Philip Gould

Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

Introduction Chapter 1: The Stamp Act Crisis and the Sublime Style of Politics Chapter 2: Wit and Ridicule in Revolutionary New York Chapter 3: Satirizing the Congress: Ancient Balladry and Literary Taste Chapter 4: Loyalists and the Author of Common Sense Chapter 5: New English Rebellion Epilogue

The rise, development, and circulation of the slave narrative

In the late eighteenth century, important cultural and philosophical changes facilitated the rise of antislavery movements. These developments are rich, complex, and usually fall under the rubric of “Enlightenment” ideology. The historian David Brion Davis has identified three of them. One was the rise of secular social philosophy, based on humanitarian principles and contractual terms for human association and government, found in such thinkers as Baron Montesquieu and John Locke, which drastically narrowed the traditional Christian rationale for slavery as the natural extension of the “slavery” of human sin. Another important development was the rise of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century, which, related to evangelical religion, popular fiction, and urban cultures of refinement, raised the importance of the virtues of sympathy and benevolence as well as the cultural refinement accompanying them. A third development, especially important in the 1790s, was the proliferation of more radical and revolutionary ideas about natural rights vis-a-vis state and social forms of authority. The slave narrative first emerged during the 1770s and 1780s in the context of these transatlantic political and religious movements which shaped the genres publication history, as well as its major themes and narrative designs. These late eighteenth-century works reveal what Paul Gilroy calls the “transcultural international formation” of the “Black Atlantic” – that fluid geographical area encompassing the West African littoral, Britain, British America, eastern Canada, and the Caribbean – through which black subjects traveled as free persons and as slaves.2 The conditions and contexts for publishing these early narratives were in many ways unique. Evangelical Christian groups often sponsored and oversaw their publication. By the 1780s, new political organizations, like the English Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787) and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (1775/1784), dedicated to the abolition of the slave trade, also played a role in encouraging and publishing these narratives.

The New Early American Anthology

The beginning of Robert Spiller’sLiteraryHistoryof theUnited States () makes a rather bold statement about the cultural politics of literary criticism: ‘‘Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must define the past in its own terms’’ (vii). This is pretty ironic, I think, because Spiller has been one of the major villains for New Americanists and multiculturalists alike, possibly the worst example of postwar American exceptionalism. But his declaration actually does capture the revisionist élan of the literary anthologies under review (with the exception ofWriting New England). In particular, Early American Writings and The Literatures of Colonial America model a new kind of early American studies that reads beyond the U.S. nation and

Review of non-battle injuries in Air Force personnel deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

This study examines non-battle injuries among U.S. Air Force members deployed during Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom. A cohort of 275,843 Active Duty, Guard, and Reserve members were identified for the period September 11, 2001 through October 31, 2006. Data on injuries were obtained from electronic medical records and deployment time was obtained from manpower records. Poisson regression was used to estimate adjusted incidence rate ratios (IRRs). The most common non-battle injuries were sprains and strains (53%) followed by open wounds (27%). Guard and Reserve members tended to have a lower rate of orthopedic non-battle injuries than Active Duty members in crude analyses and after adjustment for age, previous deployment, sex, race/ethnicity, and occupation (IRR = 0.95; 95% CI = 0.89-1.02 and IRR = 0.85; 95% CI = 0.77-0.93). Results from this study are intended to facilitate further research of potential differences between Air Force components to reduce non-battle injuries in a deployed environment.

What We Mean When We Say "Race"

Let me begin by pointing out a telling moment in a recent review of scholarly work about the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic. The reviewer, Jonathan Elmer, first acknowledged that early black writing presents ‘‘a world of such profound dislocation, risk, and contingency that we are forced to acknowledge that questions of national, religious, and ethnic identity are very often up for grabs according to the pressures of the moment.’’ Then he went on to assess the state of the scholarly field as a whole: ‘‘While the work on the black Atlantic has done much to call into question the explanatory paradigms of nation and ethnic identity, we have not yet settled on new paradigms to help us move beyond merely raising such problems to an attempt to resolve them in some interpretively satisfying way.’’ The tension between these two claims—that we need more satisfying critical terms with which to read a body of literature that may resist them altogether—begins to suggest just how difficult it is to articulate the meaning of ‘‘race’’ in the eighteenth century. This difficulty of course creates the critical occasion for a roundtable such as this one in EAL. I am grateful to be part of the discussion though realistic enough to recognize that our differences already have produced disagreements, even animosity, in print. When I was first invited to participate, I could not help but recall the scene in The Godfather where the aging Vito Corleone warns his son Michael that after his death the other dons will try to arrange a supposedly constructive meeting where, as Vito tells Michael, he will be assassinated. What does Barbaric Traffic contribute to the paradigm of race in eighteenth-century studies? I knew that the book’s argument about the historical relations between race and commerce in early antislavery writingwould be unsettling to some because it was interrogating important categories upon which the field of African American studies had established itself. (It is no surprise that critical and theoretical disruptions have come from British academics like Paul Gilroy who intentionally were trying to divest

Minnie's Sacrifice: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s narrative of citizenship

Born to free parents in Maryland in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most well-known women of her day. During her life she was a poet, activist, novelist, and orator. After teaching at Union Seminary in Ohio (later named Wilberforce University), Harper was unable to return to home because Maryland prohibited the entrance of free blacks. Instead, in 1853 she went to Philadelphia - the black cultural and political capital of the nineteenth century. There, she lived in an underground railroad station, a home where fugitive slaves were hidden and where she listened to the tales of runaways. These tales, coupled with her exile from the state of her birth, influenced her decision to become an abolitionist. Because of her education and self-presentation, she became a major orator, giving speeches and reading her poems around the country. During this period, she published her first collection of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854). Throughout her career, Harper published essays, short stories, and serial novels in black publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Weekly Anglo-African . From 1865 to 1875 – the period roughly coinciding with Reconstruction (the period following the Civil War) – she traveled extensively throughout the South, lecturing to black and white audiences. She also lived with the freedmen and recorded her observations in a series of letters published in black and abolitionist newspapers.

