abstract:While enduring the hardships of battle, many Revolutionary War soldiers recorded more about their personal religious lives than perhaps any other single topic. New and extreme circumstances tested the religious preconceptions of those who enlisted in ways that they had rarely encountered in civilian life. Their religion took on new importance for them as soldiers relied on it both as an interpretive lens and as a source of stability amid a chaotic war. This article examines how the exigencies of the Revolutionary War affected the religious lives of Whig soldiers across denominations and colonies. It will argue that ordinary soldiers' religious worldview caused them to interpret the war in ways distinct from that of their ministers and commanding officers, who have often overshadowed them in analyses of the Revolutionary movement. Neither wholly political nor militaristic, the war, for many soldiers, was a formative religious experience.
{"title":"Praying Soldiers: How Continental Soldiers Experienced Religion during the Revolutionary War, 1775–1783","authors":"R. F. de Apodaca","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:While enduring the hardships of battle, many Revolutionary War soldiers recorded more about their personal religious lives than perhaps any other single topic. New and extreme circumstances tested the religious preconceptions of those who enlisted in ways that they had rarely encountered in civilian life. Their religion took on new importance for them as soldiers relied on it both as an interpretive lens and as a source of stability amid a chaotic war. This article examines how the exigencies of the Revolutionary War affected the religious lives of Whig soldiers across denominations and colonies. It will argue that ordinary soldiers' religious worldview caused them to interpret the war in ways distinct from that of their ministers and commanding officers, who have often overshadowed them in analyses of the Revolutionary movement. Neither wholly political nor militaristic, the war, for many soldiers, was a formative religious experience.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83602036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:A significant proportion of witchcraft prosecutions in early New England targeted married couples. Although these cases have not received much attention, they open up a window onto witch-hunting in the region and how it compares to that in other parts of the English-speaking world. An examination of New England's witch spouses reveals how witchcraft intersected with demographic change as well as the social and religious outlook of its Puritan inhabitants. During the opening decades of settlement when colonists were few in number and couples' childbearing capabilities were essential to the survival of the New England colonies, spouses who fell short in this regard sometimes fell victim to suspicions of witchcraft. However, as the century advanced and the population expanded, the pressure on couples to produce children shrank while anxieties over family governance grew. Thus, New Englanders increasingly envisioned witch couples as bad parents rather than failed child-bearers. Moreover, the high frequency of accusations against spouses in New England was a product of the important place marriage held in the Puritans' worldview. They viewed it as the foundation of a godly society and, as a result, commonly envisioned witchcraft as a dark alter ego of nuptial relations.
{"title":"Diabolical Duos: Witch Spouses in Early New England","authors":"P. Moyer","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:A significant proportion of witchcraft prosecutions in early New England targeted married couples. Although these cases have not received much attention, they open up a window onto witch-hunting in the region and how it compares to that in other parts of the English-speaking world. An examination of New England's witch spouses reveals how witchcraft intersected with demographic change as well as the social and religious outlook of its Puritan inhabitants. During the opening decades of settlement when colonists were few in number and couples' childbearing capabilities were essential to the survival of the New England colonies, spouses who fell short in this regard sometimes fell victim to suspicions of witchcraft. However, as the century advanced and the population expanded, the pressure on couples to produce children shrank while anxieties over family governance grew. Thus, New Englanders increasingly envisioned witch couples as bad parents rather than failed child-bearers. Moreover, the high frequency of accusations against spouses in New England was a product of the important place marriage held in the Puritans' worldview. They viewed it as the foundation of a godly society and, as a result, commonly envisioned witchcraft as a dark alter ego of nuptial relations.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90074473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Although historians have generally framed Prince William Henry’s time in occupied New York City—September 26, 1781, to November 4, 1782—as an interesting side note to the American Revolution or a brief blip in the future king’s adolescence, the royal’s tenure in the New World has more to reveal. As the first member of the British royal family to visit colonial America, the sixteen-year-old prince rested at the confluence of a muddled-but-important dyad: for Loyalists, the prince defined how dreams of monarchical aid clashed with the reality of declining royal influence in colonial America, while Patriots also used him to assert their fantasies of republican liberty while lambasting the shortcomings of British Hanoverian monarchy. Ultimately, Prince William’s presence in colonial America confused as much as clarified, forcing all parties involved to confront the messiness of revolution as monarchical rule in the thirteen colonies was steadily replaced by equally muddled notions of American republicanism.
