Transatlantic Communities Research Articles

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Between God and Satan: Thomas Thornton, Witch-Hunting, and Religious Mission in the English Atlantic World, 1647–1693

Remembering Sappho: transatlantic ‘Lesbian Nations’ in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT This paper examines differing articulations of proto-lesbian identity in the long nineteenth century, in which educated, middle-class white women emulated the figure of Sappho in their writing and formulated Sappho-inspired communities through creative salons, societies, clubs, and social/literary networks. It maps the progression from the romantic friendships of the eighteenth century to the Boston marriages of the nineteenth century, to the beginning of the twentieth century, when love between women went from noble and virtuous to deviant and morbid sexual ‘inversion’. The question is not only treated chronologically but geographically, the position of American-based women writers juxtaposed with the opportunities afforded by specifically 'Paris-Lesbos'. The following study maps these Transatlantic communities as early forms of ‘Lesbian Nations’ through their use of the 'Lesbian' poet. It engages in a form of Sapphic ‘remembering,’ questions how and who we remember, and contributes to current understandings of a 'lesbian' historical past.

Hispanismo e latinismo no debate intelectual ibero-americano

Neste trabalho serão abordadas duas correntes de opinião do cenário ibero-americano, o hispanismo e o latinismo, ambas empenhadas na construção de comunidades culturais transatlânticas nos séculos XIX e XX. Os intelectuais tiveram lugar privilegiado na formulação de ideias, programas e iniciativas com a finalidade de estreitar laços entre o mundo europeu e o americano, assim como foram protagonistas de polêmicas que atravessaram as fronteiras nacionais. A crítica aos Estados Unidos constituiu o pano de fundo da luta que espanhóis e franceses travaram para reivindicar a liderança sobre os países ao sul do Rio Bravo. Enfocaremos algumas conjunturas e personagens que animaram tais correntes de modo a compreender suas posições e antagonismos.

Alchemy and the End Times: Revelations from the Laboratory and Library of John Allin, Puritan Alchemist (1623–1683)

John Allin (1623–1683), a Harvard-educated Puritan minister, physician and alchemist, provides an important case study for investigating connections between alchemical practice and millenarian concerns in the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world. This study explores how Allin's Puritan eschatological beliefs drove his alchemical pursuit of the philosophers’ stone, viewed by contemporaries as the panacea that would restore perfect health and longevity to mankind. For Allin, the stone's successful creation signalled assurance of Christ's promised return, while its use would prepare the godly elect for their place in Christ's thousand-year reign on earth that was to follow Judgment Day. As a nonconformist minister in Restoration England, his views led to his ejection from his East Sussex parish, requiring him to seek other sources of income. Allin's work as an alchemical operator in London illuminates his own endeavours to process “prima materia,” apparently a locally sourced species of algae known as nostoc, while his correspondence includes what may be the first extant reference to a planned alchemical laboratory facility at Oxford University. His library of medico-alchemical and exegetical literature also reveals attempts to connect the biblical figure Elias, a harbinger of Christ's Second Coming, to the quest for metallic transmutation. From these standpoints, the life and times of this Puritan alchemist open up new avenues of investigation into trans-Atlantic communities of practitioners, whose networks provide fresh insights into the mechanics of exchanges of ideas, knowledge and materials.

Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 Mario Nathan Coschi Lorenzkowski, Barbara – Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 295. Barbara Lorenzkowski’s innovative Sounds of Ethnicity examines the relationship between language and ethnic identity in the German communities of Buffalo, New York and Waterloo County, Ontario. Her book is divided into two parts: Part One: Language Matters, examines the German-language press of Waterloo County and German classes in the schools of Waterloo County and Buffalo, while Part Two: Music Matters explores the Peace Jubilees held in Waterloo and Buffalo in 1871 to commemorate the end of the Franco-Prussian War and Saengerfeste, or singers’ festivals, held in the Great Lakes region between 1860 and 1912. For sources, Lorenzkowski primarily examines newspapers [End Page 448] from the Great Lakes region, particularly the local German-language presses of Buffalo and Waterloo County. She also studies school board records and the records of the Saengerfeste and of the individuals prominently involved in them. Lorenzkowski envisions ethnicity as something that “happens” rather than membership in a group. The use of language in speech or in song served “to sound out the shape of this ethnicity” (p. 6). She therefore moves beyond a simplistic understanding of language as a static marker of ethnic identity, whereby language loss signals assimilation. To do this, she delves past the exhortations of the ethnic elite, such as newspaper editors and leaders of cultural institutions, who called for linguistic purity, and lamented the increasing use of English amongst the ethnic rank and file, a group less clearly defined by Lorenzkowski. What she reveals is a dynamic, fluid relationship between language and ethnicity for both the rank and file and the elite, despite the conservative rhetoric of the latter. In speaking a German-English hybrid rather than a pure High German, or singing and making merry in the less formal setting of the beer gardens rather than listening politely in the concert hall, the rank and file Germans were not rejecting their ethnicity, but were expressing an ethnic identity that spoke to their own experiences in North America. For both the elite and the rank and file, language practices were also a forum for interaction with the host society, rather than a barrier between the two. In staging the singers’ festivals, the elite were partly trying to foster a musical culture in North America. Anglo-Saxon audiences, for their part, eventually came to claim these festivals as their own. As a result, these ethnic festivals became part of the mainstream public culture of Canada and the United States. Lorenzkowski’s transnational approach, which sees the German communities of Buffalo and Waterloo County as “cast in a continental, not transatlantic mould,” makes a significant contribution to the historiography (p. 17). Studies of the formation of ethnic communities and identity in Canada are quite often limited to the level of a single neighbourhood or city. Those studies which venture beyond this local level are typically bounded by the receiving country’s borders. Those works which adopt a transnational approach, such as Elizabeth Jane Errington’s Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities, generally look at the continuing ties of community between the sending and receiving countries. The world that immigrants knew and lived, however, was not limited to the axis of sending and receiving countries. When immigrants came to North America, they frequently moved from one place to another in search of work, paying little heed to the border between Canada and the United States. Even once they had settled more permanently, these migrants continued to have ties of kin and community that straddled borders. These local studies of Waterloo Country and Buffalo enable Lorenzkowski to explore the growth of a larger German community in the Great Lakes region. She argues that the German-language press of Waterloo County created a transnational space that encompassed Canada, the United States, and, initially, Germany. In their advocacy for linguistic purity, editors criticized not only immigrants who spoke in a German-English hybrid, but European Germans whose language was riven by dialects and littered with French loanwords. The German-Canadian...

At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedo’s and Julieta Hanono’s Memorial Aesthetics

Lori Cole is a PhD candi date in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on the construction of transatlantic avant-garde communities in print. She is also an art critic and transla tor and has published work in PMLA, Artforum, and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. WHILE ALL PUBLIC ART HAS THE CAPACITY TO COM memorate historical events, much post-dictatorial memorial art in Latin America challenges the traditional temporal and physical frameworks characteristic of public monuments. Artists such as the Colombian Juan Manuel Echavarria, Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer, Argentine Nicolas Guagnini, or the Mexican Teresa Margolles, confront the challenge of representing and alluding to violence without stylizing it.1 In this essay I focus specifically on projects by the Colombian Doris Salcedo and Argentine Julieta Hanono, two contemporary artists whose work maps the bodies of victims lost to state-dictated violence onto the actual spaces that contained the historical traumas. Examining Salcedos Noviembre 6y 7, a memorial to the 1985 victims of the siege on the Palace of Justice and the ensuing massacre in Bogota, and Hanono's Elpozo, a video installation depicting the space where the artist was imprisoned for two years as a victim of the Argentine military secret police during the Videla dicta torship, I reflect on how these artists memorialize violence through a phenomenological relationship to site that at once centralizes the absent body and invites viewers to participate in a collective historical reflection.

