JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC最新文献

{"title":"The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897992","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Katharine Gerbner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Religion, Culture of dismemberment, Re/membrance, Protestantism, Christianity The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. By Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.95). Enslaved women in the antebellum south inhabited a \"triple consciousness,\" writes Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh in her groundbreaking new book, The Souls of Womenfolk. Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how bondwomen's intersectional [End Page 334] experiences as enslaved Black women with (re)productive demands led to \"ontological ramifications and moral dilemmas\" (2). Their triple consciousness should be recognized as the source of enslaved religious and ethical culture, with the \"psyches of enslaved men and children\" flowing from the bedrock of women's triple consciousness. In The Souls of Womenfolk, Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces several powerful interlocking concepts that help to narrate both the history of slavery and the history of religion in new, distinctive, and important ways. One foundational concept is the \"culture of dismemberment,\" which serves as shorthand for the collective experiences of dislocation, familial separation, rape, and other forms of physical violence that formed the core of the transatlantic system of slavery. The culture of dismemberment also encompassed the system of capitalism that reduced people to profit, and fundamentally shaped the ways in which bodies were viewed and treated. For enslaved women, the culture of dismemberment had distinctive features, most notably the \"resignification of the womb.\" Enslaved women recognized that their wombs were commodified in a transatlantic economic system that relied on their powers of reproduction. This resignifying process in the service of human capital forced women to wrestle with different existential questions than enslaved men, and their experiences formed the core of enslaved religious cultures. They asked existential and moral questions about how to respond to injustice and violation, how to protect themselves and their families, and how to build a life together and in community with others to mitigate the culture of dismemberment. Bondpeople's answer to dismemberment was \"re/membrance,\" a creative and adaptable orientation that drew on West African precedents and responded to the challenges of the Americas (2). Re/membrance came in many forms, and each chapter in The Souls of Womenfolk elucidates varieties of re/membering practices, orientations, and beliefs. As mothers, enslaved women recognized that their wombs had become the producers of human capital, and this knowledge shaped the ways that they understood the cosmos, defined ethical priorities, and engaged existential questions. They also shaped child-rearing, as Black women aimed to pr","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":"135946466","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":"Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897988","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder Kimberly A. Hamlin (bio) Keywords George Washington, Eliza Harriot, U.S. Constitution, Education, Female genius Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution. By Mary Sarah Bilder. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.50.) In May of 1787, a British woman named Eliza Harriot O'Connor delivered a lecture on \"the Power of Eloquence\" in Philadelphia. This occasion likely marked the first time a woman spoke publicly in the United States. The event was attended by future president George Washington and, quite possibly, several other prominent men who were in town to attend the Constitutional Convention. Washington pronounced the lecture \"tolerable.\" For years, this curious episode puzzled and enchanted Mary Sarah Bilder, whose book Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution reflects her efforts to understand the larger significance of what transpired that evening. Bilder aims to \"flip the outside in and the inside out\" by looking at the people excluded from the Constitutional Convention but whose lives nevertheless helped shape what was discussed within (4). A self-described \"constitutionalist,\" Bilder documents the world of possibilities that existed for women, and to a lesser extent for African Americans and people of color, during the tumultuous years in which the Constitution—a term that first meant a system of government—came instead to refer to a single document. According to Bilder, Eliza Harriot's lectures establish that many alternatives to white male rule existed within what ultimately became a document that enshrined it. The key to unlocking this alternative universe of female citizenship is the late-eighteenth-century debates about female intellect and [End Page 323] education because, all sides agreed, education provided the first step on the path to political representation and maybe even voting and officeholding. Eliza Harriot (Bilder refers to her by her first two names) lived and lectured during the heyday of discussions about \"female genius,\" a period that culminated in the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A major contribution of Female Genius is the rich intellectual, transatlantic history of this potentially revolutionary ideal. Each of the book's six chapters present a lively intellectual history of the Age of the Constitution—from the brief vogue for female debating societies to Irish revolutionary societies. The book also contains terrific explanatory material, including 38 images, a helpful timeline, and supplementary notes on the research process. Another strength of the book is the three-dimensional world that Bilder constructs for Eliza Harriot, especially given the paucity of sources. Relying on genealogical sources, census records, digitized histori","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":"135984072","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":"Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War by Friederike Baer (review)","authors":"Brady J. Crytzer","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897989","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"44394055","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":"Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America by Dana W. Logan (review)","authors":"S. Bullock","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897990","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"47069226","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":"Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling, 1786–1860 by Jane Hooper (review)","authors":"N. Shoemaker","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897996","url":null,"abstract":"southern slaveholders and northern cap i tal ists. And this is perhaps the most insightful of Verney’s reading of the development of the antebellum U.S. Empire: Overseas imperialism mirrored and reinforced the class, race, gender, and ethnic strug gles at home. Naval exploration was considered as a means to suppress and mediate such conflicts for the benefit of white men. Popu lar culture and the federal government were the institutions that glued this co ali tion between southern slaveholders and northern cap i talists. Accounts of exploration inspired people like Jeremiah Reynolds to acquire and disseminate scientific knowledge that was considered central to imperialism. Naval expeditions gained popularity among the public through the publication and exhibition of their materials, and were presented as national accomplishments. “The productions of the Ex Ex affirmed racial and class hierarchies and contributed to the raising of an imperial society,” writes Verney (78). While public support for overseas exploration amassed on the floors of libraries and museums, federal support was mobilized by politicians and businessmen. Naval expeditions turned into diplomatic tools to address prob lems of immigration and colonization and also became negotiation sites to amend sectional divisions over slavery by promoting U.S. capitalism abroad. Scholars of U.S. empire and expansion will find Verney’s book informative and compelling as it takes us to all corners of the world. Historians more focused on national affairs will find this book equally illuminating as it demonstrates how Americans’ visions of the world and their place in it developed alongside the nation’s po liti cal, social, economic, and cultural changes.","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":"42397614","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 Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.a897994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.a897994","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell William D. Adler (bio) Keywords State-building, Early national state, Role of Government The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 392. Paper, $34.95.) Scholars of the early U.S. have long been interested in how state-building occurred, but a massive revival of attention to the subject in the past twenty years has produced a wave of important research. The Paradox of Power enters this conversation with an impressive contribution to our understanding of the early national state through a synthetic analysis of how [End Page 340] government grew, not only nationally but at the local and state levels as well. Ballard Campbell argues in this book that American state-building has been characterized by a paradox between theory and action: a strong commitment to anti-statist values on the one hand, with a practical necessity for enhanced state action on the other. Those immediate needs, such as physical infrastructure, security, education, and others, led over time to increased state capacity as an administrative apparatus was built to handle these various functions, he argues. The anti-statist values continued apace in our culture but ultimately could not arrest the growth of government. Campbell traces these shifts from the colonial period all the way through the early twentieth century, covering well-trodden soil on how government expanded at the local, state, and national levels. The book contains a wealth of information on what government did and how it did it, including an original collection of state-level actions (contained in the Appendix) that will be of much use to scholars. The greatest contribution of this work will be for those looking for a general treatment of the subject material, as it covers a wide range of time and a similarly wide range of governmental activities. Students in advanced undergraduate courses or graduate students who need an overview of state-building throughout early American history will benefit from reading this work. As for its contributions to the scholarly literature, since it is a work of synthesis, scholars will most benefit from the above mentioned dataset on state actions as well as wrestling with its argument about the \"paradox\" of American state-building, although even this is familiar to students of these questions. For example, in his work Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2015), Gary Gerstle makes a similar contention about the tension in the Constitution between personal liberties and limited government on the one hand, versus the notion of \"the public good\" that was more prevalent at the state level. In the field of American political development, political scientists have long debated these questions as well; most recently, in Stephen Skrowronek's Pha","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":"135946465","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":"\"What's in a Name?\": They/Them","authors":"Greta L. Lafleur","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The words we use matter, yet they undergo constant change in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. There is power in naming, or misnaming, and in who gets to decide. Ideally, this Critical Engagements forum will contribute to our collective, conscious, and rigorous interrogation of the terms we use and why we use them.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45958092","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":"Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom by Spencer W. McBride (review)","authors":"Sasha Coles","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.0025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41297261","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":"Black and African American","authors":"E. A. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The terms Black and African American are the products of twentieth-century political and cultural movements that struggled to find terms to define, unite, celebrate, and recognize the heritage and identity of people of African descent in the United States. Today, African American typically refers to the ethnicity, nationality, and culture of Black people residing in or born in the United States. Black typically refers to a racial category and an elastic cultural, ethnic, and, arguably, political identity that is not defined by nationality or geopolitical boundaries. These two terms are only the most recent articulations of a long tradition of collective self-identification that began during the earliest days of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. This essay examines the social and political shifts that engendered new ways of naming Black identity and the names and terminology intellectuals have used to describe people of African descent in the Americas in the past.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48085139","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":"Creatively Anachronistic Grammars of Power","authors":"D. Richter","doi":"10.1353/jer.2023.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2023.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The contributors to the Forum \"What's in a Name?\" draw our attention to grammars of power. Words labeling race, ethnicity, gender, and ability assume distinct valences in the guise of pronouns, adjectives, and nouns, plurals and singulars, active and passive constructions.","PeriodicalId":45213,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49096283","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}