{"title":"A Royal in Revolutionary America: Prince William Henry and the Fall of the British Empire in Colonial America","authors":"Vaughn Scribner","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0011","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Although historians have generally framed Prince William Henry’s time in occupied New York City—September 26, 1781, to November 4, 1782—as an interesting side note to the American Revolution or a brief blip in the future king’s adolescence, the royal’s tenure in the New World has more to reveal. As the first member of the British royal family to visit colonial America, the sixteen-year-old prince rested at the confluence of a muddled-but-important dyad: for Loyalists, the prince defined how dreams of monarchical aid clashed with the reality of declining royal influence in colonial America, while Patriots also used him to assert their fantasies of republican liberty while lambasting the shortcomings of British Hanoverian monarchy. Ultimately, Prince William’s presence in colonial America confused as much as clarified, forcing all parties involved to confront the messiness of revolution as monarchical rule in the thirteen colonies was steadily replaced by equally muddled notions of American republicanism.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88429853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:By a ceremony of prise de possession held at Sault Ste-Marie in June 1671, a subdelegate of the intendant named Daumont de St-Lusson formally laid claim to the North American interior for France. This incident is frequently cited in early American literature and consistently misunderstood. Though he purported to act in the name of Louis XIV, St-Lusson was actually engaged in a somewhat shady fur trading operation, in defiance of the governor of New France and against the wishes of imperial authorities. The general impulse to expand into the west came from Canadian traders, missionaries, and colonial officials; and the specific origins of St-Lusson’s expedition lay in a competition for spoils pitting the governor against the intendant. “France” as embodied by the king and his naval minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, sought to consolidate its hold on the St. Lawrence Valley, avoiding any spatial dispersal of efforts. This article demonstrates that “the French” did not form a monolith with a unified, centrally directed approach to colonialism. Instead, the Sault Ste-Marie case illustrates the complex dynamics of imperial expansion, which typically involves metropolitan governments, colonists on the periphery, and Indigenous peoples, all pursuing divergent interests in fluid circumstances.
{"title":"“France takes Possession of the West”: The Council at Sault Ste-Marie, 1671","authors":"A. Greer","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:By a ceremony of prise de possession held at Sault Ste-Marie in June 1671, a subdelegate of the intendant named Daumont de St-Lusson formally laid claim to the North American interior for France. This incident is frequently cited in early American literature and consistently misunderstood. Though he purported to act in the name of Louis XIV, St-Lusson was actually engaged in a somewhat shady fur trading operation, in defiance of the governor of New France and against the wishes of imperial authorities. The general impulse to expand into the west came from Canadian traders, missionaries, and colonial officials; and the specific origins of St-Lusson’s expedition lay in a competition for spoils pitting the governor against the intendant. “France” as embodied by the king and his naval minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, sought to consolidate its hold on the St. Lawrence Valley, avoiding any spatial dispersal of efforts. This article demonstrates that “the French” did not form a monolith with a unified, centrally directed approach to colonialism. Instead, the Sault Ste-Marie case illustrates the complex dynamics of imperial expansion, which typically involves metropolitan governments, colonists on the periphery, and Indigenous peoples, all pursuing divergent interests in fluid circumstances.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77626752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:The majority of early English settlements in America were by definition coastal, but critical attention on Puritans and the environment has largely focused on the terrestrial landscape. While recent interventions have argued for an oceanic focus, such a reorientation remains blind to the unique influences of coastal environments and the cultural conflicts that happened there. Drawing largely on Cotton Mather’s maritime sermons written between 1704 and 1726, with particular emphasis on The Fisher-mans Calling (1711), this essay argues that early New England Puritan communities had a nuanced and difficult relationship to the liminal coastal, environmental, and sociocultural worlds around them. The cultural conflict, in particular, is best represented by fishermen as a distinct subset of the local population. Unlike merchant mariners and deepwater sailors, fishermen were often local citizens who consistently bridged the gap between maritime and terrestrial worlds. They were themselves liminal figures who presented unique problems around community inclusion for civic and ecclesiastic leaders. Understanding the problems fishermen posed for Puritan community leaders offers new insights into the ways environment and culture interacted in early America.
