Fall 2024
The Fall 2024 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is out now and available on Project MUSE.
Roundtable — Facing the Archive from the Present: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work, Part II – Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha
EAS Editors’ Note: This is Part II of a guest-edited roundtable that was in response to “Facing the Future of Early American Studies,” the July 2023 conference where scholars reflected on the scholarship and mentorship of Daniel K. Richter, director emeritus of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Read Part I here. Facing the Archive from the Present: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work, Part II Links to Facing…
The Language of Symbols and the Unspoken – Sherri V. Cummings
While reading Bradley’s and Michael’s pieces, I began to realize that as historians of early America we are driven to examine the lives and experiences of our subjects on their own terms while navigating the silences and erasures of the colonial archive. By using nuanced methodologies, we are able to remove the lens of western discourse to shed new light on Native American and African American cultural practices and traditions.…
Letters Lost and Found: Silences in the Early American Archive – Bradley Dubos
What can we ever truly know about early American lives when their stories are entangled with, in Sherri Cummings’s words, an “apathetic, biased archive”? Researching the “quotidian lives” of African women and girls in the early Atlantic world, Sherri asks challenging questions about lived experience that go beyond the colonial archive’s ability to answer. Both Sherri and Michael Monescalchi also reflect on the necessity of reading “around” the subjects they…
“Looking Over Bet’s Shoulders: The Archive and the Albany Arson Plot” – Michael Monescalchi
In the prologue to Facing East from Indian Country, Dan Richter claims that it is nearly impossible for scholars who are interested in recovering disenfranchised persons’ perspectives “to see the world through [the] eyes” of those we study.1 Rather than despair over the archive’s limitations, however, he offers a solution to this problem, arguing that we must try to look over our subjects’ shoulders to “reconstruct something of the way in…
Interview with Meg Toth, Managing Editor of Early American Studies
What inspired you to specialize in American Studies? When I started my Ph.D. at Tufts University, I was convinced I would specialize in Victorian British literature. I had taken excellent courses in Victorian studies for my M.A. degree at Boston College, and I imagined writing my dissertation on authors like Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, and Wilkie Collins. Then, in my first semester at Tufts, I took an American literature class…
Featured Video: What Makes a Good Blog Post?
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Cancel Culture and Call Out Culture in Salem and Essex County, Massachusetts on the Eve of the American Revolution – Richard Morris
Today, much is made of “cancel culture,” or economically punishing those whose statements, ideas, and behaviors violate the values of various groups. Canceling can include calls for firing individuals who take objectionable stances; boycotting businesses that behave similarly; or, in the case of celebrities, steering clear of their performances. “Call out culture” also condemns offensive language and behaviors but is more often associated with pressure for apologies and reform than…
Summer 2024
The Summer 2024 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is out now and available on Project MUSE.
Interview with Jonathan Eacott, Author of the Summer 2024 Free Access EAS Article
EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Summer 2024 author Jonathan Eacott to talk about his article, “‘Elephant Murder’: ‘Lessons on Humanity and Benevolence’.” For a short period of time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I kept stumbling into elephants when I was working on my first book, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain…