they still lived along the Mohawk River, the Mohawks of the homeland continued to participate in confederacy affairs uninterrupted and undeterred by the absence of their wayward northern kin. They were still considered the "keepers of the eastern door" of the "extended lodge" that symbolized the League of the Iroquois. They would attend grand councils at Onondaga and join the rest of the confederacy in diplomatic or military endeavors. One might assume that because of that relationship, they maintained all of their traditional beliefs and eschewed Christianity, but that did not happen. Their close proximity to European colonists of New York brought the Protestant faith to their doorstep, which they found expedient to entertain. Much like the French and their Jesuits in Canada, the English and their ministers made for a similar chess game back in the homeland. This aspect of Mohawk history has been largely overlooked by historians, who typically gravitate to the soap opera romance of Sir William Johnson and his Mohawk wife, Molly Brant, or the warrior exploits of her hot-head younger brother, Joseph. John Wolfe Lydekker's The Faithful Mohawks, published in 1938, was the first book-length study of the subject, but it was not exactly something you'd take to the beach. William B. Hart brings a fresh, new focus to the subject of Christianity in the old Mohawk Valley in "For the Good of Their Souls": Performing Christianity in Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Country. Since there is a whole century (and a fair bit of the previous one) to cover in 288 pages, Hart goes about the work methodically, stepping back from the subject a bit to put it all in its proper perspective, then focusing in on a few key moments that illustrate his points as he crafts his narrative. The seasoned researcher might find some of the stops along the way to be repetitive of other scholarship, such as his take on the journey of the "Four Kings" to England in 1710, who were not really the big chiefs they were made out to be. But for those who might be new to the subject, he has written a great introduction to a complex topic. The author handles his sources very well for the most part, but I did notice one error that jumped out at me. He confuses two notable Mohawk leaders from the seventeenth century, the "Great Mohawk," Kryn, also known as Joseph Togouiroui, with Canaqueese, also known as Smiths John and the "Flemish Bastard," describing them as the same person. In his source citation...

The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine

Reviewed by: The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine Christine Whyte The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria. By Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. xiv + 238 pp. Cloth $ 90, paper $26.95. In this book, Robin Chapdelaine introduces a new conceptual framework—"the social economy of a child"—to help historians and others to understand how "children functioned as transmitters of wealth" (2–3). The book's introduction promises to detail "ongoing methods of appropriating children's bodies and their labor through the institutions of slavery, pawning, and child marriage" in the colonial period of the Bight of Biafra (2). While the focus is on the early twentieth century and the effects of British colonial rule, the first chapter sets the context in the last century of the transatlantic slave trade, using the biographies of two enslaved children, Olaudah Equiano and Peter Nicholls (27). This use of texts produced in adulthood to illuminate enslaved childhoods responds to Sánchez-Eppler's call to think through life-stage when working with slave narratives.1 This region was selected both because of the paucity of scholarship on childhood and because of the particular impact of colonial rule on politics and the economy. Colonial legislation deliberately excluded "canoe houses" (trading centers) from antislavery legislation in the early twentieth century, indirectly acknowledging the central role unfree labor played in systems of trade (37). Increasing integration into global commodity markets, exacerbated by a shift in agricultural production to the plantations of West Africa, especially for palm oil, increased labor demands (36). At the same time, new pressures of colonial rule, taxation, and the increasing corruption of provincial courts forced people to take desperate measures, including pawning their children to acquire cash. Governor-General Lugard's policies—which strengthened the powers of local courts—in tandem with the ballooning labor demands and the introduction of sterling and paper notes to replace the existing monetary system, [End Page 461] greatly increased slave-dealing in the southeastern region (57). Children were particularly vulnerable, as their parents and guardians "pawned" them to access cash to pay taxes and court fees. Pawning, once a relatively secure means of raising collateral, became increasingly risky, as pawned children were sold into slavery with relatively little hope for redress (59). The chapter on colonial policy brings out the ironies and contradictions between antislavery rhetoric and the realities of labor demands, building on and updating Lovejoy and Hogendorn's Slow Death for Slavery.2 The analysis of court case material is particularly compelling, offering both a broad view of the trends—widespread and frequent litigation over debts and contracts—and a microlens on individual cases, which show how debt, slavery, and child trafficking were intertwined (65–7). As well as the risk of being trafficked into slavery, pawned girls were sometimes retained as creditors' wives on nonpayment of a debt (80). This linkage between pawning, enslavement, and child marriage drew the attention of the successors of the Victorian prostitution abolition movement. Here the book combines the documentary evidence generated by various colonial enquiries into child pawning and marriage with oral history evidence collected in cooperation with Nigerian researchers. Discussion draws out some of the rituals and beliefs around pawning that reinforced the notion of it as a temporary state, from which parents or guardians would eventually redeem the children (95). The moral unacceptability of enslaving children, as opposed to pawning them, was emphasized by informants (97). This study of child trafficking launched from Chapdelaine's careful reading of the testimony taken after the 1929 Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women's War). In the accounts of Igbo women involved in the rebellion, the women highlighted threats to their children as a primary concern (109–10). It was these women who organized and orchestrated the revolt. The oral histories point to the initiative taken by the women, refuting prejudicial colonial notions that men must have played a leading role. Their testimonies provide rich detail on the hardships wrought by the imposition of direct taxation. Chapdelaine argues that the women of the 1929 Ogu Umunwaanyi were willing to fight...

New England Tales: Revisiting a Region's Past in Unfamiliar Places

New England TalesRevisiting a Region's Past in Unfamiliar Places Eric J. Morser (bio) Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution j. patrick mullins University Press of Kansas, 2017 255 pp. American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire ben p. lafferty University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 269 pp. Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse carolyn wakeman Wesleyan University Press, 2019 288 pp. More than a generation ago, the historian Jack P. Greene published an article on the state of colonial New England history. Greene provided a kaleidoscopic survey of the field and noted an interesting trend: although his colleagues continued to focus on such familiar topics as puritanism and the religious character of the region, their work had taken a social turn (143). Rather than focus solely on familiar civic and religious leaders like John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards or the overarching influence of the Puritan mindset on New England, historians were now asking questions about what drove settlers to migrate to a strange new world, how they worked the land and made a living, and the choices they made that shaped the region and its early history. What, in other words, made them tick. The result of this new emphasis on the social worlds of colonial New [End Page 247] Englanders was a fresh flow of scholarship that explored a wide range of historical issues from the region's shifting demographics to its commercialization to the rise of new towns and cities. Greene did not address every relevant topic. He said little, for example, about slavery in colonial New England or the presence of American Indians in the region. The implication seemed to be, however, that historians were increasingly interested in mining the New England terrain for new voices, for people whose stories were not always shared by professional scholars. In the more than three decades since Greene penned his piece, interest in these untold or unconsidered New England tales has continued to thrive. In just the past few years, in fact, a host of creative scholars have revisited New England's history and crafted intriguing narratives that force us constantly to reconsider its past. Some have included the voices of previously overlooked New Englanders. Wendy Warren, for example, has situated slavery at the heart of the colonial New England past in ways both revealing and unsettling. Others have set American Indians at the center of the region's story. David J. Silverman has rewritten the history of Plymouth with the Wampanoag Indians as lead characters, while Jean M. O'Brien has investigated how New Englanders consciously removed Indians from their local histories in an effort to justify their claims to indigenous lands. Some have taken signature New England events like the Salem witch trials and cast them in entirely new light. Emerson Baker, for instance, has expanded beyond Massachusetts and located the witch trials in a larger imperial context. Picking up this transatlantic thread, Margaret Ellen Newell has highlighted the heartrending saga of Indian bondage and linked colonial New England to the slave economies of the Caribbean. These are just a few examples of how historians are uncovering fresh early New England tales and challenging us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about the region and its peoples. Apparently, even the most thoroughly trodden places still have alluring secrets to share. The three books under review are very different from each other. They focus on people in a variety of New England places and times. They deploy distinct methodologies and have diverse audiences in mind. Ultimately, though, what each of these books shares in common is a healthy willingness to take up the call of recent historians and demonstrate how looking beyond a familiar set of names and listening for overlooked voices can help us understand New England's past in exciting new ways. In Father [End Page 248] of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution, historian J. Patrick Mullins, for example, reveals the enticing story of a Congregational minister whose fiery sermons and pamphlets antagonized British officials and inspired soon-to-be Boston patriots like John Adams and Paul Revere...

Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman

Reviewed by: Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution by Kacy Dowd Tillman Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch STRIPPED AND SCRIPT: LOYALIST WOMEN WRITERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, by Kacy Dowd Tillman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 224 pp. $28.95 paperback. Kacy Dowd Tillman's new book, Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution, makes an impressive contribution to our understanding of how white women in the era of the American Revolution shaped and expressed their political identity. She joins a growing number of scholars who assert that women in revolutionary America were political beings with their own individual political allegiances. Stripped and Script explores the political identity of eight Philadephia-area women, using "intimate political writing conducted in domestic spaces" to uncover a sliding scale of political allegiances among these elite, white women as they experienced the shortages, traumas, and loneliness of the homefront during the American Revolution (p. 24). The women—Grace Growden Galloway, Sarah Logan Fisher, Elizabeth Drinker, Margaret Hill Morris, Anna Rawle, Rebecca Shoemaker, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, and Deborah Norris Logan—crafted self-described politicized epistolary narratives that ranged between disaffected, pacifist, neutral, loyalist, and patriot. Tillman skillfully argues that these manuscripts were political tools and that the women used this epistolary space to express and refine their political ideas, loyalties, and opinions. Consequently, she asserts that the women used writing as a means of political engagement that is part of the larger national revolutionary narrative. Tillman uses "letter-journals" as the primary form of source material for her study, although she also occasionally includes the women's public petitions, poems, and individual letters. Letter-journals took on heightened importance when Philadelphia was under military occupation during the war (by the British, United States, or both depending on one's political orientation). Sending letters during the war was difficult and dangerous, so the women created sets or booklets of continuously scripted letters that spread across multiple days and pages and then sent them all together as a single packet or bundle (pp. 12–15). According to Tillman, these bundles of letters written over time often took on the character of a journal, and the writer sometimes moved back and forth between addressing her intended recipient (a husband, sister, or child) and a more autobiographical style of writing. For Tillman, this fluid form of writing creates an epistolary space where these women developed, expressed, and refined their multifaceted political [End Page 161] allegiances in forceful and bold ways that early American women did not dare speak out loud in public. Interestingly, however, Tillman contends that because letter-journals were circulated among family and friends and sometimes read aloud by others, published in part, or surveilled by military and political officials, these manuscripts were in essence semi-public in nature. Tillman argues that the authors were aware that others might read their letters and in some cases intentionally penned them as political narratives in ways that allowed them to make public statements, while simultaneously maintaining their status as respectable femes covert. One of the most important contributions Stripped and Script makes to existing studies of early American women is that it broadens the way scholars define political loyalty. Beyond just oaths, military service, and formal or legal definitions of treason, Tillman deftly establishes that women's epistolary writings blurred the boundaries between public and private and can be used as a way to access elite, white women's political ideas. These women's writings clearly demonstrate that they thought deeply about their own political loyalties and had strong opinions about the events of the revolution. Moreover, Tillman demonstrates that the women in her study had well-developed, strong political opinions that were different than those of their husbands or fathers. This injection of women's political allegiances into the broader narrative of the American Revolution promises to reshape the history of the early American political culture in important ways. Less convincing is Tillman's use of metaphorical rape. There are several places throughout the book where Tillman suggests that the women in her study intentionally deployed the rhetoric of rape to reframe rebel soldiers and their supporters in a negative light (p...

“Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo

Reviewed by: “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo Elizabeth Hewitt “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture. By Sandra Runzo. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. viii + 255 pp. $27.95. With the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson is the American artist most beloved and fetishized by contemporary popular culture. Her image and poetry are emblazoned on countless T-shirts, tote bags, and necklaces. Her life has been reimagined in novels, plays, movies, and recently in the Apple TV+ television series Dickinson. That show, and other recent biographical films about Dickinson, have set out to transform the old stereotype of the poet as a frigid hermit into a passionate and vibrant member of her community. This rewriting has also been the central project of Dickinson scholarship over the last three decades, and Sandra Runzo’s work is a crucial part of this endeavor. “Theatricals of Day” constitutes a major project to document Dickinson’s consumption of “popular entertainments of her time” and to calibrate how this popular media manifested itself in her poetry (1). Runzo begins with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, focusing particularly on the exhibits Barnum marketed as “What Is It?” She calls particular attention to Joice Heth, the supposedly 161-year-old enslaved woman and nursemaid to George Washington, and to William Henry Johnson, the man Barnum marketed [End Page 172] as a cross between human and orangutan. Runzo does not claim that we find allusions to either Heth or Johnson specifically but suggests instead that Dickinson’s poetry resembles the circus by exhibiting a range of personae and experiences that challenge easy classification. Her verse presents “spectacle and conundrum” (26). But unlike Barnum, Dickinson does not exploit these ambiguous identities through her poetry—she identifies with them and “explore[s] her affiliation with the alien and fantastical” (44). Runzo follows a similar kind of analogic analysis in the next three chapters. She argues that we can see evidence of Dickinson’s appreciation for the Hutchinson Family Singers, an extremely popular antebellum singing group, not only because she owned sheet music of their songs but also because of other kinds of thematic affinities: “prominent references to graves, liberty, captivity, diminutiveness, desolation, yearning, and betrayal” (55). Similarly, the influence of minstrel songs on Dickinson is indicated by the elements of minstrelsy—song, dance, masquerade, riddles, satire—found in abundance in her poetry. And we can see the importance of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” by observing the frequency with which Dickinson’s poetry narrates stories of crisis similar to that in Spofford’s tale: “a speaker encounters a demon, a monster, a goblin, a ghost . . . [and] the ghastly and the familiar live side-by-side” (127–28). Runzo meticulously works through Dickinson’s corpus to identify what is indisputably true: Dickinson’s poetry is laced with allusions to popular entertainments. But I did find myself less persuaded by some of the more sweeping claims made by the book, which threaten an overdetermined reading of the very influences Runzo skillfully uncovers. She certainly proves that the Hutchinson Family Singers influenced Dickinson’s work, but I am less persuaded that what Dickinson appreciated about their music was the “rebellious energy” and “threat of tumult” (63). While I appreciate Runzo’s desire to push back against scholarship that reads Dickinson’s poetry as racist or apolitical, the fact that Dickinson owned sheet music by the Hutchinsons does not, for me, “evince [Dickinson’s] interest in the musical voices of the abolitionist movement” (68). They were extremely popular musicians, so it is not surprising that an avid sheet music collector like Dickinson would own their music. And, as Runzo says, her collection did not include the Hutchinson’s most celebrated abolitionist song, “Get Off the Track.” Runzo argues on behalf of Dickinson’s anti-racism because she owns sheet music for “Old Dan Tucker” and several other antebellum minstrelsy songs. I am unsure why, however, Runzo reads Dickinson’s ownership of the Hutchinson sheet music as approbation of their reformist politics but offers a very different account of Dickinson’s ownership of minstrel music...

Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States by Alea Henle

Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States by Alea Henle Christine DeLucia (bio) Keywords Historical societies, Historical culture, Heritage, Artifacts Rescued from Oblivion: Historical Cultures in the Early United States. By Alea Henle. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Pp. 264. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $28.95.) Alea Henle surveys the tumultuous landscape of historical enterprises in the early U.S. republic in this carefully constructed study of “historical cultures.” Opening with the founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1791 and the Boston-based organization’s goals for preserving original materials and supporting inquiry into historical topics, Rescued from Oblivion traces out the larger contexts and consequences of institution-building. In its six chapters the book adopts a comparative approach, examining scores of historical societies to discern larger patterns [End Page 488] in their origins, motivations, trajectories, and social effects. This is a welcome vantage that adds profitably to extant literature more focused on single-institution, municipal, or regional historical pursuits (for example, accounts of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, or the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia). The comparative lens also foregrounds the many networks of historically engaged individuals and groups who consulted with one another, competed for acquisitions of notable materials, and attempted to differentiate their goals and remits. Henle’s work emphasizes the tenuous quality of these early historical enterprises, which took shape from Maine to Georgia to California. Nearly all of them confronted serious challenges while attempting to build and sustain their memberships. They struggled to obtain donations—both documentary and artifactual—to their nascent collections and labored to secure sufficient funding to purchase or rent appropriate meeting and storage spaces. When members did amass collections, fires, floods, mold, vermin, and neglect frequently compromised the holdings’ integrity. Many societies found it challenging to maintain their momentum beyond their founders’ initial enthusiasm. While the institutions that have endured into the twenty-first century may be best known today, Rescued from Oblivion points out the importance of recovering and critically scrutinizing those that failed or dwindled into obsolescence. (Appendix One neatly lays out a chronology of societies’ establishments.) These lesser-known histories underscore the relative weight or lack thereof accorded by local communities to formally institutionalized historical endeavors. Henle’s methodology draws on the ample though uneven documentary records that many of these institutions created about their own origins and evolution. It productively illuminates the complex crossovers between “private” and “public” domains, and how entrepreneurial historical society leaders sometimes scooped up colonial and state records, particularly in the relative absence of formal governmental structures for preserving and rendering accessible key archives. It also situates the collecting of physical objects—especially objects associated with locally and nationally prominent individuals—as a counterpart to early archival development that eventually spurred the divergence of natural and historical museums from historical societies. Rescued from Oblivion recognizes at the outset that most of these institutions were envisioned and operated by elite Protestant, Anglo American [End Page 489] men. It critically assesses how members’ identities and political commitments strongly shaped the types of histories that they valued and preserved—or de-legitimized and ignored. The societies’ work closely aligned with emerging commitments in the early republic such as local pride, civic duty, and nationalism, as well as anxieties about the salience of American histories as compared to European ones. The book does not simply critique these exclusionary ideologies and practices. It also productively examines how individuals and groups not represented in these spaces pushed back against their marginalization and advocated for other forms of knowledge-production and preservation. Chapter 6, “‘An Oblivious Society’: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Omission in Historical Collections,” takes up societies’ relative silences about histories of slavery and emancipation and about settler colonialism’s impacts on Native American people and tribal nations. Engaging recent scholarship such as Jean M. O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010), the chapter critiques historical societies’ efforts to relegate Native people to a distant past (typically under a heading of “antiquities”) rather than recognizing their ongoing presence and sovereignty. While the book takes historical societies as its interpretive center, it certainly appreciates that...

Amy Hildreth Chen. Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. 192p. Paper, $33.95 (ISBN 978-1-62534-485-4).

Published as part of the University of Massachusetts Press series on Studies in Print Culture and History of the Book, Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market is a well-written and fascinating history of how various stakeholders—and their differing motivations—shaped the literary archives trade in the United States of America. Amy Hildreth Chen, who holds a PhD in English from Emory University, previously was an academic librarian at the University of Iowa and now is an independent scholar. She traces the largely overlooked history of the trade in literary papers from its post-World War II origins through to the mid-2010s. The book comprises an introduction, conclusion, and six chapters. After a brief first chapter on the various values implicated in archives (financial, scholarly, and public), Placing Papers examines the literary archives market from the perspective of several key stakeholder groups: authors and their families (chapter 2), agents and dealers (chapter 3), directors and curators (chapter 4), archivists and digital archivists (chapter 5), and, finally, scholars and members of the public (chapter 6).