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
2007–2008
October 18, 2007—Corey Capers
November 29, 2007—Scott Stevens
January 17, 2008—John Donoghue
February 21, 2008—Shannon Dawdy
March 13, 2008—Angela Keysor
April 17, 2008—Peter Mancall (Cancelled)
May 15, 2008—Katy Chiles
June 5, 2008—Justine Murison
Printable 8½” x 11” pdf Schedule
October 18,2007— Practical Blackness: Racial Publicity, Satire and the Terms of Order in the Early Republic North
Corey Capers, University of Illinois at Chicago
Coincidental with the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” and appearing into the 1830s a series of racist prints now known as “Bobalition Broadsides” emerged in Boston and its environs. These prints employed graphic caricature, mock toasts, and a fictive black dialect to ridicule African American anniversary celebrations of the US abolition (Bobalition) of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. This paper explores how and to what end these racist prints emerged out of Anglo-American satiric practice and argues that their racism was a continuation of Federalist cultural politics.
November 29, 2007— Figuring the Great Chiefs: Iroquois Portraiture from Verelst to Catlin
Scott Stevens, State University of New York at Buffalo
Figuring the Great Chiefs: Iroquois Portraiture From Verelst to Catlin, examines the turn to depicting specific Native leaders and the invention of the category of the ‘Great Chiefs’ in Anglo-American culture. I am particularly interested in the place of the portrait as it relates to the larger issues of the representation of authority, political alliance, cultural loyalty, and sovereignty. The chapter focuses on Joseph Brant and concludes with a reading of Zacharie Vincent, a late nineteenth-century Huron painter living in Montreal, who painted numerous self-portraits. His works constitute one of the first entrances of a Northeastern Indian into the fine arts tradition as it was defined in the period and manifest his own interpretation of Indian identity and its representation.
January 17, 2008— Abolition’s Origins: The Politics of Emancipation in the Atlantic World of the English Revolution
John Donoghue, Loyola University Chicago
This paper sets the English Revolution in Atlantic context to explore one of its most important yet understudied legacies: slavery’s abolition. While intellectual historians have long noted slavery’s usage as a metaphor for political tyranny, they have taken little note of how the rise of chattel slavery shaped the Revolution’s republican politics. Focusing on Cromwell’s 1655 attempt to conquer the Spanish Caribbean to forge an empire on the foundation of unfree labor, the paper traces how English republicans responded by forming a political opposition that joined together condemnations of political and economic slavery. This opposition ultimately generated two failed plots, led by former colonists, to overthrow the Cromwellian Protectorate in 1657 and the Stuart Dynasty in 1661.
February 21, 2008— First you make a roux... with bear fat: Cooking, eating, and colonial identity in French Louisiana
Shannon Dawdy, University of Chicago
This paper pursues two related questions, the first substantive, the second interpretive: what were people eating in French colonial Louisiana? and what do food practices and their related discourses tell us about colonialism? Using colonial narratives and archaeological data, I show that the meals of French colonial Louisiana were quite distinct from that which is now recognized as Creole cuisine. The argument I develop here is that food patterns in French colonial Louisiana reflect a tension between an adventurous embrace of the exotic and a clinging to French culinary practices. This duality reflects the hybridity of colonial identity while the ways in which it gets resolved reflects the “consuming” transformation of the civilizing process.
March 13, 2008— Down But Not Out: Poverty in a Time of Scarcity Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1730–1820
Angela Keysor, University of Iowa
This paper will take the reader through unchartered territory: the eighteenth-century world of poor relief in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Our guides will be the needy themselves. Through the letters and petitions of desperate women and men, we will see the channels and pathways that those in need of aid travelled. The experiences of the needy reveal that there was a dynamic care system, based on a communal web of relationships that existed in Charlestown during this time period. The very instability of life ensured the vitality of this system of care. Everyone in Charlestown had a vested interest in the success or failure of the town’s relief network.By following individual journeys through this network, we will begin to see the world of poverty through the eyes of the poor themselves.
April 17, 2008— Session rescheduled for Fall 2008
What Happened to Henry Hudson?
Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
May 15, 2008— “Of our own colar”: Racing Native Alliances in Hendrick Aupaumut’s “Short Narration”
Katy Chiles, Northwestern University
A Native American sachem who fought on the American side of the Revolutionary War, Captain Hendrick Aupaumut was tapped by President George Washington to serve as a diplomat to the British-allied Miami and Shawnee leaders who fought against white frontier settlers. Aupaumut recorded his negotiations in his 1792 “A Short Narration of My last Journey to the Western Contry,” and this paper considers how Aupaumut conceives of racialized political alliances. Aupaumut evokes the concept of one “color” as a part of one’s past and identity that can be mobilized politically, even if members of a group do not agree on what “race” itself is. As we shall see, he thus crucially reworks several late eighteenth-century conceptions of racial difference.
June 5, 2008— Apes, Frogs, and Dogs: The Physiology of Democracy in Early Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Justine Murison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper argues that the cultural and political disruptions posed by studies of nervous physiology during the mid-nineteenth century, particularly the physiology of the reflex arc, threatened to turn the Great Chain of Being into a horizontal web of analogical relationships, tying animals and humans intimately together through their internal functions and opening the door for human bodies operating without mind or sympathy. The reflex therefore posed a problem for the two most prominent antebellum theories of subjectivity: the liberal democratic subject and the sympathetic subject, which this chapter traces through Marshall Hall, one of the discoverers of the reflex function, and Edgar Allan Poe.
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.