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Anthony Di Mascio Errington, Elizabeth Jane — Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. Pp. 244. In Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Jane Errington takes the reader on a transatlantic journey from various corners of the British Isles to Upper Canada. In doing so, she reminds us that the resettlement of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century was undertaken by individual men and women with complex lives and varieties of motivations for leaving home and starting anew. As one of Canada's leading scholars on the social history and development of Upper Canada, Errington opens a fresh window into the personal world of emigration through a meticulous reading of the writings of emigrants and their families and an empathetic analysis of their emotional voyage. Emigrant Worlds reverses the usual lens for research on migration to North America. Typical studies of migration "look 'out' from North America to try to understand how particular cultural practices and political propensities persisted and shaped New World societies" (p. 169). By contrast, Errington's study looks toward North America to understand what factors drove emigrants to leave home and abandon their familiar cultural practices and political propensities. She finds transatlantic communities in which familial networks were instrumental in establishing a new and broad sense of identity and home. Kinship ties and networks with friends and families who had gone before were often instrumental in forging connections and communities that made the emigrant's world navigable. Within this context, personal reasons for emigrating were often more pivotal than wide-scale socio-economic conditions. Decisions were very much shaped by the experiences of individual emigrants and the particular circumstances in their local communities and within their transatlantic interpersonal relationships. Errington uses letters, diaries, and journals to examine the variety of reasons that convinced emigrants to go to British North America. She paints a vivid portrait of the physical and emotional stress that preparing to leave home brought upon emigrants, the peculiar culture and surreal experiences that connected emigrants aboard passenger ships on the Atlantic, and both the euphoric and disappointing emotions that welcomed emigrants into the "strange land." Emigrant [End Page 259] writings certainly demonstrate that many "remained emotionally rooted more than three thousand miles away" (p. 137). In turn, for those who remained behind, the bonds were equally as strong. Through transatlantic webs of kin and community facilitated by letter-writing, the availability of newspapers, and, for those with the means, the occasional return visit home, the old world remained a part of the emigrants' new world. The author furthermore broadens our historical imagination through an innovative reading of often overlooked information such as wanted notices printed in colonial newspapers. In doing so, she successfully teases out information about who the emigrants were, where they were from, for whom they were looking (or who was looking for them), and how emigration was a "family affair." Throughout the book, Errington takes the reader beyond a practical description of emigration and into poignant accounts of the joys and pains of leaving home. Departure, she argues, separated the emigrant from friends and family who were staying behind not only physically, but also emotionally. As emigrants negotiated the intricacies of arranging passage to the New World, sold their farms, possessions, and family heirlooms to raise funds for and lighten the load of travel, and found lodging while waiting to board the ship, the world of emigration "was now very real. It was a world with its own rules and customs, and for those in transit it was often bewildering and sometimes overwhelming" (p. 59). While reading this book, with its descriptive and telling accounts of the trials and tribulations of emigration, I could not help but imagine the harsh emotional journey of my own family who travelled across the Atlantic from Italy to Canada in the 1960s. Indeed, one of the striking features of emigrant writings...

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Webs of Affection and Obligation: Glimpse into Families and Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Communities

This paper explores the networks of affection, of frustration, and of obligation that continued to tie families and friends divided by the Atlantic in the first half of the nineteenth century as seen through the correspondence of two men — John Gemmill, who with his wife and 7 children emigrated to Upper Canada in the 1820s, and John Turner, who stayed home in England after his younger brother resettled in St. Andrews, New Brunswick in the 1830s. A close reading of this correspondence illustrates how kith and kin divided by the Atlantic continued to assert their place around family firesides, despite the difficulties presented by the gulf of time and space. Through their letters, correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic also negotiated often highly contested relationships that changed over time. At the same time, this link offered emigrants some reassurance of who they were and their place in the world as they negotiated new identities.

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Elizabeth Jane Errington. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History Series 2. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+244. $80.00 (cloth).

