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Articles by Rachel Herrmann
Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina. By D.A. Johnson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2024. xv + 219 p. $54.95 (hb). ISBN 978‐1‐4214‐4980‐7. - Herrmann - Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies - Wiley Online Libr
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Minnesota protects trans rights but falls short on women's sports
Opinion editor's note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here. Minnesota has continued to stand as a prominent protector of transgender civil rights, but there is one battleground that we are currently neglecting: participation in women's sports.
Which Foods Aren’t Disgusting? On Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites
Which Foods Aren’t Disgusting? On Carla Cevasco’s Violent Appetites By Rachel Herrmann • It has been a privilege to read Violent Appetites, the latest installment of a debate about hangriness that unfolded at Nursing Clio in 2017. At that time, Carla Cevasco and I agreed about the importance of recovering the myriad meanings of hunger in the eighteenth century and disagreed over who experienced “hangriness” – the sensation of feeling simultaneously hungry and angry.
Some Thoughts on Teaching: An Interview with James H. Merrell
I first met Jim Merrell in the spring of my sophomore year at Vassar College, when I registered for his Revolutionary America class. Over the next two and a half years I took several more courses with Mr. Merrell (professors at Vassar go by “Mr.” or “Ms.,” rather than “Dr.” or “Professor”), where I received multi-page responses to my essays, and comments on my research papers with words like “Huzza!” Eventually, I began work on my senior thesis, which he kindly agreed to supervise.
A is for “Anthropocene”
Today I want to pretend that I know how to read science journals, particularly a recent Nature article by scientists Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin entitled “Defining the Anthropocene.”[1] Reading a summary about the article was provocation enough to read the article itself, which in turn sparked a more extended rumination about chronology, interdisciplinarity, and scholarly divides.
Q&A with Edward E. Andrews, Author of Native Apostles
The following is an interview with Ted Andrews, an assistant professor of history at Providence College in Rhode Island. Yesterday, Christopher Jones reviewed his book, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), and now Ted is speaking with The Junto about the process of writing it.
Published Editions of Manuscript Sources " The Junto
February 12, 2014 By Rachel Herrmann in Published Editions of Manuscript Sources, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Archives, dissertations, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, James Merrell, manuscripts, star wars Rachel Herrmann concludes our roundtable on James Merrell’s article, “‘Exactly as they appear’: Another Look at the Notes of a 1766 Treason Trial in Poughkeepsie, New York, with Some Musings on the Documentary Foundations of Early American History” from the most...
The Long Game of U.S. Historiography: A Century of Competing Interpretations
February 8, 2020 By Rachel Herrmann in Conferences, Uncategorized Tags: American West, Daniel Boorstin, Democracy, Francois Furstenberg, Frederick Jackson Turner, Harvey Neptune, historiography, Jessica Roney, Johann Neem, Winthrop Jordan The Temple Early Atlantic Seminar presents a day-long symposium The Long Game of U.S. Historiography: A Century of Competing Interpretations Monday, March 23, 2020 9:00 ~ Introduction 9:15-10:45 ~ François Furstenberg, Johns Hopkins University “Frederick...
Junto March Madness 2016: The Unveiling of the Brackets
March 9, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in March Madness Tags: Junto March Madness The brackets are here, the brackets are here! During the next month, prepare for a supreme nerd-fest as historians vote for the articles they think have shaped early American history. This year, the bracket is focused on articles. A few rules guided how we constructed the brackets based on your excellent nominations: We tried to break up the brackets into vaguely thematic topics. As you’ll see, some are a real stretch.
Students Writing Letters, Students Reading Letters
September 26, 2019 By Rachel Herrmann in Pedagogy Tags: Letters, pedagogy, teaching Today I want to make an argument for doing something without knowing and without being able to ever know its full pedagogical value. Let me explain. In the last content-focused seminar of the semester, before we begin exam prep, I ask my students to write letters to future students taking that class. I tell them to offer advice; to write about what they wish they had known at the start of the year.
Interview with David Doddington, Author of Contesting Slave Masculinity
David Doddington is a Senior Lecturer in North American History at Cardiff University. His research interests centre on slavery, race, and gender in the antebellum South, with a particular interest in examining resistance, survival, and solidarity within slave communities. Today he speaks with Rachel Herrmann about his new book, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South. Find him on Twitter at @d_doddington.
