EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Fall 2024 author Viviana Díaz Balsera to talk about her article, “Light of Egypt Shining from Within: Fr. Gregorio de Movilla and the Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua (1625).” For a limited time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? Good luck and a number of coincidences led me to the…
In 1670, George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, rebuked fellow Quakers to “pluck down your images” lest they be imitating “the Creator.” Fox’s admonition against the display of fine art established a prohibition that lasted for over a century. Friends believed that painting was of little merit to one’s spiritual enhancement. They valued a “useful education” that taught children religious principles coupled with practical skills. Not…
The Fall 2024 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is out now and available on Project MUSE.
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…
EAS Miscellany encourages educators to integrate articles from our journal into the classroom. As a part of our series “Teaching EAS,” we invite you to use this lesson plan as a model for designing your curriculum and teaching Early American Studies articles. If you would like to create other lesson plans using EAS articles, please download our template here and share your plan with us. Teaching EAS: “Writing and Sensory Knowledge in a…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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