Transatlantic History Research Articles

Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder (review)

Reviewed by: Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder Kimberly A. Hamlin (bio) Keywords George Washington, Eliza Harriot, U.S. Constitution, Education, Female genius Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution. By Mary Sarah Bilder. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.50.) In May of 1787, a British woman named Eliza Harriot O'Connor delivered a lecture on "the Power of Eloquence" in Philadelphia. This occasion likely marked the first time a woman spoke publicly in the United States. The event was attended by future president George Washington and, quite possibly, several other prominent men who were in town to attend the Constitutional Convention. Washington pronounced the lecture "tolerable." For years, this curious episode puzzled and enchanted Mary Sarah Bilder, whose book Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution reflects her efforts to understand the larger significance of what transpired that evening. Bilder aims to "flip the outside in and the inside out" by looking at the people excluded from the Constitutional Convention but whose lives nevertheless helped shape what was discussed within (4). A self-described "constitutionalist," Bilder documents the world of possibilities that existed for women, and to a lesser extent for African Americans and people of color, during the tumultuous years in which the Constitution—a term that first meant a system of government—came instead to refer to a single document. According to Bilder, Eliza Harriot's lectures establish that many alternatives to white male rule existed within what ultimately became a document that enshrined it. The key to unlocking this alternative universe of female citizenship is the late-eighteenth-century debates about female intellect and [End Page 323] education because, all sides agreed, education provided the first step on the path to political representation and maybe even voting and officeholding. Eliza Harriot (Bilder refers to her by her first two names) lived and lectured during the heyday of discussions about "female genius," a period that culminated in the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A major contribution of Female Genius is the rich intellectual, transatlantic history of this potentially revolutionary ideal. Each of the book's six chapters present a lively intellectual history of the Age of the Constitution—from the brief vogue for female debating societies to Irish revolutionary societies. The book also contains terrific explanatory material, including 38 images, a helpful timeline, and supplementary notes on the research process. Another strength of the book is the three-dimensional world that Bilder constructs for Eliza Harriot, especially given the paucity of sources. Relying on genealogical sources, census records, digitized historical newspapers (especially the 140-plus advertisements that Eliza Harriot herself placed), and the papers of prominent others (most notably George Washington whose collection holds all five of the existing letters penned by Eliza Harriot), Bilder sketches a compelling biography of a woman whose life was both extraordinary and representative. Born to English merchants in Portugal, Eliza Harriot resided in many parts of the British Empire before settling in the U.S., with her Irish husband John O'Connor, in 1786. Within the new democracy, she moved frequently because of her husband's inability to keep a job. In each new city Eliza Harriot offered public lectures, which she then used as a platform to establish female academies from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and many cities in between. The bigger questions undergirding the book include: What did the Constitution mean for women? How did it come to be that women, along with people of color, were written out of the Constitution? The introduction and bibliographic essay are in conversation with historical works that offer various answers to these questions, including classics by Mary Beth Norton, Linda Kerber, Mary Kelley, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Bilder challenges the consensus that Republican Motherhood best describes the role of women in the early republic. Instead, she suggests that Republican Motherhood, along with its chief exponent Benjamin Rush, represents just one of many competing visions of the role of women in that tumultuous era. Eliza Harriot...

“We Witches.” Knowledge Wars, Experience and Spirituality in the Women’s Movement During the 1970s

During the 1970s, feminist activists reappropriated the figure of the witch in various ways as a symbol of alterity, political radicalism, feminist revolt or victimhood, or the presentation of subversive (healing or bodily) knowledge. The article investigates these witch constructions with a focus on its experiential foundations drawing on appropriations in Western Germany within a larger transatlantic history. First, it provides a brief overview of witch discourses in the 1970s, highlighting radical feminist, health-political and artistic milieus, based on representative Western European journals and movement literature. The article emphasizes the variety of witch images and its epistemic foci, showing that however different these approaches may appear, they all created women’s alterity. Second, the article examines alternative practices of knowledge production, focusing on health guides and advice literature, as well as on approaches to experience in consciousness-raising groups. This section demonstrates how witch discourses both enabled the movement’s knowledge empowerment, but were also part of complex boundary work within the milieus, such as in the debates about the relationship between experiential knowledge and theory. The last section shows how closely and in what ways spiritualist approaches were linked to this boundary work. The article argues that feminist milieus constituted themselves within the framework of feminist epistemologies against and within established knowledge cultures, thereby drawing further boundaries within the movement. In analyzing the “evidence of experience” (Scott) produced by witch discourses its overarching aim is to demonstrate that their historical relevance initially laid in its standpoint-creating character.

Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy by James E. Moran (review)

Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy by James E. Moran (review)

Intelectuales «satélites» Fernando Aínsa y Roger Caillois, mediadores de transferencias culturales

Fernando Aínsa and Roger Caillois were two intellectuals who acted as cultural hinges between the European and Latin American continents. Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic, the writers built, through their travels, transatlantic networks that functioned as mechanisms for the circulation of cultural transfers. Their actions to disseminate and promote Latin American authors led them to become mediators. Actors in the «second line», especially Aínsa, their contribution to the history of cultural production merits to be rescued and put into perspective in order to recover the missing links of transatlantic history. From Paris, the «capital of letters», Aínsa and Caillois will establish a gateway of Latin American texts to European territory, their contacts in the publishing world, academia, magazines and international organizations such as Unesco will allow them to create connections with magazines such as Río de la Plata, América, El correo de la Unesco and to link up with publishing projects such as the Croix du sud Collection, Representative Works and Archivos, from where they will act as «passeurs» of Latin American literature.

Anarquismo italiano, transnacionalismo e emigração ao Brasil: Contribuições ao debate teórico

The transnational networks built by anarchists’ activists in the end of the 19th and beginning the 20th centuries, are already much known by the historiography. For Italian anarchism, due to the political persecution suffered in the 19th, transnational networks became the rule of the movement. Italian's anarchist immigration to South American cone was part of this transatlantic history. The encounter of many activists in São Paulo, Brazil, allowed the creation of several affinity groups working together, an important improve to the propaganda. In 1904, one of these efforts resulted in their aim media, “La Battaglia”, maybe the most important, certainly a very popular periodical in Brazil until 1913.

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories

Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History.

Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History.

Puritans and Pilgrims

Puritans and Pilgrims Christopher Grasso New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration. Early American History. By Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 582 pages. Cloth, ebook. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England. By Francis J. Bremer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 267 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. By David D. Hall. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. 525 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World of Plymouth Plantation. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 244 pages. Cloth, ebook. They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. By John G. Turner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020. 459 pages. Cloth, ebook. There was a time, a couple of scholarly generations ago, when a certain breed of graduate student in early American history seemed to embrace Giles Corey as their patron saint. Corey had been accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, but as the sheriff piled stone after stone upon him to force him to plea, Corey merely called for “more weight.”1 Three centuries later, [End Page 121] Corey’s New England Puritans appeared vital to understanding American religious and intellectual history. “Begin with Perry Miller’s two volumes on The New England Mind and work forward,” our mentors said. And as the next dense explication of Puritan theology or a six-hundred-page meditation on the cultural meanings of Plymouth Rock was added to our already long reading lists, like Corey we grinned or grimaced and called for more weight.2 But scholars have ceased to habitually plumb Puritanism for the deep sources of the “American mind” or the “American self.” We have long known how much Max Weber missed when he saw the Puritan strain of Protestantism as the font of “individualism.” We have long recognized that, despite the appropriations of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop’s 1630 invocation of a “city on a hill” was not a prophecy of American exceptionalism. In the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly at the end of the last century, Charles L. Cohen pronounced the end of the Puritan paradigm in early American religious history.3 New England Puritans, once dour giants bestriding American Studies, retreated to the hills and hollows of scholarly subspecialty, occasionally reemerging more fully as denizens of the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world. Perhaps most contemporary Americans only think of grim witch-hunting Puritans on Halloween and buckle-hatted Pilgrims on Thanks-giving, not giving much thought to the connections between the two. But most of the English settlers founding Plymouth were very much part of the larger movement that David D. Hall describes in his synthetic survey, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Hall himself is not much interested in the small Plymouth branch of the much larger Puritan tree. The other volumes under review here, however, each published with an eye toward the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage, pay close attention to the significance of the Puritan version of “hot Protestantism” in that colony, even if they come to different conclusions.4 [End Page 122] Hall writes that when he began his doctoral work in 1959, historians of early New England tended to have “colonists unpack the luggage labeled Puritanism and magically turn into ‘founders’ of the America-to-be—founders of a literary tradition or something resembling democracy, and especially founders of a ready-made ‘identity’” (10). He names some of the leading American scholars who introduced the Atlantic turn to their studies of Puritan theology and practice: “Michael McGiffert, E. Brooks Holifield, Baird Tipson, W. G. B. Stoever, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe” (10–11) and also “Norman Fiering, Charles Lloyd Cohen, Francis J. Bremer, Richard Cogley, and Stephen Foster” (11). Most would add Hall to this list of luminaries. To an even longer list of British scholars, the name of Patrick Collinson stands out as a major influence. Hall’s early monograph, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the...

