EAS Editors’ Note: This guest-edited roundtable is a follow up 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.

Roundtable Introduction – Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha

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As literary scholars, we want to honor the spirit of Dan Richter’s work in early American history and in particular, Dan’s commitment to the intersections of language, history, and storytelling. To that end, we are excited to share this roundtable discussion to celebrate Dan’s support as a mentor and scholar at the McNeil Center and beyond. We’ve convened literature and history scholars together in honor of the multiplicity of Dan’s work and his expansive way of thinking about the narration of history. His research and mentorship has inspired scholars of the colonial Americas across disciplines in the humanities, both inside and outside of the traditional forms of the academy. Dan is also a wordsmith, a critic of language, and as anyone who has ever attended a McNeil Center seminar knows, he is an expert in writing puns. In particular, we want to recognize Dan’s attention to language and narration as a historian, a facet of early American studies that is too often under appreciated.

Below we share short responses from three scholars who are invested in the public humanities (broadly defined) and who are also thinking carefully about language and narration. We think this particular format of an open-access, online dialogue best mirrors the collective thinking and conversations at the McNeil Center because of its accessibility and communal nature. Sherri Cummings, Bradley Dubos, and Michael Monescalchi discuss here the politics of the archive and the ethics of narrating the past. Sherri considers the ethical lines of the archive in her own research, as she narrates the lives of some of the most vulnerable victims of the transatlantic slave trade: women and girls. Bradley reflects on his work on an exhibit for the New-York Historical Society by questioning myth-busting frameworks and insisting that Native-authored materials are not just antidotes to settler myths. For Michael, this discussion involves the importance of cultivating curiosity by refusing to see omissions in the early American archive as the end of his ongoing research on Phillis Wheatley in Newport.

Through this focus on early American narration, this roundtable aims to recreate the dialogues that happen outside of seminars, in receptions, over dinner, and in the hallways. The conversation that follows is meant to inspire new ways of thinking about the study of language in early American studies as well as affirming Dan’s invitation–to all of us–to convene, to remember, to sit with the work of doing history.  Within this format, we are sharing a call-and-response style roundtable that will be published as a two-part series. Part 1, published below, includes Michael, Bradley, and Sherri’s responses to questions that we developed. In Part 2,  they will briefly respond to each other. 

Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha

Questions for respondents: 

1. What do you think is exciting about Early American studies? How has public humanities, digital humanities, and curatorial work introduced us to new ways of seeing and reading early American histories? 
2. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (as well as the 50th anniversary of the anti-colonial counter-protests in Philadelphia in response to the bicentennial in 1976), why is language in the texts we study and  in our representation of history important? How have our methods of thinking about language shifted as we rely more and more on digital forms of sharing knowledge? 
3. We’ve gathered these stories about the colonial Americas and continue to look for new ones. Now what? What do we do with the stories that we’ve collected and told and retold? What makes early American stories so important? 
4. How can we think more imaginatively about the early American archive, in writing but also in other daily practices (e.g. sitting in the archive, doing mundane tasks at one’s job, talking out ideas, etc.)? How can we encourage students and collaborators who are new to these materials to think more imaginatively about the early American archive?
5. What are the ethics of narrating the past? How do the primary sources you work with shape the way you think about memorialization? The colonial archive is incredibly opaque and complex; How do you best represent this complicated dynamic in your work and whose perspective do you aim to highlight? 

Liz Polcha is an Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Drexel University.

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