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
5:30-7:00 PM
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org
2005-2006
October 20, 2005---The Radical Underworld Goes
Colonial: P.F. McCallum's Travels in Trinidad
James Epstein,
Vanderbilt University
Scandal-monger, blackmailer, bankrupt, and pornographer,
P.F. McCallum appears at the fringes of the history of British radicalism. A
Scot of obscure orgins, McCallum went abroad at an early age and in 1800
surfaced in North America, eventually landing at St. Domingue during the great
slave insurrection. Following the French invasion of 1802, he escaped on a
British frigate. But instead of returning to London as planned, he got wind of
the tyrannical regime of General Thomas Picton, the first British governor of
Trinidad, and set out to "enquire minutely into every part of his conduct." His
Travels in Trinidad (1805) is the most comprehensive account of Picton's
regime. Denounced in the Anti-Jacobin Review as an irresponsible Jacobin
"performance," the book operated under a subterfuge; its title suffested a work
of travel literature, which it clearly was not. Seen as the incarnation of
imperial acquisitiveness and license, the Caribbean provided a rich field of
inquiry for a writer like McCallum. My paper analyzes McCallum's expose of
British rule, tracing some of the circuits, often hidden or unacknowledged,
between the world of metropolitan radicalism and a wider trans-Atlantic,
colonial world.
November 17,
2005---Personal Visions of the British Empire: Reexamining the Loyalist
Experience at the End of the American Revolution
Christopher Sparshott,
Northwestern University
This paper offers a new interpretation of Loyalism at
the end of the American Revolution. When the United States became independent
many colonists decided to remain part of the British Empire. Between 1782-83,
more than 25,000 Loyalists sailed from New York City to the British Colony of
Nova Scotia. Historians have argued that the common experience of exile created
a cohesive Loyalist community. In contrast, this paper focuses on the divisions
that occurred between Loyalists during their resettlement in Nova Scotia. Every
exile believed the British Empire should reward their steadfast Loyalism. The
shared expectation of compensation combined with the difficulties of founding
new settlements in the Canadian wilderness fueled disputes between the exiles.
Analyzing these moments of tension demonstrates that colonists had a personal
vision of their place in the British Empire. This conclusion reveals that just
as Revolutionaries debated what it meant to be part of a new nation Loyalists
debated what it meant to be part of the British Empire.
December 15, 2005---"The Political Rock of Our
Salvation": The U.S. Constitution According to John Dickinson
Jane
Calvert, St. Mary's College of Maryland
This paper examines the constitutional thought of John
Dickinson during the creation of the U.S. Constitution. It argues that not only
was he a much more important figure than most historians have recognized, he
brought to the deliberations a distinctly Quaker understanding of the
processes, functions, and purposes of political deliberation,
constitution-making, and the structures of goverment. As a Quaker politician
(though not a Quaker) Dickinson was the only Framer who advocated ideas and
practices that were neither Unitarian nor reformed Calivinist, and he brought
his religion into the debate more explicitly than most. His Quaker views show
us not only the origins of what some historians have called his "innovative"
contributions to American constitutionalism, but also, insofar as the nation
has departed from or forgotten his theories, an alternative model for how to
imagine the democratic processes that animate the country.
January 19, 2006---Positioning the Word in Early New
England
Matt Cohen, Duke University
The expansion of comparative colonial and indigenous studies has been coeval with, but not in dialog with, the flowering of book history. This paper traces the historiography of this gap and the disciplinary investments that structure it, outlining what the new history of the book might look like in the case of New England before the printing press. What shared methodological space could be established between approaches to textuality developed by the history of the book and those from colonial and indigenous studies?
February 16, 2006---Paine, Jefferson,
and the Grammar of Revolution
Betsy Erkkila, Northwestern
University
This is the first chapter of a longer
study entitled Writing the Cultural Revolution: Literature and Politics in
Revolutionary America. I focus on Revolutionary writing as a rhetorical
battlefield in which a multiplicity of voices and forms struggled for cultural
authority in writing and naming America. In the section of this chapter, I
argue that Tom Paine's Common Sense played a foundational role in
transforming the American Revolution from a primarily political to a social
revolution. By retelling the origins of government from a republican point of
view, Common Sense invested such key terms in the American founding as
liberty, equality, rights, independence, natural law, representation,
consent, constitution, and common sense with a more radical because
more popular valence. It rescued the terms republic, republican,
and republicanism from their previously negative associations with
anarchy and excess and in effect, killed the King rhetorically as a meaningful
term in American and arguably, Western history.
March 16, 2006---Fleeing the Founding
Father
Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania, Australia
As Harry Washington faced a military tribunal in 1800 he may not have appreciated the irony that his escape from enslavement to the leader of the rebellion in colonial America led inexorably to his trial for rebellion in Sierra Leone. Where General Washington was subsequently reified as father of the United States, Harry Washington lost everything in his attempt to forge an independent community in West Africa. The contrast between these two Washingtons could not be greater, yet they share a commitment to the transforming ideals of liberty and self-determination, albeit one which played out very differently for George Washington and the African man he purchased in 1763.
April 27, 2006---Why Betsy Ross Won't
Go Away
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University
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.
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