That Early New England, This Early New England, and Some of the Next

That Early New England, This Early New England, and Some of the Next Michael Ditmore (bio) As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon daniel t. rodgers Princeton University Press, 2018 356 pp. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism abram c. van engen Yale University Press, 2020 380 pp. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History david d. hall Princeton University Press, 2019 518 pp. Poems and Meditations anne bradstreet, ed. margaret olofson thickstun Iter Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019 380 pp. The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts emily c. k. romeo University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 220 pp. Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England elisabeth ceppi Dartmouth University Press, 2018 276 pp. [End Page 237] There are some inexterminables we tolerate as best we can: death, taxes, nuclear bomb-proof cockroaches, and New England Puritanism. Of this quartet, the last strikes me as the most historically contingent and least natural. New England Puritans are difficult to get rid of, no matter how unpalatable many may find them, and whether one is sympathetic, antagonistic, or somehow agnostic. But from whatever angle, they are always contenders for sustained and renewed attention. Consider: under travailing circumstances of 2020, "America's Hometown"—Plymouth—did its level best, masked and distanced, to celebrate the quadricentenary of that first deadly winter of the Mayflower's arrival, and in ways that equitably honor and dignify its pre- and post-Mayflower heritages.1 And if Plymouth celebrates, can Boston and all the rest of New England be far behind? Will we see, as in the bicentennials of the 1830s and again in the tricentennials of the 1930s, an unfolding series of town celebrations, monuments, studies, commemorative knickknacks, and such across New England? Surely so; but just as surely, we will also see unprecedented strains and tensions; the throwback costumes, recipes, and recitations are likely to seem worse than dated. One thinks of that cracked and bowed main beam of the Mayflower, mid-Atlantic: how many would now bother with its repair? Who possesses the equipment, skills, or motivation for the task? This present selection of books, for all the divergent angles and aspects, affords but one somewhat prismatic, dispersed glimpse into the present states of New England Puritanism academically calibrated, and perhaps will offer some foretaste of what to expect as we approach 2030 and beyond. They are all, to be sure, state of the art, but they hardly represent all the scholarly activity at present or to come; however, they do provide a worthwhile vantage point for surveying something of—well, I wouldn't push the Plymouth allusions too far, but let's say a Mount Pisgah. I have divided them into three pairings: measured deflations of a classic sermon; the Puritans as they were; and forms of oppression. Without intending to, I found that pairings in each case settled in a literature-history dyad, suggesting that, despite our disciplinary overlap, we still have miles to go before such boundaries dissolve. First and foremost, as a foundational homage for Boston's quadricentenary we would expect a full-dress rehearsal of Governor John Winthrop's profound and indispensable 1630 lay sermon on the Arbella as it crossed the Atlantic, "A Model of Christian Charity," laying groundwork [End Page 238] and spearheading the Great Migration into Massachusetts Bay and all that dominoed and degenerated therefrom. We certainly would, except that virtually every detail of the preceding sentence has been severely scrutinized and found wanting over the past thirty years, to the point that even its authorship is now disputed.2 That can make for an especially embarrassing beginning, if every detail of one's ballyhooed origin has been pretty much obliterated. And that is deeply unfortunate, given the extraordinary investment put into the Model" by historians, politicians, and educators over the past sixty or so years. Up until the 2016 national election at least, it seemed that every national politician since Ronald Reagan routinely sampled the "Model"; generations of teachers and test-makers have found it especially useful for critiquing "American exceptionalism." But beginning...

The Cost of Trust: The World Health Organization and Vaccination's Contested Economization in France

This article explores the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) within the tumultuous history of the hepatitis B vaccine in France, including a controversy that erupted in 1996 and lasted several years. When the first hepatitis B vaccine was commercialized in France in 1981, it inaugurated a new era in the industry characterized by high prices, an unprecedented number of patents and aggressive commercial competition. By inscribing the hepatitis B vaccine controversy into a broader, global history of the economization of immunization – in which the WHO played a central role – this article reframes the causes and implications of a controversy that both actors and scholars have approached through a primarily national lens. The challenge posed to the economic approach to immunization prepared the ground for subsequent critiques of vaccines as commodities. The article discusses a key transformation in the recent transatlantic history of public health by focusing on the perceived association of immunization with a contested economic order.

