The Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture, 2008

This announces the schedule for the Ohio Seminar in Early American History and Culture for Winter 2008. The seminar will meet three times this winter. We welcome all faculty and graduate students with an interest in early American studies.

The papers will be available in printable PDF format here on the Ohio Seminar website about two weeks prior to each meeting – follow the prompt below to access the papers. This page is password protected: please contact John Brooke for access. A limited number of copies of the papers will be available at the department front desk in Dulles Hall.

We would like to invite the Ohio Seminar membership to attend the meetings of the department’s Center for Historical Research. The center’s two-year program, “Crossroads of Globalization: ‘Hot Spots’ in the Early Modern World,” will be of particular interest to anyone working or teaching in the early modern era. The Center will not meet this winter, but will have a series of presentations on Charlestown, Quebec, and Detroit in the Spring Quarter.

For further information ands contacts, please consult the Center’s Program website at:
http://chr.osu.edu/program.cfm#07

• Campus Map & Dulles Hall

• Follow this link for PDF copies of the papers (available two weeks prior to each meeting) | request password

• Seminars Presented in Previous Years

Ohio Early American Seminar Schedule, Winter, 2008

January 18
Andrew Schocket, Bowling Green State University
Revolutionary Studies: New Approaches to the American Revolution

We as early Americanists recognize a fissure in our overall conception of the American Revolution between an ideological school on the one hand and a social conflict school on the other, but increasingly recognize that neither one exclusively, nor the two of them together, offer fully satisfactory models.  This work-in-progress is an attempt to transcend current scholarship through by invoking the sociology of revolutions, considering the intersections of revolutionary ideological and cultural change with race, class, gender, and ethnicity; employing revolutionary disorder as a lens of analysis, and recognizing the continuities and disconnections among different scales of human experience, thus proposing a new, more interdisciplinary, more comparative, and chronologically- and geographically-broader framework for the study of the American Revolution.

February 8
Margaret Sumner, Ohio State University, Marion Campus
“Object of Interest”: College Families and Their Construction Principle, 1820-1850

As they designed and managed a new generation of college communities along the borders of the new republic, early American college families attracted attention by the distinct construction principle they tried to implement in their communities: a collective refusal to countenance the public and private divide growing in their wider culture. My paper explores how these families used their buildings, their local spaces, and their very selves as working models of this principle, determined to prove that the reconnection of the public and private sphere would be, in their opinion, the key to renovating the republic and saving what was left of its virtue.

February 29
Brian Schoen, Ohio University
"Protecting Slavery and Free Trade: The Political Economy of Cotton."

Southern planter-politicians commitment to slavery has made them appear as backward-looking traditionalists.  Yet their central place in a vibrant international cotton trade and support for free trade theories and policies placed them, in their minds at least, on the frontline of a modern-looking internationalism.  This chapter explains how national and international developments associated with the cotton trade informed regional responses to protectionism, and how, in turn, battles to protect slavery and free trade during the 1820s reshaped planters’ perceptions of themselves and the union. 

The seminar will meet in 168 Dulles Hall, 230 W. 17th Ave., Ohio State University, Columbus Campus, 4:00-5:45.  Papers will be posted on the seminar website roughly two weeks prior to the seminar meeting, with a detailed announcement following.  We will continue our tradition of a "Dutch-treat" dinner following the seminar, open to all, at a restaurant of the presenter's choosing!!   Further details will be distributed prior to each seminar.  Anyone with questions regarding these sessions should contact John Brooke: brooke.10@osu.edu

I f you should have any questions about the presentations, please feel free to contact either of the co-conveners:

John Brooke 614-292-8757 brooke.10@osu.edu
Margaret Newell 614-292-2495 newell.20@osu.edu

Steering committee:
John Brooke, Ohio State University
Margaret Newell, Ohio State University
Drew Cayton, Miami University
Carla Pestana, Miami University
Mitchell Snay, Denison College

U.S. History to 1877 > Ohio Seminar