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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
2008-2009
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| 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 |
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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 19, 2009— Edward Gray
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
February 19, 2009— Submit or Starve? Debating Authority and Obligation in Early American Households
Kirsten Sword, Indiana University
March 19, 2009— The Architect and the State: Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge, from Common Sense to Rights of Man
Edward Gray, Florida State University
April 16, 2009— Edward Taylor’s Voice
Jordan Alexander Stein, University of Colorado at Boulder
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
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
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