The Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture
Archives
Papers discussed in 2006-2007:
May 4:
James Kloppenberg
Harvard University
"Democracy in Europe and
America:
A Conversation with Jim Kloppenberg on Alexis de Tocqueville"
In a departure from our traditional consideration of unpublished work,
we will read two recently published articles that bear on Professor Kloppenberg’s
emerging project of Alexis de Tocqueville. Professor Kloppenberg
writes that he would like to “discuss a couple of things that have
recently appeared and that point in the direction of the arguments
I want to make in the book on democracy in America and Europe. Both
are on Tocqueville, and both challenge prevailing understandings of New
England as anything but the cradle of democracy, the understanding T.
took from Jared Sparks, J. Q. Adams, and the New England Whigs. I
think your early Americanist colleagues would find the argument provocative,
and I'd value their response. I can send you copies of both articles
if you'd like. The one more directly engaging New England is "Tocqueville,
Mill, and the American Whigs," in The Tocqueville Review/La Revue
Tocqueville, 27 (2006): 351-380. The other deals more with
themes in intellectual history and the relation between Tocqueville's
own writings and our current practice as historians: "The Canvas
and the Color: Tocqueville's 'Philosophical History' and Why It
Matters Now," Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006): 495-521.”
OSU Grad Visitation Day (April 6):
Tom Ingersoll
OSU-Lima
"'A Day of Strict Reckoning: Loyalism in Revolutionary New England."
Comment:
"This chapter follows an introductory chapter
that represents a synthetic social and cultural portrait of
the region in the early 1770s. Implicitly, Chapter 2 attempts
to wrestle with the theoretical problem of whether a cultural
factor (like the history of New England) can play an autonomously
creative role in historical change at a crucial moment. My argument
is that the Loyalists were remarkably successful at working
their cultural advantage in the run-up to the Declaration. This
chapter is followed by one that explores the Loyalists' other
strength, British imperial might, and how they lost that advantage
over the rebels. The
argument of the book as a whole is that the Revolution was
radical in New England in a variety of ways, in part because
it was not retributive
against the Tories."
February 9:
Nicole Etcheson
Ball State University
“Wives and Sweethearts: The Women of Putnam County, Indiana during
the Civil War.”
Comment:
"This paper is a chapter of a book I ’m working
on. The larger project is a microhistory of Putnam County,
Indiana during the Civil War era, roughly 1850 to 1880.
That project will trace how the war transformed, or did
not transform, this northern community. Indeed, the war
had limited effects on both gender (as this chapter argues)
and politics. Although the Republicans emerged as powerful
in the county and Civil War veterans became influential
both as voters and candidates, the county remained closely
divided between Republicans and Democrats in the post-war
period as it had been during the antebellum era. The greatest
changes came in race relations with increasing acceptance
of black rights and an increased migration of African Americans
from the South into Putnam County."
November 17:
Tamara Thornton
SUNY Buffalo
A “Great Machine” or a “Beast of Prey”: A Boston
Corporation and Its Rural Debtors in an Age of Capitalist Transformation
Comment:
"This essay grows out of my current book project, a biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838). When I first examined the papers of the company Bowditch headed in his later life, the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, I had little expectation that so much of Bowditch’s temperament would be revealed in business records and, more important, that the papers would shed light on the changing nature of capitalist practices and values in this era. Originally, I regarded this research as contributing to the dialogue among historians regarding rural capitalism, a dialogue in which farmers from Massachusetts in particular have played such a significant role. Having conducted additional research in Berkshire County, received much useful feedback from colleagues, and revised the original essay, I now believe that the research tells us much more about urban capitalists and their adjustment to the changing conditions of the antebellum period. It pins down a moving target—capitalism—in
one place and at one moment in time. In general, this work reflects
my desire to bring as much nuance to the analysis of elites and elite
culture as historians have brought to their analyses of ordinary and
oppressed peoples."
October 20:
Mary Beth Norton
Cornell University
"Lady Frances Berkeley, Nathaniel Bacon, and the Politics of Gendered Power in Seventeenth Century Virginia"
Comment:
"This work in progress was actually researched and written
two years ago, when I had a study leave in the fall of 2004.
"It represents my first attempt to address the questions I
laid out at the end of Founding Mothers & Fathers (1996),
when I promised a follow-up volume to focus on the question of the relationship
of women and the state/public realm in the period between c. 1670 and
c. 1750. I have realized that I am writing a trilogy, in which Liberty’s
Daughters, my first foray
into women’s/gender
history, actually represents the end point.
"The central problem that interests me is: how does Anglo-America
move from a world in which, as I show in FM&F, high-status
women have a recognized place in the political/public realm (or at the
very least are not explicitly excluded
from it), to a world in which all women are directed to confine
their activities to a private sphere, a feminized concept that
in itself (again, as I show in FM&F) did not exist in the
17th century.
"This past year, while I served as Pitt Professor of American
History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge, I
devoted myself to researching the English side of the story
from the 1640s on; I learned a great deal, some of which I
will share orally with the seminar at the beginning of our
discussion."
Papers discussed in 2005-2006:
May 5:
Timothy H. Breen
Department of History, Northwestern University
"America's Insurgency: Reflections on Popular Mobilization during the
American Revolution."
Originally written for a festschrift for Hermann Wellenreuther in Gottingen,
Germany, Professor Breen's paper reopens the debate on the beginnings
of the American Revolution in a dialogue with classical and contemporary
social science.