James Moran, Madness on Trial: a Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy

James Moran, Madness on Trial: a Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy

Puritanism in Transatlantic Perspective

Abstract David D. Hall’s book comprises a transatlantic history of the Puritan movement from its sixteenth-century emergence to its heyday under Oliver Cromwell and its subsequent political demise after 1660. Hall provides insights into the movement’s trajectory, including the various forms of Puritan belief and practice in England and Scotland and their transatlantic migration. In Hall’s sweeping view, Puritanism was a driving force for cultural change in the early modern Atlantic world and left an indelible mark on religion in America. The four reviewers praise Hall’s book for its monumental achievement, with Abram Van Engen emphasizing the centrality of Puritan theology. They place it within its historiographical context, as Evan Haefeli does by comparing it with Michael Winship’s Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (2018) and as Fred van Lieburg does by reminding us of the centuries-old German tradition of Pietismusforschung. The reviewers also raise critical questions as to the audience of Puritan publications and point to the benefits of studying Puritanism in an even wider comparative framework, one that looks forwards and backwards in time and one that speaks to the large, overarching questions raised by global history and digital humanities, including Andrew Pettegree’s ustc project. In his response David Hall begins by acknowledging the decades of Anglo-American scholarship on the Puritan movement on which his book builds, replies to points raised by the reviewers, and reflects on the situation of Puritan studies in the United States at this moment in time.

Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy by James E. Moran

<i>Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy</i> by James E. Moran

SagerFritz, ChristianRosser, CélineMavrot, Pascal Y.Hurni (2018). A transatlantic history of public administration. Analysing the United States, Germany, and France. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar

SagerFritz, ChristianRosser, CélineMavrot, Pascal Y.Hurni (2018). A transatlantic history of public administration. Analysing the United States, Germany, and France. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History, by David Hall

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History, by David Hall

Political Satire, That Was The Week That Was, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

The political satire boom in the United States and the United Kingdom experienced a brief, albeit notorious success on British and American television, most notably represented by That Was The Week That Was. In the United States, the satire boom largely evaporated with the assassination of President Kennedy. This article examines the transatlantic history of this iconic programme during the Kennedy years and how that transatlantic exchange manifested in the midst of the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death with the British satirists’ hastily produced tribute episode a day after the American president’s assassination, its broadcast on NBC twice in the days following the assassination, and the Anglophilic response by American audiences to the programme in voluminous letters sent to the BBC.

James E. Moran, Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy

James E. Moran, Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David Hall, and: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History by David Hall, and: Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg

First Victims at Last: Disability and Memorial Culture in Holocaust Studies

This essay begins with a Berlin memorial to the victims of National Socialist “euthanasia” killings first unveiled in 2014. The open-air structure was the fourth such major public memorial in the German capital, having followed earlier memorials already established for Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity in 2005, German victims of homosexual persecution in 2008, and Sinti and Roma victims in 2012. Planning for the systematic persecution and extermination of at least 300,000 infants, adolescents, and adults deemed “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben) long preceded and extended beyond the 12-year Nazi period of massacre linked to other victim groups. Yet those constructing collective memory projects in Berlin appear to consider these particular victims as an afterthought, secondary to the other groups. Rather than address the commemorations themselves, this essay addresses the sequence in which they have appeared in order to demonstrate a pattern of first-victimized/last-recognized. I argue that the massacre of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others had to come into legal jurisprudence, scholarship, and public memory projects first before the murdered disabled body and its related memorialization could be legitimized as a category of violence important in and of itself. I argue further that the delay is rooted in a shared trans-Atlantic history that has failed to interrogate disability in terms of the social and cultural values that categorize and stigmatize it. Instead, the disabled body has been seen as both a physical embodiment of incapacity and a monolith that defies historicization. An examination of the broader foundation behind delayed study and representation that recognizes the intersection of racism and ableism allows us to reconfigure our analysis of violence and provides fertile ground from which to make connections to contemporary iterations still playing out in the present.

Rezension: Sager, Fritz, Rosser, Christian, Mavrot, Céline &amp; Hurni, Pascal Y.(2018). A Transatlantic History of Public Administration. Analyzing the USA, Germany and France. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 210 Seiten, ISBN-13: 978-1-78811-374-8 (Hardcover), 978-1-78811-374-5 (eBook)

The construct of administrative traditions is at the heart of public administration. Investigating the spread of intellectual ideas between German, French and US scholars over the period 1870 – 1970, the study demonstrates that “it is more realistic to interpret intellectual traditions as crossbreeds, instead of distinctively and uniquely German, French and US breeds” (Sager, Rosser, Mavrot & Hurni, 2018, p. 3). The study supports the notion that intellectual innovation requires strong publication output, a scientific network, and institutional support.-----Bibliographie: Jäkel, T. (2019). Sager, Fritz, Rosser, Christian, Mavrot, Céline & Hurni, Pascal Y.(2018). A Transatlantic History of Public Administration. Analyzing the USA, Germany and France. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 210 Seiten, ISBN-13: 978-1-78811-374-8 (Hardcover), 978-1-78811-374-5 (eBook). dms – der moderne staat – Zeitschrift für Public Policy, Recht und Management, 12(2-2019), 486-489. https://doi.org/10.3224/dms.v12i2.18