Category: Roundtables

Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Special Features

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…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

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.…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

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…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

“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…

EAS
Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Special Features

Roundtable — Facing the Archive from the Present: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work – Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha

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 Jump to Facing the Archive from the Present Roundtable Posts As literary scholars, we want to honor…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

The Ethics of Narrating the Past – Sherri V. Cummings

What are the ethics of narrating the past? I often wrestle with this question while researching the quotidian lives of African women and their daughters, in slavery and precarious freedom, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Saidiya Hartman, in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” reminds us to respect the “shrieks, the moans, the nonsense and the opacity,” of their experiences despite the want, or rather the need, for…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

Cultivating Curiosity: Phillis Wheatley in Newport – Michael Monescalchi

To more imaginatively engage with the early American archive, I think that we should go into every archive—and approach every text we read—without any kind of wishful thinking. Instead, we should be open-minded and curious about what we uncover. One of the ways that I’ve been able to enhance my curiosity is to move beyond the individual writers I research and learn more about the communities they belonged to and…

EAS
Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

Beyond Myth-busting – Bradley Dubos

On December 6, 1811, New York City’s mayor, DeWitt Clinton, stood before the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) and voiced a prediction: “Before the passing away of the present generation, not a single Iroquois will be seen in this state.” I stumbled on Clinton’s speech while assisting with content research for a history exhibition at N-YHS. The exhibit, Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West, opens by examining how Haudenosaunee…

EAS
French Perspectives on the American Revolution, Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables

Roundtable: The American Revolution in France – Kevin Butterfield and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke

The histories of France and the United States are closely intertwined, to say the least. Since 1778, the very existence of the two nations has more than once hinged on the willingness of one nation to come to the aid of the other. But the histories of the two nations have been more interconnected than the historiographies – the way historians have written about those histories. Scholars in both countries…

EAS
French Perspectives on the American Revolution, Roundtables

Contemporaneous and Contemporary French Perspectives on the American Revolution: Revisiting the French-American Connection? – Carine Lounissi

The American Revolution was a world event. All of Europe and its colonies were interested in what happened in the North American colonies. French authors and journalists published extensively on the conflict. Consequently, there is a huge corpus of printed materials and archives in continental Europe that scholars are currently exploring to better understand the intellectual, political, economic, and diplomatic aspects of American Independence. In addition, the presence in France…

EAS