{"title":"Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner (review)","authors":"E. Hart","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905109","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42208864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America by Jordan E. Taylor (review)","authors":"Helena Yoo Roth","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905098","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45092702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)","authors":"Amanda Van Lanen","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905105","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have studied slavery’s history in North Amer i ca from many angles, ranging from regional histories centered on specific crops to broader works that explore gender, transatlantic connections, culture, and economics. David Silkenat’s recent book explores slavery as environmental history. The book is based on the premise that for nearly two hundred years, “the environment fundamentally shaped American slavery, and slavery remade the southern landscape” (2). Southern historians have long been aware of the impacts of slavery on the landscape, dating back to Avery Craven’s 1926 study of soil exhaustion in Virginia and Maryland; however, much of the scholarship has tended to take the form of agricultural rather than environmental history.1 Cash crops and slavery were so intertwined that it is natu ral to place those histories in an agricultural framework. Agriculture is fundamentally connected to the land, so it is impossible to write an agricultural history without considering the environment, but ultimately, environment is not the primary lens in agricultural histories. Silkenat places environment at the center of his study. In doing so, he deftly weaves two hundred years of diverse history from across the region into a thoughtprovoking narrative that synthesizes decades of scholarship on slavery and southern agriculture. The book’s thesis pre sents an in ter est ing dilemma: To what extent was slavery constrained by the environment and to what extent did slavery shape the environment? Building on works by historians such as William","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43921948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"If they send him off, I think I shall not long be safe myself\": Contesting Early American Citizenship in the Longchamps Affair, 1784–1786","authors":"C. Thomas","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905095","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through the little known Longchamps Affair, this article explores the interaction between state and national, and popular and legal, conceptions of American citizenship during the founding era. In 1784, French migrant Charles Julien de Longchamps attacked a French diplomat on the streets of Philadelphia, sparking a national debate on what it meant to be an American citizen. While the French government demanded his expatriation, in an unexpected turn of events, Longchamps alleged that he had been naturalised as a citizen of Pennsylvania the day before the attack, and consequently had the right to stand trial in the United States. The affair became a national referendum on the nature of American citizenship. Officials employed a state-centric, legal vision of membership inherited from the colonial period to argue that Longchamps was not an American citizen and advocate for his removal. These claims were disputed in newspaper coverage across the United States, which instead contended that Longchamps' commitment to revolutionary values proved his citizenship, invoking a broader national community. The public perceived Longchamps' fate as inherently tied to their own, demonstrating that a shared sense of belonging across the United States was equally as important as state membership in shaping how citizenship was understood in real terms. The Longchamps Affair provides a window into the ambiguous and contested nature of membership during the founding decades, both in determining what constituted American citizenship, and how the rights conferred by citizenship differed for native-born Americans and naturalized migrants.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44005430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval (review)","authors":"Daniel S. Dupre","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905110","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48084628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill (review)","authors":"Gregory Ablavsky","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905101","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44907279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"From the Works of Nature … to the Institutions of Man\": How Political Moderation Made Possible the Constitution's Ratification","authors":"T. Estes","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905094","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The ratification debate of 1787–1788 unfolded in distinct stages and the stage which began early in January 1788 was the most important. It saw the introduction of political moderation which blended both stylistic and substantive elements to enable compromise across a vast gulf of differences between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Ultimately, moderation was the mechanism and the approach that enabled the Federalists to win the ratification contest. James Madison and John Jay—who were themselves defining examples of political moderation—helped lead this crucial turn, first through written words and later through their actions. But just as important as the turn toward political moderation was the timing of that pivot. In other words, when Madison and Jay took these actions in the context of the debate mattered greatly. This article examines the practice of moderation within the immediate context of the ratification process so that we can better understand the key interventions made by Madison and Jay and discover why the timing of their political moderation was so crucial.