Roundtable Conclusion: Food and Hunger in Vast Early America
Today, Rachel Herrmann concludes our food roundtable. You can read Carla Cevasco’s introduction here, Zachary Bennett’s post here, Bertie Mandelblatt’s here, and Rachel Winchcombe’s here. We hope we gave you some things to think about. This week I spent three days reading three books, and I watched these posts go out into the world while thinking about my comps.
Q&A with Christopher Parsons
Today Rachel Herrmann interviews Christopher Parsons about his book, A Not-So-New World, which Carla Cevasco reviewed yesterday. Parsons is an interdisciplinary historian of science and the environment in the French Atlantic World. He has a longstanding interest in highlighting the contribution of indigenous peoples to the evolution of European and Euro-American environmental sciences.
How to Teach with JSTOR Text Analyzer
Many first year undergraduates enter university not knowing how to manage their time. They have extra-curricular activities. Or jobs at the local grocery store. And then there are all those assignments—they always seems to be due at once! My students, I’ve found, need help learning how much time to spend researching, writing, and editing their assignments—and help locating the appropriate tools to do so.
Call for Blog Posts: Food and Hunger in Vast Early America
A Group Blog on Early American History January 23, 2019 By Rachel Herrmann in Announcements Tags: agriculture, Call for posts, cookbooks, dietetics, Diplomacy, food, foodways, Hunger, hunting, livestock, markets, medicinal recipes, pharmacopeias, single-commodity foodstuffs, Warfare In February 2017, our colleagues at Nursing Clio issued a call for a series on nutrition, resulting in a variety of posts on nutrition, food, and hunger over the several months that followed.
Eating Well at #AHA19
Despite my enthusiasm for history and snacking, it’s taken me some time on the conference-going circuit to figure out how to use this knowledge to enjoy eating and drinking at conferences. On one introverted conference night, I was congratulating myself in my hotel room for acquiring Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine (for my weekend stay) before I realized I didn’t have a corkscrew.
Interview with Michael McGandy
Michael McGandy is Senior Editor and Editorial Director of the Three Hills imprint at Cornell University Press. He tweets as @michaelmcgandy. JUNTO: Can you outline the review and production schedule for a first book? Michael McGandy: If I am talking to a scholar who has just wrapped up his or her dissertation and is prepared to move on to developing the book, I state as a reliable truism that the bound book is four years off.
Why I’m Glad I Worked on an Edited Collection
When I was a graduate student, I wrote a master’s on cannibalism during the Starving Time of 1609-10, which became my first article. That article resulted in an invitation to edit a collection on cannibalism, which I agreed to do during a time when most early career academics were being advised to prioritize books and articles over work in edited collections (and often to avoid them entirely).
Call for Papers: Zones and Lines, Water and Land: New Conversations on Borders
In the early modern world, no less than today, borders were contested spaces that fostered opportunity on one hand and anxiety on the other. New technologies expanded the reach and scale of maritime enterprises and empires even as control of coastlines and blue-water spaces remained elusive.
Q&A with Sari Altschuler, Author of The Medical Imagination
Sari Altschuler is an assistant professor of English, associate director of the Humanities Center, and founding director of the minor in Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University.
Guest Post: Elizabeth Seton and Me: Or, How I Almost Wrote a Book about a Saint Without Mentioning God
. Her book, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint was published this month by Cornell University Press. She is also the author of Men of Letters in the Early Republic (UNC Press, 2008) and is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. When I arrived at the archive in Emmitsburg, Maryland, my heart sank.
Of Course Death Discriminates
The following post contains a discussion of a student death and trans lives. It may be upsetting to readers, so please practice self-care in deciding when and how to read it. I’ve wept three times in front of my students this semester, and I am not a public weeper. One of my trans students has died, and reader, it wrecked me. I found out the first day I was back on campus after the last round of strike days.
Geographies of Power on Land and Water: Space, People, and Borders
I recently spoke at an event for Early Career Researchers hosted jointly by the British Group in Early American History, the British American Nineteenth Century Historians, and the Institute of Historical Research about funding initiatives for Americanists based in the UK.[1] I was there to talk about applying for and winning a networking grant (in the UK, it’s called a “networking scheme grant,” which I LOVE because it makes me feel extra sneaky) with my co-investigator, Jessica Roney.
Survey on American History in the UK
BGEAH (British Group of Early American Historians), BrANCH (British American Nineteenth Century Historians) and HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth Century United States) are pleased to invite participation in a new survey exploring the conditions of study, recruitment and employment within the field of American history as practiced in the UK.
