Co-sponsored by
The University of Chicago, DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Northern Illinois University, and Northwestern University
Seminars are held on Thursdays from 3:30-5:30 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org
2004-2005
September 30, 2004—'The Power of Feeling' in Common Sense: the Pennsylvania Context of Thomas Paine's Egalitarian Emotional Rhetoric
Nicole Eustace, New York University
In January of 1776, a year after arriving in British America, Thomas Paine penned the pamphlet Common Sense and urged his readers to "examine the passions and feelings of mankind," confident that any such scrutiny would inevitably lead to support for American independence. By invoking the "passions and feelings" of all mankind, Paine sought to promote a universal concept of human emotion, to collapse eighteenth-century distinctions between the supposedly refined feelings of genteel sensibility and the purportedly irrational passions of common servility. While Paine, a recent arrival in Pennsylvania in 1776, has often been regarded primarily as a trans-Atlantic figure - an Englishman who stopped off for a time in America on his way to revolutionary France - he should also be recognized as a Quaker-born writer who composed the piece Common Sense in Philadelphia at the close of a decades-long Pennsylvania pamphlet war that had long debated public policy using emotional rhetoric. This paper casts Common Sense as the culminating production of eighteenth-century colonial Pennsylvania debates.
November 18, 2004—"Cheats and Rogueries" in Eighteenth-Century New York City (formerly titled: Cheats and Rogueries: Gender and the Making of an Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Market)
Serena Zabin, Carleton College
In 1741 the New York Supreme Court, suspecting a conspiracy, ordered the execution of thirty slaves and four whites and the expulsion from New York of more than seventy other people. In all, close to two hundred people were arrested and interrogated. Two individuals were the driving force behind these trials: Supreme Court Justice Daniel Horsmanden and his chief witness, Mary Burton, a sixteen-year-old indentured servant. Through the figures of Horsmanden and Burton, I examine the relationship between financial credit and personal credibility, in a city where the economy was beginning to incorporate the international into the local. Both Horsmanden and Burton, although separated by status and sex, were typical eighteenth-century New Yorkers. Like the confidence tricksters and counterfeiters who found their way to the city, Horsmanden and Burton took advantage of New York's role as an entrepot for people and goods in order to achieve financial and personal success.
December 16, 2004—A "Reciprocally Beneficial" Trade: Economic Exchange on the Lower Missouri River Valley Frontier
Rebekah M. Mergenthal, University of Chicago
In the 1820s and 1830s, white settlers in the lower Missouri Valley clamored for the removal of Indians from their vicinity. At the same time, however, this vision of separation coexisted with trade that led to frequent interactions between Natives and whites, since in a cash-poor frontier economy, white settlers found that selling goods and alcohol to the nearby Native Americans provided an important source of hard currency, as well as a fairly stable market. Natives' own actions played a crucial role in shaping the world of the river valley as well, as they appropriated the language of rights and decided the form of their annuity payments. This paper explores this economic accommodation in order to understand the kind of removal sought and the range of local responses to it, both from whites and Natives. By juxtaposing these conflicting views, this paper will illuminate the tensions and tolerance between disparate groups in the area and explore the kinds of cultural frontiers facilitated by the movement of goods and people in the lower Missouri valley in the early nineteenth century.
February 24, 2005—The Cultural Work of Salem Witchcraft
Gretchen A. Adams, Texas Tech University
While the studies of "positive" national symbols abound in the burgeoning field of cultural memory, little or no attention has been paid to the cultural work performed by "negative" national symbols, Salem's witch hunt has, for over 300 years, functioned as a domestic cautionary tale. This paper argues that while positive icons are in times of crisis to suggest appropriate courses of action that define the normative self and community, negative symbols such as Salem are used to police the cultural boundaries of that same community by warning against the consequences of ill-advised actions.
March 17, 2005—Sensing the Sacred (Formerly titled: Pulpits, Piety and Power: Anglican Architecture and Cultural Formation in Colonial South Carolina)
Louis P. Nelson, University of Virginia
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Anglicans had a problem. They loved building great churches. But together with other Protestants, Anglicans held a theological commitment to the omnipresence of God, a commitment that undermined the possibility that God was somehow more present in the space of the church. To resolve this problem, Anglicans enlisted the senses to communicate the present of God and defend the sanctity of the church (small "c" as in the building) without having to constrain the divine. Depending on a case study of early colonial South Carolina, this paper examines the ways Anglicans used early modern understandings of sight, sound, and smell to imbue their churches with sanctity. It raises questions about the cultural work of signs and symbols, the power of the written word, and the complexity of metaphor in the context of a world deeply invested in the reality of the supernatural to explore the construction of sacred space.
April 21, 2005—Tyranny and Sympathy: Trans-Atlantic Family Correspondence in the Age of Revolution
Sarah Pearsall, Andrews University, Scotland
Would the husband return to his wife after the war ended? This question vexed fictional and historical couples during the American Revolutionary War. The War divided not only countries but also married couples, who, even in peace, sometimes found themselves separated by the Atlantic. The microhistory of Charles and Catherine Dudley, like many similar stories, raises significant issues about marriage and gender in a state of political, economic, and military flux. This paper argues that emphasis on ties of marriage kept connections up across war and the Atlantic, even as it also signaled disagreement and the complex working out of domestic authority. The destructiveness of war forced couples into liminal settings, as households were broken apart. These settings propelled a re-thinking of the strength of sentimental ties, in a world in which such sentiment often received little reward. Letters were a critical means for many to keep together and also to re-order their worlds. This paper, like the larger project from which it comes, interrogates letters from families divided by the Atlantic in a revolutionary age in order both to argue for the strength of transatlantic epistolary sensibility, especially in the hands of women, and to delineate its limits.
May 19, 2005—"A Murmuring Underneath": Revolts, Rumors of Revolt, and the Road to the Constitution (Formerly titled: Minds Afire: Angry Farmers and the Origins of the United States Constitution)
Woody Holton, Richmond University
The U.S. Constitution promises to "ensure domestic tranquility," and historians have long understood that one of the Framers' goals was to fund a national army mighty enough to crush plebeian insurrection. There was also another link between insurgency and the Constitution. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, rebellion - and more commonly, the threat of rebellion - repeatedly forced the thirteen state legislatures to adopt tax and relief. These relief laws appalled nearly all prominent Americans (not to mention most modern historians), and finding ways to prevent their passage was high on the agenda when the Constitutional Convention delegates assembled in May 1787. By that time, men who had once ascribed relief legislation to the fear of rebellion now blamed it on what Elbridge Gerry and Alexander Hamilton both called an "excess of democracy." Like most modern historians (especially Gordon S. Wood), the convention delegates detached the issue of rebellion from the problem of legislative relief in a way they had not done as state legislators. Putting the two issues back together alerts us to the need for a closer look at the ways in which desperate debtors and taxpayers manipulated their social betters' fear of agrarian insurgency.
The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay in advance, and that all who request the paper will attend the seminar. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
To be placed on the mailing list for notices of presentations, contact Ginger Shulick at the Scholl Center, scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524. Please include your e-mail address if you are willing to receive notices by e-mail.