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44971472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle (review)","authors":"Gabrielle Straughn","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a905112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a905112","url":null,"abstract":"water pollution, fenced around furnaces to mitigate animal exposure to lead byproducts, and worried about depleting timber resources. This is not a linear story in which the arrival of U.S. settlers necessarily brought greater devastation. The traditional amalgam of practices, particularly when performed at scale, consumed enormous swathes of forest and generated mounds of toxic tailings and ash. This destruction of animal habitats in turn undermined Native subsistence practices. In 1741, for instance, a French official lamented that “primitive methods” of lead production were causing deforestation, and Moses Austin warned in 1798 that the use of log furnaces was unsustainable (22). New technologies adopted after 1800 were strikingly more efficient in terms of fuel consumption and reduced the output of waste materials. Yet the broader intensification of mining unleashed hazardous pollution into the air and miners’ bodies as well as propelling lead into a growing range of industrial and consumer products in a burgeoning home market. Amid advancements in scientific and medical knowledge, Chambers argues that the unhealthiness of Missouri lead country was an uncomfortable truth that parties interested in settlement and business preferred to minimize or omit. Gray Gold is an original and insightful environmental history that brings early American, Indigenous, and business histories into shared conversation. By finding lead mining at the center of a dynamic cultural and material world in the center of North Amer i ca, Chambers offers a contribution that can enrich both introductory surveys and scholarship on the interrelationships between peoples and the land beneath them.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43513248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897993","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman M. Scott Heerman (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Jay family, John Jay, John Jay II, William Jay Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. By David N. Gellman. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 519. Cloth, $36.95.) David Gellman's Liberty's Chain is an elegantly written study of slavery across several generations of the Jay family of New York, which offers an important intervention into several literatures on race and slavery in U.S. history. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on one generation of the Jay family from the 1770s to the 1870s. Its main subjects are John Jay (1745–1829), William Jay (1789–1858), and John Jay II (1817–1894), allowing Gellman to focus on the history of slavery in the founding generation, through the era of gradual emancipation in the U.S. North, and [End Page 337] ultimately into the Civil War era. Across this long arc Gellman \"shed[s] new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force for liberation\" (4). Each of the three sections is a masterful study in its own right, and by putting them together Gellman narrates the history of slavery and emancipation between U.S. independence and its Civil War like only a skilled scholar can, probing complex dimensions of gradual emancipation, immediate abolitionism, and the meaning of race in the nation at large. Gellman opens with the observation that \"the enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound\" (2). He builds on a generation of scholarship on slavery in the founding generation and in the North, but charts new territory by foregrounding both the lives of the Jays and of the Black workers, free and enslaved, in their New York households. Using this framework he shows how relationships across race and gender lines in the domestic sphere shaped, or clashed with, the wider political landscape. His model approaches the history of slavery in the Jay family as a series of \"concentric circles\" and the \"personal relationships with actual slaves and former slaves formed the core,\" followed by the regional conditions, national policy, and then international forces and intellectual and cultural trends (74). This approach shows that the great national paradoxes were also personal ones, and it reveals how enslaved, indentured, and formerly enslaved African Americans shaped the wider political landscape across generations. Gellman opens his analysis in earnest in the Age of Revolutions, where John Jay stood out as one of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He charts both Jay's marriage into the Livingston family, affording him access to a powerful family network, and his rise in New York politics. Jay was an ","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135946436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"The Baby of Biological Race\": The Issue of Racial Science in Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black","authors":"H. Neptune","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897984","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Are there currently venerated works of history-writing that, upon closer inspection, should embarrass us for their entanglements with white supremacy? White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) by Winthrop Jordan is one such text. A weighty historical study of English and Anglo–American \"thoughts and feelings\" about people of African descent in the colonies and the early republic, Jordan's book has won great professional acclaim within the North Atlantic for more than half a century. Yet, for all of this reverence, White Over Black betrays a deep and fatal problem and deserves reassessment as a disturbingly retrograde contribution to the historiography on racism. This monumental piece of scholarship advanced an essentialist conception of race as part of nature, as arising from natural distinctions between groups of people. Guilty of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields have called \"racecraft,\" Jordan put the cart of racial difference before the horse of racism. Indeed, he deliberately challenged the assumptions of contemporary anti-racist scholars who emphasized race as an invention, complaining that they had \"thrown out the baby of race with the bathwater of racism.\" Maintaining that racism followed fundamentally from inherent racial difference, Jordan cast white supremacy, tragically, as an unconscious psychological response to the distinct physiology of Blackness. The result was a teleological narrative of racial domination. Though not intended to apologize for racism, White Over Black did nevertheless (ir)rationalize racism as the fatal product of inescapable biological difference. Carefully and critically read, Jordan's book provides an eloquent (pre)text for considering how a primordialist view of race subverts the project of effective anti-racist history-writing.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42356412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}