Joyce E. Chaplin

The Southern frontiers, 1607-1860 : the agricultural evolution of the colonial and antebellum South

Preface Introducing the Southern Frontiers The Chesapeake Frontiers (1607-1775) The Carolinian Frontiers (1670-1775) The Backcountry Frontiers (1681-1775) The Revolutionary Frontiers (1775-1790) The Upland South Frontiers (1790-1860) The Lowland South Frontiers (1790-1860) Summarizing the Southern Frontiers Bibliography Index

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the "Principle of Population"

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthuss Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthuss Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthuss ideas. They explore what the Atlantic and Pacific new worlds—from the Americas and the Caribbean to New Zealand and Tahiti—meant to Malthus, and how he treated them in his Essay. Bashford and Chaplin reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust. Elegantly written and forcefully argued, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus relocates Malthuss Essay from the British economic and social context that has dominated its reputation to the colonial and global history that inspired its genesis.

The Other Revolution

The early American past is overdue for sustained attention as a distinctive stage in environmental history. As we denizens of the Anthropocene look toward some kind of post-fossil fuel stage of history, looking back at the pre-industrial era of American history would help us to identify what was at stake in making a transition into a carboniferous energy regime, and therefore what may be at stake in transitioning out of it. For that reason, the environment is a potent and relevant historical context, perhaps more so than the social, political, and cultural contexts that have driven the scholarship in the field of early American history over the last forty years. Much of that historiography has used the American Revolution as pivot or terminus. But the industrial revolution and its crucial turn toward carbon-based energy was in the end even more revolutionary as a historical watershed. Indeed, the industrial revolution, the “other revolution,” represents one of the greatest opportunities for early Americanists who are interested in environmental history, which should at this point mean all of us.

Earthsickness: circumnavigation and the terrestrial human body, 1520-1800

From their distinctive experience of going around the world, maritime circumnavigators concluded that their characteristic disease, sea scurvy, must result from their being away from land too long, much longer than any other sailors. They offered their scorbutic bodies as proof that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe. That arresting claim is at odds with the current literature on the cultural implications of European expansion, which has emphasized early modern colonists’ and travelers’ fear of alien places, and has concluded that they had a small and restricted geographic imagination that fell short of the planetary consciousness associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But circumnavigators did conceive of themselves as actors on a planetary scale, as creatures adapted to all of the land on Earth, not just their places of origin.

Planetary Power? The United States and the History of Around-the-World Travel

It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social – it implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators’ accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.

The Problem of Genius in the Age of Slavery

In a private letter written in 1778, Ignatius Sancho, famous black British man of letters, deplored the persistence of racial prejudice, yet he did so in terms that proposed another kind of human inequality, and this has been the problem of genius ever since. Sancho reported (in order to denounce) an ongoing debate among white colonists and Britons over whether the African captive who had been taken to Boston as a child, sold as a slave, and named by her owners Phillis Wheatley, had herself actually written the Poems on Various Subjects published under her name in 1773. Sancho observed that Wheatley’s poems had been preceded by a list of worthies who swore to her authorship, yet these testifiers made no comment on her status as chattel, let alone offered any criticism that she (or anyone else) might not deserve that degraded status: The list of splendid—titled—learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress—alas! shows how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge is—without generosity—feeling—and humanity.—These good great folks—all know—and perhaps admired—nay, praised Genius in bondage—and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by—not one good Samaritan amongst them.1

Benjamin Franklin and Science, Continuing Opportunities for Study,

The books about Benjamin Franklin keep piling up, each fat tome ample evidence that the famous early American continues to fascinate people. Do we now know everything about the man? Probably not, and deanitely not when it comes to his work in science, which remains the elephant in the room. Science was the most important part of Franklin’s life, but, quite oddly, it is the least thoroughly and systematically examined part of that sprawling and eventful life. Franklin is the biographer’s delight and despair, not least because of his range of accomplishments—he seemed to do, see, or at least comment on everything. Several new catalogue-of-a-life biographies copiously document Franklin’s impact and accomplishments; other studies focus on his speciac contributions to many—almost too many—events and activities in the eighteenth century. Franklin wrote and published on nearly every topic imaginable. He took an active political role from the 1740s until his death in 1790; he was warrior, diplomat, peacemaker. He had strong yet, in the end, reverent opinions on religion. He was client of several men, then himself patron to many men and women. He was devoted to some members of his family but neglected others; he had many friends, but also enemies. He did brilliant experimental work on electricity, then left experimentation to others. He is ubiquitous and changingly meaningful, our eighteenth-century Zelig. Yet it is all old news. The benchmark comprehensive biography of Franklin appeared in 1938, with Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin. And comparably deanitive work on Franklin’s electrical experiments appeared with 1941 in I. Bernard Cohen’s scholarly introduction to Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, followed by Cohen’s massively learned Franklin and Newton: An