{"title":"“The Fishes Life”: Social and Physical Liminality in Mather’s The Fisher-mans Calling","authors":"Daniel K. S. Walden","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The majority of early English settlements in America were by definition coastal, but critical attention on Puritans and the environment has largely focused on the terrestrial landscape. While recent interventions have argued for an oceanic focus, such a reorientation remains blind to the unique influences of coastal environments and the cultural conflicts that happened there. Drawing largely on Cotton Mather’s maritime sermons written between 1704 and 1726, with particular emphasis on The Fisher-mans Calling (1711), this essay argues that early New England Puritan communities had a nuanced and difficult relationship to the liminal coastal, environmental, and sociocultural worlds around them. The cultural conflict, in particular, is best represented by fishermen as a distinct subset of the local population. Unlike merchant mariners and deepwater sailors, fishermen were often local citizens who consistently bridged the gap between maritime and terrestrial worlds. They were themselves liminal figures who presented unique problems around community inclusion for civic and ecclesiastic leaders. Understanding the problems fishermen posed for Puritan community leaders offers new insights into the ways environment and culture interacted in early America.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79353958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:In the 1820s, incarcerated workers constructed Sing Sing Prison between the Hudson River and a limestone quarry. The prison’s name evoked the site’s legacy of conquest and colonization, while the War of 1812 served as a catalyst for large prisons like Sing Sing where confinement would be shaped by labor, violence, and coercion. During the war, both the British and the United States held captives in large prison complexes in North America and England. Initially envisioned as humane alternatives to earlier prison ships, British and U.S. military prisons soon became sites of intimidation and violence. Soon after, the cultural memory of the war helped reshape the meaning and experience of incarceration at Sing Sing. This led prison advocates, including veterans of the war, to reject the religious idealism of earlier prison advocates without rejecting prisons altogether.
{"title":"Sintsincks to Sing Sing: Empire, the War of 1812, and the Transformation of U.S. Prisons","authors":"Lee Bernstein","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In the 1820s, incarcerated workers constructed Sing Sing Prison between the Hudson River and a limestone quarry. The prison’s name evoked the site’s legacy of conquest and colonization, while the War of 1812 served as a catalyst for large prisons like Sing Sing where confinement would be shaped by labor, violence, and coercion. During the war, both the British and the United States held captives in large prison complexes in North America and England. Initially envisioned as humane alternatives to earlier prison ships, British and U.S. military prisons soon became sites of intimidation and violence. Soon after, the cultural memory of the war helped reshape the meaning and experience of incarceration at Sing Sing. This led prison advocates, including veterans of the war, to reject the religious idealism of earlier prison advocates without rejecting prisons altogether.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80766113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Following the Boston Tea Party and passage of the Port Act, General Thomas Gage, the new royal governor of Massachusetts, moved the seat of government to Salem. Upon his arrival, Gage was greeted by dueling addresses signed by 48 of Salem’s Royalists and 125 of its Whigs. The addresses exhibit contrasting political ideologies; however, the signers’ backgrounds reveal each group embraced views that served its interests. On the one hand, Royalists supported a polity that promoted order, stability, and the rule of law, a system that benefited an interrelated group of old elite families with lucrative kinship ties to the Bay colony’s political establishment led by former Governor Thomas Hutchinson. On the other hand, Whigs demanded a government that protected people’s rights, especially their property rights. This suited artisans, master mariners, and rising merchants determined to preserve meager or recently acquired holdings from Englishmen, whom Salemites asserted had “an interest in laying burthens upon us for their own relief.” The property that Whig signers sought to defend served various purposes. It provided economic security, and it was a source of personal liberty, masculine pride, and a voice in government.