Portrait of a Juntoist in Motion
I’ve had a blog, in one place or another, since 2002, and thus the distinction between “a blog” and “a blog post” is a hill on which I am willing to die. But before Ben Park approached me to be one of The Junto’s founding members, I hadn’t blogged extensively about history. Five years later, I still want to write about history and other topics, but I firmly believe that my history teaching and history scholarship have benefitted from my membership here.
Module Conveners and the British Job Market
As an undergraduate, I didn’t take many large survey classes, and apart from one class, even the surveys that I took were taught by one faculty member. Larger U.S. universities do have more survey classes (I know, because I was a TA for several of them), but most that I taught on were also taught by one person.
Inspiration Roundtable: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Respect the Historiography
This is the second post in a roundtable about research inspirations. You can read the first essay, a guest post by Whitney Barlow Robles, here. My dissertation on food and war, which became my first book project on war and hunger, originated at a crossroads between panic and personal interests.
Guest Post: Did Squanto meet Pocahontas, and What Might they have Discussed?
This is a guest post by Dr E. M. Rose. Dr Rose is a Visiting Fellow, Department of History, Harvard University, and can be reached at emrose@fas.harvard.edu. These observations emerged during research Rose conducted in the spring of 2017 as Visiting Fellow at The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC)/Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation at Historic Jamestowne. Two of the most famous Native Americans in early colonial history may well have met in London.
Q&A with Coll Thrush
By in Review / Q&A Tags: Australia, british library, British Museum, Canada, Coast Salish, Coll Thrush, cricket, Eccles Centre, Ethnohistory, Hawaii, Indigeneity, Indigenous London, Indigenous Studies, Joseph Brant, Leanne Simpson, London, Native American history, New Zealand, Performance, Pocahontas, Queen Victoria, Saidiya Hartman, United States Today Coll Thrush speaks with The Junto about his most recent book, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire, which examines that...
“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing
The following post has been cross-posted from an ongoing series about diet and nutrition over at Nursing Clio. I am grateful for permission to re-post it here; if you have time, definitely go read the other blog posts! In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry.
A Grammatical Declaration of Independence
As a result of the misbehaviour of several Juntoists, I am quite sorry to announce that I, along with several other members, will be leaving The Junto and forming a new online forum for the study of early America. Our declaration follows: In BLOG, 1 April 2017 A Declaration by British-based Members of The Junto in Blog assembled.
Lost and Found in Revisions
In some ways, editing my book has felt similar to the year I spent driving around the country for dissertation research — often lost. Back then, I was a New Yorker living in Texas, and I didn’t have much driving experience.
Q&A with Sowande’ Mustakeem
This is an interview with Sowande’ Mustakeem, who is an Assistant Professor in the departments of History and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Today she speaks with The Junto about her book, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage, which Casey Schmitt reviewed yesterday.
“Daddy” Schuyler, Hamilton, and the Dakota Access Pipeline
Three things happened in the last couple weeks to put Hamilton back on my mind: 1) the Victoria Palace Theatre in London announced that tickets for the show would finally (finally!) go on sale in January, 2) I started re-reading some of my research notes for this round of book edits, and 3) police arrested and pepper-sprayed peaceful Native Americans—Standing Rock Sioux, along with 90 additional nations and tribes—who were protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.[1] I find...
Making Students Lead Discussion: Three Methods
I wrote lots of recommendation letters for students this summer, probably because last year was the first year that I taught students in their final undergraduate year, and many of them are looking for or have recently found jobs. I always die a little inside when I read or hear the word “employability,” because I think it’s a jargony term that seems to reiterate the point that a university sells a degree to its customers, the students.
Why the Exeter Chiefs Should Rebrand Themselves
This blog post originally appeared at the Imperial and Global Forum in June. It’s reposted with slight edits here for reasons I’ll go into below. On any given weekend, you might find yourself on a train platform, surrounded by sports fans wearing “Native American” headdresses and “war paint,” and waving inflatable tomahawks. They’ll be wearing apparel purchased from the team’s online store (the “Trading Post”), where you can also buy a “Little Big Chief” mascot.
A Letter to Past Graduate-Student Me
Almost a decade ago you were preparing to move to Texas to begin a Ph.D. program in history, where you would also earn a master’s degree along the way. First up was the M.A. coursework. You felt pretty confident about this foray into academe — after all, you were coming straight from college and thought you knew how things worked.