March 31:
Kate Haulman
Department of History, Ohio State University
"Social and Imperial Fabrics"
Abstract:
This chapter uses fabric, the primary indicator of fashion
in the eighteenth century, to explore the relationship among fashion
as an idea, a trans-Atlantic economic engine, and a set of practices
in British North American cities during the first half of the century. As
the literal stuff of fashion, fabric lay at the intersection of commerce
and culture— transatlantic trade, rituals of imperial connection,
and distinct colonial practices, serving as one of the ways in which
abstractions such as “empire” and “colony” became
material and visible. Its transatlantic movement facilitated
a fashion system that linked supply and demand, production and consumption,
and incorporated many participants while maintaining literal and figurative
distance between them. Although trade in fabric commercially
connected England and its colonies, the ways in which colonists consumed
and displayed cloth could visually and materially separate the communities. The
donning of imported fabrics permitted sartorial gestures toward the
wider world, yet English sumptuary laws, the vagaries of trans-Atlantic
trade, and even a sense of provincial distinction modified the replication
of metropolitan modes in colonial cities—replication that was
not, perhaps, unequivocally sought. Fashion indicated commercial
and cultural inclusion in the British empire, yet was never purely
about mimicking the metropole. Focusing on fabrics reveals that
fashion “on the margins” consisted of gestures toward
England and the wider world as well as intentional attention to particular
colonial social landscapes. Thus fashion helped to construct
an idea of empire that relied as much on the concept and practice
of colonial distinction as imperial connection.
February 3:
Julie Sievers
Department of English, Denison University
"Monsters, Angels, and Balls of Fire: Writing New England for
the New Science" A note from Professor Sievers:
This paper is a draft of a chapter which belongs to a larger project
on seventeenth-century American literatures of "wonder." The
full project surveys writings from the New England colonies to show
how colonists used narratives about "remarkable," "marvelous" events
and objects to negotiate socio-political challenges. It pursues
four major genres of wonders initially recounted by ordinary colonists
and later edited for publication by colonial elites--sea providence
writings, judgment narratives, reports of witchcraft and demonic
possession, and the materials covered in this essay: wondrous natural
history writings. I envision substantial revisions for the final
version of this chapter, and I welcome feedback on all aspects of
the essay.
November 18:
Patrick Griffin
Department of History, Ohio University
"Drawing the Line: The Ideology of British Empire in the American West."
October 14:
Terri Snyder
Department of History, California State University, Fullerton
“Stories of Suicide in Eighteenth-Century
Virginia: Masters, Slaves, and Print Culture During the Imperial
Crisis”
This paper represents an early foray into my larger project on suicide
in the early American South. This particular portion of the study
investigates stories of suicide from biographical, legal and popular
viewpoints. Moreover, it explores the various meanings of self-murder
in early Virginia as they are related to mastery, slavery, and print
culture. Taken together, these stories of suicide reflect the emergence
of complex set of Virginia identities as well as a distinctly southern
culture of violence by the onset of the Revolution.
I look forward to your comments on both the substantive findings
of and the methodologies employed in my paper.
Papers discussed 2004-2005:
October 1:
Gordon Wood, Department of History, Brown University
"The Law and an Independent Judiciary," a chapter from his work in progress tentatively entitled
The Empire of Liberty, which will be the Oxford History of the Early Republic.
Co-sponsored with the Ohio State Legal History Seminar
Professor Wood also led a Graduate Student Seminar discussing his paper-in-progress:
"Is There a "James Madison Problem"?"
November 5:
Walter Rucker, Department of African and African-American Studies and Department of History, Ohio State University
"'Only draw in your countrymen': Atlantic Creoles, Akan Rebels, &
Intentional Communities in Colonial New York City."
April 9:
Drew Cayton, Miami University and Fred Anderson, University of Colorado
A panel discussion: "The Meaning of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America."
Co-sponsored by the OSU Early Modern Seminar
Papers discussed 2003-2004:
September 26:
Steven Bullock, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
"The Rages of Governor Francis Nicholson: Anger, Politeness, and Politics in Provincial America"
November 7:
James Allegro, Department of History, Case-Western Reserve University
"Negotiating the Law: Slavery, Statute Law, and the Dynamics of Inter-racial Sex and Marriage in Massachusetts Bay"
March 12:
Michael Les Benedict, Professor of History, The Ohio State University
"Popular Constitutionalism in the Era of Reconstruction"
Co-sponsored with the OSU Legal History Seminar.
April 9:
Leslie Alexander, Assistant Professor of History, The Ohio State University
'To Leave the House of Bondage:' The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on African American Emigration in the Age of Emancipation."
May 14:
Randolph Roth, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University
"The Decline in Homicide in Colonial America, 1675-1765."
Papers discussed in 2002 -2003:
October 25:
Peter Way, Bowling Green University
"Class and the Common Soldier in the Seven Years' War"
November 22:
Sarah Fatherley, Otterbein College
"The Sweet Recourse of Reason: Women's Education and
Elite Identity in Colonial Philadelphia"
February 21:
Elizabeth Mancke, University of Akron
"Power, Space, and the Making of Early Modern Empires"
April 11:
Barbara Groseclose, The Ohio State University
"The 'Turkish Robe' and Early American Portraiture"
Papers discussed in 2001-2002:
October 5:
Shirley Wajda, "'This museum of the human race': Fowler
and Wells' Phrenological Cabinet and American National Character."
February 1:
Wayne Durrill, "Becoming Rafinesque: Market Society, Science,
and the Politics of Academic Reputation in the Early Republic":
May 10:
Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "Metis Families in the 19th century
Midwest: Responding to Colonization"
Papers discussed in 2000-2001:
November 3:
Mitchel Snay, History, Denison Univeristy, "Land and
Nationality: Fenians, African-Americans, and Southern Whites
in the Era of Reconstruction"
February 9:
Jared Gardner, English, Ohio State, "Early American Periodicals
and the Unsettling of American Literature"
April 20:
Ann M. Little, History, University of Dayton, "Amongst
ye French . . . She would be Ruin'd': English Families and
the Catholic Menace"
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