Editors' Note

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Editors' Note
• Katy Chiles and Cassander Smith

We love being the bearers of good news! In this issue, we are thrilled to report that the Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023 has been awarded jointly to Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Harvard University Press, 2022) and Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of English at Northwestern University, for Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilations and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale University Press, 2021). See page 263 for a more detailed statement about the awardees. Congratulations, Professor Gruesz and Professor Wisecup!

We are also excited to announce that Autumn Hall, EAL's Digital Media Editor and an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, has been selected for the National Humanities Leadership Council (NHLC) of the National Humanities Center. Chosen from universities across the United States, the NHLC undergraduate students "participate in a unique series of interactive experiences with leading humanities scholars and leaders," "explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society," and "focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions" (https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/national-humanities-leadershipcouncil/). Autumn does great work for us here at EAL, and we are excited to see her collaborating with her peers to demonstrate the value of the humanities to our lives. The future of the humanities is in good hands.

Finally, we are proud to present our second issue as editors. This issue's three essays all examine figures very much familiar to early American studies—John Winthrop, John Marrant, and J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. The essays attend to the subjects with great nuance that deepens our knowledge about the rhetorical, archival, and linguistic nature of early American cultures. Adam N. McKeown's essay, "Reconciliation in John Winthrop's [End Page 259] History of New England," offers a new take on Winthrop's History and colonial Massachusetts by examining the concept of reconciliation as a sociopolitical strategy and a rhetorical tool employed to cast the colony as tolerant. The essay centers on the textual representation of what McKeown calls "reconciliation events," those moments of conflict and resolution between colonial government and dissenters, figures such as Anne Hutchinson, John Wheelwright, and Roger Williams. He argues that Winthrop's History portrays such events as instances of a colonial power exercising restraint in its endeavors to reconcile with wayward colonists. In instances where reconciliation succeeds, the behaviors of dissenters are deemed tolerable. In instances where it fails, dissenters are cast as intolerable and subject to the harshest measures, such as ostracism and banishment, forms of silencing. Importantly, before these acts of silencing, according to McKeown, those ultimately deemed intolerable have power to act, to speak, and to plead their case during deliberations that could span months and years. During deliberations, they exist in a liminal state, not as silenced dissenters but as vocal participants helping to define communal boundaries. Thinking about the conflicts between colonial governments and dissenters as reconciliation events, then, presents a new perspective on dissent as a fluid phenomenon, resulting from exercises of colonial power designed to represent colonial Massachusetts as fair, reasonable, and tolerant.

In Elizabeth Bohls's "John Marrant's Nova Scotia Journal Writes Displaced Communities," Bohls directs our attention to the archival margins to reexamine John Marrant's Journal and what it can tell us about displaced communities of Black Loyalists at the end of the eighteenth century. While Marrant's Journal is mostly noted for its theological content, Bohls directs our attention to the communal nature of the text. She argues that the Journal incorporates the experiences of communities of Black Americans forced to relocate in the wake of the Revolutionary War. She advocates a way of reading the Journal that de-emphasizes Marrant as a singular author and instead emphasizes a process of "collective representation" that shapes the Journal. Reading the text for its more communal aspects, according to Bohls, also makes clear how the journal reflects traces of two other genres—the extempore sermon and...