Elizabeth Jane Errington. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History Series 2. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+244. $80.00 (cloth). - Volume 48 Issue 1

Book Review: Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Book Review: Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process

Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process ARWEN PALMER MOHUN Laundry is women’s work. For some centuries, this is what most Europeans and Americans assumed. Whether in manor houses or army camps, by streamsides or in tenement rooms, laundrywork has traditionally been one of the most powerfully gendered ofall domes­ tic tasks. Men, on the other hand, avoided doing laundry for reasons beyond the fact it was hot, difficult work. The man who submerged his arms into a washtub or picked up an iron (except in a tailor’s shop) risked unsexing himself. A man who needed his washing done sought out a woman to do it for him—either wife, or servant, or washing woman.1 Women were also the guardians of knowledge about the processes involved. They taught their daughters how to make soap and to season an iron, how to brew starch and remove stains. The tools and the knowledge and the task itselfwere indisput­ ably theirs.2 Dr. Mohun is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. She thanks Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, Carroll Pursell, Erik Rau,John Staudenmaier, and Angela Woollacott as well as participants in the Johns Hopkins Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine for careful readings and wise advice on previous drafts of this article. ’Some anecdotal evidence even suggests that men who were forced to do their own washing did it at night or behind closed doors to avoid being observed; see Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work is NeverDone: A History ofHousework in the British Isles, 1650-1950. (London, 1982), pp. 136-37. 2For more on domestic laundrywork in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History ofAmerican Housework (New York, 1982) and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Workfor Mother: The Ironies ofHousehold Tech­ nologyfrom the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983). For Great Britain, see Davidson, and Pamela Sambrook, Laundry Bygones (Ayelesbury, Bucks, 1983). Patri­ cia Ma\co\rnson’s English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1986) is a unique study of the lives and experiences ofwomen who worked in both commer­ cial laundries and in taking in washing. There is no equivalent study for American washerwomen although Tera Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making: AfroAmerican Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861-1920” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990), is one of several recent studies of African-American women who worked as domestic laundresses.© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0007J01.00 97 98 Arwen Palmer Mohun In the mid-19th century, “steam” or “power” laundries began to appear in American and British cities, offering consumers an alter­ native to the rigors of wash day or the uncertainties of employing a washerwoman. These enterprises distinguished themselves from their domestic counterparts by adapting industrial methods and technologies to the problem of cleaning clothing, sheets, towels, and other items made of cloth. Rather than scaling up primitive washing machines then available for home use, early laundry proprietors bought or modified textile machinery that had been designed for bleaching and dying cloth.3 In common with other industrial em­ ployers, they also reorganized the work process, dividing up the tra­ ditional parts ofthe laundress’sjob—washing, drying, starching, and ironing—between multiple workers and, eventually, specialized ma­ chines. While women continued to constitute a majority of wage workers in these laundries and to do the wash at home, men controlled the industrialization of laundrywork. They created, propagated, and controlled the technology known collectively as a “steam laundry.”4 These first commercial laundries are hardly more than shadows in the historical record, evidenced primarily by their presence in city directories and fire insurance maps. In the 1880s, however, large numbers of new entrepreneurs entered into the laundry business. This period ofgrowth was accompanied by the first efforts oflaundry owners and managers, “laundrymen” as they now called themselves, to create a public identity for themselves. Through trade journals and associations, laundrymen created local, national, and transAtlantic (Anglo-American) communities where technical informa­ tion could be shared...

The role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade

The recent controversy instigated by Leonard Jeffries has prompted discussion of the relationship between the development of the transatlantic slave trade and European Jewish communities. Closer attention to the role played by Jews in the development of the trade, and its associated enterprises, suggests that little direct involvement can be identified. In the Dutch slave trade Jews can be said to have had tangible significance, but even here their involvement was relatively marginal. Through detailed analysis of the historiography of slavery, the ‘conspiracy theory’ approach to the issue is substantially challenged and disproved.

Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver

Previous articleNext article FreeCudjo's Own Story of the Last African SlaverZora Neale HurstonZora Neale Hurston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 12, Number 4October 1927 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2714041 Views: 38Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1927, 1955, 1969 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mariane C. Ferme, Andrew B. Kipnis, Raminder Kaur, and Luiz Costa Racial burdens, translations, and chance, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10, no.22 (Nov 2020): 259–268.https://doi.org/10.1086/711419 Karen B. Bell RICE, RESISTANCE, AND FORCED TRANSATLANTIC COMMUNITIES: (RE)ENVISIONING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN LOW COUNTRY GEORGIA, 1750-1800, The Journal of African American History 95, no.22 (Nov 2017): 157–182.https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.95.2.0157