{"title":"General Gage Comes to Salem: Interests, Ideologies, Identities, and Family Alliances Collide on the Eve of the American Revolution","authors":"R. Morris","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Following the Boston Tea Party and passage of the Port Act, General Thomas Gage, the new royal governor of Massachusetts, moved the seat of government to Salem. Upon his arrival, Gage was greeted by dueling addresses signed by 48 of Salem’s Royalists and 125 of its Whigs. The addresses exhibit contrasting political ideologies; however, the signers’ backgrounds reveal each group embraced views that served its interests. On the one hand, Royalists supported a polity that promoted order, stability, and the rule of law, a system that benefited an interrelated group of old elite families with lucrative kinship ties to the Bay colony’s political establishment led by former Governor Thomas Hutchinson. On the other hand, Whigs demanded a government that protected people’s rights, especially their property rights. This suited artisans, master mariners, and rising merchants determined to preserve meager or recently acquired holdings from Englishmen, whom Salemites asserted had “an interest in laying burthens upon us for their own relief.” The property that Whig signers sought to defend served various purposes. It provided economic security, and it was a source of personal liberty, masculine pride, and a voice in government.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82077699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:“ ‘I Hear that God Saith Work’: Wunnampuhtogig and Puritans Laboring for Grace in Massachusetts, 1643–1653,” details how beliefs about life after death transformed, and were transformed by, labor practices for both wunnampuhtogig (“praying Indians”) and English colonizers as they navigated the fraught terrain of seventeenth-century colonial encounters. This article argues that beliefs about the afterlife and those about labor were mutually constitutive, building distinctive and sometimes paradoxical worldviews for wunnampuhtogig and English alike. Traumas wrought by virulent epidemics among Eastern Algonquian polities catalyzed reassessment of eschatology and labor practices, the two variables appearing profoundly intermeshed in the conversion narratives spoken in Wôpanâak by wunnampuhtogig and translated for English readers across the Atlantic. Epistemological emphasis on the confluence of labor and cosmology was not a foreign imposition, but an engrained element of Eastern Algonquian cultural histories. Labor and eschatology converged in English evangelists’ rhetoric in ways that both reinforced and strained key tenets of Puritan covenantal theology, pointing toward scriptural tensions that preoccupied colonial evangelists. This article examines how religious beliefs about death and afterlives organized, inflected, and recast the labor performed by Indigenous and settler communities in Massachusetts throughout the mid-seventeenth century.
{"title":"“I Hear that God Saith Work”: Wunnampuhtogig and Puritans Laboring for Grace in Massachusetts, 1643–1653","authors":"S. Pawlicki","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:“ ‘I Hear that God Saith Work’: Wunnampuhtogig and Puritans Laboring for Grace in Massachusetts, 1643–1653,” details how beliefs about life after death transformed, and were transformed by, labor practices for both wunnampuhtogig (“praying Indians”) and English colonizers as they navigated the fraught terrain of seventeenth-century colonial encounters. This article argues that beliefs about the afterlife and those about labor were mutually constitutive, building distinctive and sometimes paradoxical worldviews for wunnampuhtogig and English alike. Traumas wrought by virulent epidemics among Eastern Algonquian polities catalyzed reassessment of eschatology and labor practices, the two variables appearing profoundly intermeshed in the conversion narratives spoken in Wôpanâak by wunnampuhtogig and translated for English readers across the Atlantic. Epistemological emphasis on the confluence of labor and cosmology was not a foreign imposition, but an engrained element of Eastern Algonquian cultural histories. Labor and eschatology converged in English evangelists’ rhetoric in ways that both reinforced and strained key tenets of Puritan covenantal theology, pointing toward scriptural tensions that preoccupied colonial evangelists. This article examines how religious beliefs about death and afterlives organized, inflected, and recast the labor performed by Indigenous and settler communities in Massachusetts throughout the mid-seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84999501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:As a range of recent scholarship attests, "the history of the book in America is not a history of American books." This approach has led to a focus on the trans-Atlantic nature of the book trade and the relationships between printers and booksellers in print centers such as London and Edinburgh with retailers in colonial cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Still, recent scholarship has not fully addressed a central facet of colonial book trade networks: the history of the book in America is not simply the history of books and the economics of book exchange, but, rather, the history of much larger economic networks that facilitated the circulation of print throughout the colonies, in rural as well as urban areas. This essay explores the impact of one of these larger economic networks, built around tobacco, on the book trade in the colonial Chesapeake. The efforts of Scottish tobacco merchants, in particular, in stocking books created new avenues for print circulation in the Chesapeake and helped serve the needs of a population of readers within the colonial interior. Studying their efforts as booksellers emphasizes the wide range of cultural exchanges that the tobacco trade helped facilitate.
{"title":"The Scottish-Chesapeake Tobacco Trade and the Economics of Book Importation","authors":"P. Mogen","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:As a range of recent scholarship attests, \"the history of the book in America is not a history of American books.\" This approach has led to a focus on the trans-Atlantic nature of the book trade and the relationships between printers and booksellers in print centers such as London and Edinburgh with retailers in colonial cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Still, recent scholarship has not fully addressed a central facet of colonial book trade networks: the history of the book in America is not simply the history of books and the economics of book exchange, but, rather, the history of much larger economic networks that facilitated the circulation of print throughout the colonies, in rural as well as urban areas. This essay explores the impact of one of these larger economic networks, built around tobacco, on the book trade in the colonial Chesapeake. The efforts of Scottish tobacco merchants, in particular, in stocking books created new avenues for print circulation in the Chesapeake and helped serve the needs of a population of readers within the colonial interior. Studying their efforts as booksellers emphasizes the wide range of cultural exchanges that the tobacco trade helped facilitate.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75738756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
abstract:Nowadays scholars accept Sarah Kemble Knight's authorship of an early eighteenth-century New England travel journal as fact; but when it was first published in 1825, some questioned its authenticity. By 1839 doubts led Massachusetts historian Rev. Joseph B. Felt to describe her as a "fictitious author" even as he included a quote from the journal that "appears to be true." This essay uses a case study of the controversy surrounding Knight's journal to explore how nineteenth-century Americans sought to determine the authenticity of the published works they read. Historians, historical editors, and readers used at least three methods to decide whether a given work was genuine: authority, evidence, and expectations. Theodore Dwight's editorial decisions in presenting the journal deprived it of his authority. While many reviewers accepted the journal, others argued it was a fake based in part upon failure to match their expectations. By midcentury, historians Frances Caulkins and William R. Deane authenticated Knight and the events in her journal through accrual of corroborative evidence. Ideas of historical authenticity shaped the development of modern historical practices and helped determine how editors compiled document collections in the nineteenth century.
萨拉·肯布尔·奈特(Sarah Kemble Knight)撰写了一本18世纪初的新英格兰旅行日记，这一事实如今已被学者们接受;但当它于1825年首次出版时，一些人质疑它的真实性。到1839年，马萨诸塞州历史学家约瑟夫·b·费尔特牧师(Rev. Joseph B. Felt)对她的怀疑导致他将她描述为“虚构的作者”，尽管他引用了一段“似乎是真的”的日记。本文以围绕奈特杂志的争议为例，探讨19世纪美国人如何试图确定他们所阅读的出版作品的真实性。历史学家、历史编辑和读者至少用三种方法来判断一部作品的真伪:权威、证据和期望。西奥多·德怀特在发表期刊时的编辑决定剥夺了他的权威。虽然许多审稿人接受了这篇论文，但也有人认为这篇论文是假的，部分原因是论文没有达到他们的预期。到本世纪中叶，历史学家弗朗西斯·考尔金斯和威廉·r·迪恩通过积累的确凿证据证实了奈特和她日记中的事件。历史真实性的观念塑造了现代历史实践的发展，并帮助确定了19世纪编辑如何编纂文献集。
{"title":"Theodore Dwight and the Publication of Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal: Establishing Historical Authenticity in the Early United States","authors":"Alea Henle","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Nowadays scholars accept Sarah Kemble Knight's authorship of an early eighteenth-century New England travel journal as fact; but when it was first published in 1825, some questioned its authenticity. By 1839 doubts led Massachusetts historian Rev. Joseph B. Felt to describe her as a \"fictitious author\" even as he included a quote from the journal that \"appears to be true.\" This essay uses a case study of the controversy surrounding Knight's journal to explore how nineteenth-century Americans sought to determine the authenticity of the published works they read. Historians, historical editors, and readers used at least three methods to decide whether a given work was genuine: authority, evidence, and expectations. Theodore Dwight's editorial decisions in presenting the journal deprived it of his authority. While many reviewers accepted the journal, others argued it was a fake based in part upon failure to match their expectations. By midcentury, historians Frances Caulkins and William R. Deane authenticated Knight and the events in her journal through accrual of corroborative evidence. Ideas of historical authenticity shaped the development of modern historical practices and helped determine how editors compiled document collections in the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88012963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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