A Letter to Past Graduate-Student Me
D ear Past Graduate-Student Me, Almost a decade ago you were preparing to move to Texas to begin a Ph.D. program in history, where you would also earn a master’s degree along the way. First up was the M.A. coursework. You felt pretty confident about this foray into academe — after all, you were coming straight from college and thought you knew how things worked.
Teaching with Databases: An Early American Atlanticist’s Conundrum
During my three years of teaching in England, it’s become apparent that students in my American history classes spend a lot of time worrying about access to primary sources. As an undergraduate myself, I knew that upper-level assessment turns on the ability to find and analyze primary sources—that stipulation is no different in this country.
March Madness 2016: Presenting your Champion
The polls have closed, and the votes are in! With nearly 1,000 votes cast in all the rounds, competition was fierce, but, we finally have a winner in this year’s March Madness tournament. (1) Morgan, Edmund. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (June 1972): 5–29 67% beat (2) Lepore, Jill. “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography.” Journal of American History 88, no.1 (June 2001): 129–144.
Junto March Madness Semi-Final Results and Finals Voting
After a little bit of fun on Friday, it’s back to our regularly-scheduled March (er, April) postings, and the last week of March Madness. Over 150 of you voted to choose finalists in our semi-final; read on to find out who goes head-to-head in the last round! It looks like our final round will be a JAH v. JAH match-up, with Morgan’s work on slavery going up against Lepore’s rumination on microhistory. (1) Morgan, Edmund.
Evolution of an Article
In summer 2010 I sat in the house furnished by Rhys Isaac in Colonial Williamsburg, and attempted to write my first dissertation chapter. I’d just finished my first research trip, to Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, and was in the middle of my second, at the John D. Rockefeller Library. I was trying to follow advice I’d read to write as I researched. There was no Wi-Fi in the house, which was a curse and a blessing.
March Madness Call for Nominations
It’s the most wonderful time of the year here at The Junto, or the month of March Madness! As faithful readers will know, each year we engage in a spirited tournament of voting in some category related to early American history. Last year, it was primary sources. Find out what this year’s theme will be after the jump. This time around, we’ve decided that our tournament will focus on journal articles.
Guest Post: The “Scotch War”: Scotophobia and the War of American Independence
Today’s post is a guest post from Tim Worth, a PhD candidate at the University of Southampton. His thesis examines transatlantic Scotophobia during the late eighteenth century, and how ideas of ethnicity affected British and American images of empire. Over the past couple of years I’ve followed the fascinating Junto debate about whether or not we can see the War of American Independence as a civil war. Tom Cutterham and Christopher F.
Revisiting Red Jacket, alias Cow Killer
Lately I’ve been thinking about names and what they mean. The Seneca orator Red Jacket had several of them.
Guest Post: The Payroll Union’s Paris of America
Pete David is a songwriter from Sheffield, who performs with the band, The Payroll Union. They have produced two EPs—Underfed & Underpaid and Your Obedient Servant—and have two albums: The Mule & The Elephant and their most recent, Paris of America. Andrew Heath (@andrewdheath) is a lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield in the UK. He spent several years in grad school in Philadelphia, where he became fascinated by the city’s nineteenth-century past.
Race, Riot, and Rebellion: A Bibliography
This morning on the other side of the Atlantic, I woke up early in preparation for a morning seminar on William Otter, whose History of My Own Times closes the list of our readings in my Revolutionary America class. Essentially, Otter was a brawling, violent, white man in the 1800s, living variously in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
Teaching the Historiographical Intervention
Last year, my university shifted its policy on assignments, meaning that faculty members suddenly got the option to change extant assignments, make new ones, and alter the weighting of any of them. This was a big transition, given that in previous years assignments were set by the department and students in each of our three class years could expect similar assignments in their courses.
Junto March Madness Nominations Open
It’s March here at The Junto (and, um, the rest of the world), which means it’s time for our annual March Madness tournament! By now you probably know the drill: you nominate, we bracket, and voting begins to establish a champion. Last year’s tournament can be found here: Michael Jarvis’s In the Eye of All Trade beat out a number of strong competitors to finally triumph in the tournament of nerdom. Each year there’s been a twist, and this year is no different.
Deadline approaching for Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic
Do you like cannibalism? As a topic, obviously, not a personal preference. Of course you do! If research travels will take you to England this summer (or if you reside in the UK or nearby), please consider submitting a proposal for a conference I’m organizing at the University of Southampton this June. The deadline for submitting a proposal and short CV is next Thursday, January 15th. On early modern voyages, people ate to survive.
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