The Newberry Seminar in Early American History and Culture Co-sponsored by the History Departments of DePaul University, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago Seminars are held on Thursdays from 5:30–7:00 PM at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl[at]newberry.org. 2008-2009

Emma Willard, A Series of Maps to Willard's History of the United States, or Republic of America. Designed for Schools and Private Libraries (New York : White, Gallaher & White, 1828). Case folio G1201.S1 W5 1828

2009–2010 Call For Papers

September 25, 2008— Ann Keating
October 23, 2008— Andrew Wehrman
November 13, 2008— Kelly Ryan
January 15, 2009— John Reda
February 19, 2009— Kirsten Sword
*March 26, 2009*— Edward Gray (please note date change)
April 16, 2009— Jordan Alexander Stein
May 21, 2009— James Robertson
June 11, 2009— Patricia Rogers

September 25, 2008— Chicago in Indian Country: The Murder of Jean B. Lalime
Ann Keating, North Central College

This paper is an excerpt from the first chapter of a manuscript that explores the Fort Dearborn era in Chicago (1803-1812). The resulting book will culminate in a reconsideration of the August 1812 battle that brought the destruction of the first Fort Dearborn. My research focuses on the many individuals who called the Chicago area home during these years, as well as their overlapping family, linguistic, business, social, and national networks. In this paper, I explore the lives of Jean Lalime and John Kinzie, two men whose lives show the complex allegiances that evolved in early Chicago, where personal connections, not institutions, formed the bedrock of society.

October 23, 2008— The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’: Marblehead, Massachusetts’ Medical Revolution, 1764–1777
Andrew Wehrman, Northwestern University

After an epidemic of smallpox broke in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1773, several of the town’s rising Whig leaders built a private inoculation hospital to combat the distemper. By January the maritime workers and other members of the “Savage Mobility” burned the hospital, nicknamed “Castle Pox,” to the ground. Far from being ignorant or anti-inoculation, as some historians have claimed, the desperate action by the people of Marblehead was a true act of revolution. This paper recreates the explosive events and argues that the people of Marblehead sought equal access to medicine as raucously as they did political rights.

November 13, 2008— The Sexual Management of Race: Patriarchy and the Denial of Citizenship to Africans and Indians, 1740–1774
Kelly A. Ryan, Indiana University Southeast

“The Sexual Management of Race” proposes that patriarchy was the major paradigm whites conceived to institutionalize the unequal relationship between themselves and Indians and African Americans on the eve of the imperial crisis. The paper is part of a larger study that proposes patriarchy and sexual regulation were tools of gender, class, and racial subordination in New England between the late colonial and early national eras. Patriarchal ideals, including legal dependence and control over sexuality and labor, were central components of the economic, legal, and missionary relationships whites created to subordinate African Americans and American Indians.

January 15, 2009— From Tippecanoe to Portage des Sioux: The Wars of 1812 in the Early American West
John Reda, University of Illinois at Chicago

This paper traces the economic and diplomatic causes of the violence between the U.S., Great Britain and Native Americans between the Battle of Tippecanoe and the Portage des Sioux treaty conference. At stake was sovereignty over the western Great Lakes and the lower Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys. The inconclusive nature of the fighting compelled the U.S. to seek peace with the Native Americans through negotiation, rather than from a position of overwhelming strength.

February 19, 2009—Submit or Starve? Two Seventeenth-Century Marriages and the Making of a Precedent
Kirsten Sword, Indiana University

In the Restoration-era court case Manby v. Scott, England’s leading legal authorities used marriage and misogyny to bind political wounds. The case framed two centuries of Anglo-American legal debate over household authority and obligation, but subsequent generations masked its significance even as they reified its arguments. This essay situates Manby in its original context, using it to explore the place of marriage in seventeenth-century conflicts over political and religious authority, and to examine the contested relationship between the theory and practice of household government in both old and New England. In revised form, it will serve as the introductory chapter for my book, Wives not Slaves: Dependence, Authority and the Invention of the Modern Order.

March 26, 2009— The Architect and the State: Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge, from Common Sense to Rights of Man
Edward Gray, Florida State University

This paper explores the significance of Tom Paine’s bridge-building activities and attempts to connect those activities to the larger arc of Paine’ thought. The paper argues that the bridge reflects a little recognized aspect of Paine’s radicalism: an abiding interest in the commercial infrastructure of the state. Paine is generally thought of as one of the American Revolution’s most radical proponents. But his quest to build a single-arched iron bridge, the paper argues, is indicative of a prominent strain in his thinking that places him closer to commercial system builders such as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson than most scholars have recognized.

April 16, 2009— Edward Taylor’s Voice
Jordan Alexander Stein, University of Colorado at Boulder

This paper explores various traditions of self-representation in seventeenth-century New England Puritan writings and situates them in relation to twentieth-century scholarly claims about Puritan subjectivity. Taking as a central case study Edward Taylor's "Preparatory Meditations" (written c.1682-c.1718, but only published in 1937), the paper argues that Taylor’s poems (and the representational conventions and oddities of seventeenth-century religious writings more generally) anticipate the rise in the eighteenth century of aesthetic projects like the novel, which more forcibly construct and reflect normative dimensions of human interiority.

May 21, 2009— Fighting Jamaica’s First Maroon War: Soldiers’ journals and the nature of colonial campaigning
James Robertson, University of the West Indies at Mona

A re-examination of Jamaica’s First Maroon War, 1728-1738/9, prompted by finding a description of a British defeat in 1731 in an English provincial records office, and then extended as part of a broader project on the transformation of Jamaica during the first century of English rule from 1655 - c. 1770, identified a number of journals kept by the commanders of patrols sent out against the “rebel Negroes”. These offer immediate reports from a prolonged guerrilla war. Reconsidering how the war was fought allows a broader reconsideration of its place in island politics and Jamaica’s wider development. Such re-evaluations prompt comparisons with earlier frontier campaigning that Governor Robert Hunter had overseen as Governor of New York, besides offering a context for the Jamaican colonists’ parallel political campaign during the 1730s targeting the North American colonies for the enforcement of the Sugar Duties.

June 11, 2009—“We Waite Impatiently to Hear”: The Intersections of Boundaries, Loyalties, and Commercial Activities in the Revolutionary Atlantic
Patricia Rogers, Michigan State University

This essay focuses on Simeon Perkins (a Nova Scotian merchant during the revolutionary era), along with his commercial activities, to explore a cluster of questions surrounding the economic relationship between Nova Scotia and the original mainland colonies, as well as the colony's position within the British Atlantic empire. In general, the questions center on pre-existing commercial patterns, what became of established networks after the American Revolution, and what that says about commercial centers. In particular, I wish to explore the relationship, if any, between commercial activity and loyalty to the British empire. Within that context, how did individuals on both sides of the Atlantic view illicit commerce, such as smuggling?

We will pre-circulate papers to those planning to attend. If you cannot attend and want to read a paper, please contact the author directly. E-mail scholl[at]newberry.org,or call (312) 255-3524 to receive a copy of the paper. Papers are available for request two weeks prior to the seminar date. Please include your e-mail address in all correspondence.

Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend the seminar

2007-2008

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