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
September 21, 2006—Laura Edwards
October 19, 2006—Aaron Fogleman
November 16, 2006—Mark Peterson
January 18, 2007—Leon Fink
February 15, 2007—Eric Slauter
March 15, 2007—Chernoh Sesay
April 19, 2007—Sandra Gustafson
May 10, 2007—Tim Breen
September 21, 2006— Keeping the Peace: People’s Proximity to Law in the Post-Revolutionary South
Laura Edwards, Duke University
This is the second chapter in the book manuscript, The People and Their Peace: The Reconstitution of Governance in the American South, 1787–1840. It is the first of three chapters that explore the workings of the localized processes that characterized so much of the legal system at this time. As this chapter shows, this localized system privileged social “order” over individual “rights.” The emphasis on order had several, important implications: it drew a wide range of southerners—including slaves, free blacks, and white women—into the legal system; it encouraged southerners to see “law” as a process for maintaining “order,” however that might be defined; and it meant that the legal system regularly dealt with a wide of issues that would later be labeled “private” and therefore outside the legal system’s reach. The analysis then explores the implications of a social milieu in which so many people approached the legal system with the assumption that their “private” concerns could be—and should be—matters of “public” law and governance.
October 19, 2006— The Atlantic World, 1492–1860s: Definition, Theory, and Boundaries
Aaron Fogleman, Northern Illinois University
The Atlantic World was made by contacts between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. It began with Columbus and ended with revolution and colonial independence, the end of the Atlantic slave trade followed by abolition, and the shift from merchant to industrial capitalism. Thereafter a radically different Atlantic world developed, with new relationships between Atlantic peoples and continents. This paper explores important aspects of these beginnings and endings and major themes that shaped Atlantic developments, from forced and free migrations to the “Columbian exchange,” to transatlantic processes of creolization and syncretic religious development, to forms of political thought that emphasized the interdependent nature of “freedom” and slavery.
November 16, 2006— Cutting off the Circulation: The Destruction of Phillis Wheatley’s Transatlantic World, 1763–1784.
Mark Peterson, Iowa University
Phillis Wheatley’s rise to transatlantic fame would have been impossible had she not been well positioned in the currents of cultural circulation around the Atlantic basin created by evangelical and reform-minded people throughout Britain’s expanding empire. Through a close reading of Wheatley’s poetry, set in the context of the shifting politics of her transatlantic connections, this paper traces Wheatley’s integration into this community and then its sudden destruction in the crisis of the American Revolution.
For the members of this community, which included the Earl of Dartmouth and the Countess of Huntington, international evangelists such as George Whitefield, and the Boston dignitaries who attested to Wheatley’s authorship, circulation was the key to the health, growth, and well being of the whole. Britain’s commercial empire transported people, commodities, ideas, and beliefs around an enormous network of contact and exchange, sorting out the world’s valuable “goods,” moving people and things to the places where they belonged, or where they were most needed. It is in this context that Wheatley’s famous and troubling poem, “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA,” makes the most sense. In many of her poems, the circulation of people, goods, and ideas around the Atlantic basin figures as a source of health, good fortune, and ultimately, redemption. This young displaced African staked her faith and her identity in the ultimate benevolence of a system of Atlantic circulation that she and her fellow evangelical reformers believed was designed for the improvement of the empire.
The imperial civil war that led to American independence was, from this point of view, a disaster and a tragedy. Massachusetts’ move from imperial colony to independent republic destroyed the networks of communication, trade, philanthropy, and reform on which Wheatley and her world had built their hopes. The circulation of people and goods was fatally interrupted, and it would take decades for Bostonians to rebuild new channels, by which time Wheatley herself was dead, and the leading figures in her transatlantic world had lost their power, gone into exile, or died as well. With their displacement, departure, and death, a promising vision of antislavery activism and evangelical reform that transcended the boundaries of local, regional, or national allegiances died as well.
January 18, 2007— ‘The Nation’s Property’: Merchant Sailors and the Rise of Liberal Political Economy in the Atlantic World, 1800–1870
Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago
February 15, 2007— Reading and Radicalization: Print, Politics, and the American Revolution
Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
Do books make revolutions? The question has never had the same urgency in the study of the American Revolution as it has in debates about the relation of Enlightenment to Revolution in eighteenth-century France, perhaps because most historians and literary scholars agree that the printing press played a significant role in generating popular colonial opposition to British rule. Pre-revolutionary writings in British America and especially Britain itself focused on the threat posed by radical readers, but curiously few post-revolutionary commentators treated print as an agent of change; if anything, they considered reading and the growth of printing as effects rather than as causes of the Revolution. This essay invites readers to reconsider the causal relation of print and politics in the age of the American Revolution, not by endorsing post- or sometimes counter-revolutionary perspectives but by focusing on the issue of political reprinting in the period and by examining the production and consumption of one particular reprint: a cheap pamphlet version of John Locke’s Second Treatise issued by Boston printers in 1773. Rather than asking if books make revolutions (or which books), the essay argues that scholars should balance the best-selling pamphlets against the worst, should consider the role of pre-revolutionary tracts during and after Independence, and should attend more closely to the marketing of revolution.
March 15, 2007— Black Radicalism in the Revolutionary Era: Freedom, Equality, and Cosmopolitanism, 1770–1780
Chernoh Sesay, DePaul University
Recent work on the limits of antislavery activism during the late-eighteenth century suggests that black activism suffered from a naive belief in universal rights, and that the failure of the new states to abolish slavery quickly and universally partially reflected a lack of organization among black critics. While these interpretations help explain the limited, gradual, and compensatory nature of northern emancipation, they make difficult a deeper investigation of African-American political thought and activism. This paper reexamines Massachusetts black protest to better understand the relationship between its hesitant optimism and its previously overlooked early coalescence.
April 19, 2007— Republicanism Across Borders
Sandra Gustafson, University of Notre Dame
This paper describes a “republican Atlantic” and analyzes the circulation of women and property between Cuba, Boston, Halifax, Montreal, and London in The Rebels, Lydia Maria Child’s 1825 historical novel about Revolutionary Boston. Written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, Child’s novel transforms the conflicts leading up to the war into a tale about how women inherit property and, by extension, republican civic identity. The transatlantic framework of the novel reflects the discourse of international republicanism that characterized the anniversary celebrations that inspired Child’s novel. These included the Marquis de Lafayette’s tour of the United States (1824-5); Daniel Webster’s speech dedicating the Bunker Hill Monument at the ceremony where Lafayette concluded his tour; and the affiliations with Simon Bolivar that Lafayette and Webster pursued at this time.
May 10, 2007— America’s Insurgency:Reflections on Popular Mobilization During the American Revolution
Timothy H. Breen, Northwestern University
In this piece T.H. Breen explores the dynamics of popular political mobilization during the years before independence. Rejecting older interpretative models that focus on the rhetoric and leadership of the so-called Founding Fathers, Breen suggests that recent scholarship in economics and sociology provides valuable insights for the analysis of new forms of communication and the creation of radical networks for the exchange of “useful knowledge.” Drawing specifically on the writings Joel Mokyr, Herbert Simon, Gerd Gigerenzer, and James Surowiecki, Breen argues that revolutionaries made key decisions about the tactics of resistance within systems of “bounded rationality.”
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 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.