The Pocahontas Story in Early America

Near the end of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson offers a notably ambivalent assessment of Captain John Smith: “To his efforts principally may be ascribed [the colonys] support against the opposition of natives. He was honest, sensible, and well-informed; but his style is barbarous and uncouth. His history, however, is almost the only source from which we derive any knowledge of the infancy of the state” (177). Such ambivalence registers the degree to which late 18th-century ideologies of civility and refinement mediated historical accounts of Virginias colonial past, and it begins to suggest an overlooked context for reconsidering the cultural meaning of the Smith–Pocahontas story during this era. For the episode traditionally has been read in terms of race and “the birth of the nation” (Jenkins, 10). While influential critics of Smith have extolled his enterprising “genius” and his “doctrine of hard work and self–reliance,” revisionist critiques of Smiths version of American heroism manage only to reproduce the same interpretive categories. Indeed, to revisionists, the Pocahontas story instances an ethnocentrism endemic to colonial encounters: Smith fails to recognize the huskanaw ceremony (whereby he is made a werowance to Powhattan); and Pocahontass “self-abandonment” prefigures the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Biography and the Black Atlantic ed. by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (review)

Does Book of Ages have any faults? Not for me. I can see, however, that some readers could take exception to the very enterprise of writing a biography when the data are so limited, because the historian inevitably fills in some blanks with conjecture. I think this would only be a problem if the writer overgeneralized, drew hasty conclusions, or made definitive statements. Instead, Lepore takes great care to make unreliability or suggestion overt. She is honest about uncertainty even as she furnishes circumstantial evidence to support her arguments. In Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1838, Benjamin Franklin quipped, “Read much, but not many Books.” Lepore’s volume is one you should read. Painstakingly researched, well argued, deftly organized, remarkably comprehensive, and beautifully written, Book of Ages casts light on the famous and the forgotten alike as well as the gendered society that produced both a Benjamin and a Jane Franklin.

Early print literature of Africans in America

In 1986, the literary critic William L. Andrews argued for the multiple registers on which antebellum slave narratives signify. The “free” story they tell recounts both the physical journey from slavery to freedom and also the more subtle struggle to write independently, especially in light of the prevailing racial attitudes in antebellum America that might distort black authorship. Insofar as this model imagines the scene of literary production as the arena of racial collaboration and conflict, it is useful for thinking about early black print literature – but only up to a point. This literature cannot simply be lumped together with the more canonical works of the antebellum period as a way of tightly suturing the continuities within the African American literary “tradition.” It emerged at a distinctive historical moment, and its formal and thematic complexity arises largely from that moment. This is a literature about movement – geographical, ontological, and rhetorical. As a way of accounting for this fluidity of personae and identities, Paul Gilroy has argued that we should reexamine our assumptions about the place of “race” and “nation” in this literature and read it instead in light of the “transcultural international formation” that he calls the “Black Atlantic.” This includes the areas through which black subjects traveled as both free personae and bonded servants: the West African littoral, Britain, British America, eastern Canada, and the Caribbean.

The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture

Historians have long struggled to comprehend the ways that the enslaved understood the boundaries of their social and affective worlds, seeking to pay the requisite attention to both the intensely local horizons that slavery’s repressive regime imposed on its victims, and the evidence that slaves developed an extra-local racial identity. Of course all historians have portrayed an ongoing tension between the local and the racial, and the dialectic between plantation-based identities mediated through paternalism and a broader national vision rooted in Christianity provides the driving force behind Eugene Genovese’s interpretation of the world the slaves made. Anthony Kaye seeks to change the terms of this discussion by altering the unit of analysis. Kaye thinks that the revisionist historiography that has developed since the 1960s has been too wedded to the concept of the ‘slave community’. That term allows historians to elide the movement from local to trans-local – the slave community can be anything from the community of a single plantation to the community of all of the enslaved – but Kaye’s dissatisfaction lies elsewhere. Sidestepping the degree to which historians turned to community, sometimes gemeinschaft, to counter emphasis on individualism, Kaye argues that the ‘community paradigm’ has left the ‘historiography of antebellum slavery ensconced in’ a ‘liberal framework’ inappropriate to the slaves’ world (9). It has allowed us to recognise that ‘day-to-day resistance’ was more than the childishly nihilistic actions that earlier racist historians had seen, but that insight has come at a cost. As every action by every slave, including decisions about how to dress, what to wear, when to work and how to play have been interpreted under the rubric of resistance, the concept has lost meaning. If everything is resistance, then we gain little analytical purchase on any action by seeing it as resistance. Kaye roots this problem in the anachronistic liberal paradigm that foregrounds individual autonomy as the goal of each of the resisting slaves. He turns from the endlessly selffashioning resisting slave and oppressing master to the tissue of relationships that made up southern neighbourhoods. ‘Everyday resistance’ was, he insists, about something other than the slaves’ autonomy; its struggles were ‘waged on the grounds of another battle for control over social space, a terrain that slaves were compelled to share with owners’ (10), and, as such, one that involved shifting patterns of alliance and enmity. Joining Places moves simultaneously outward from the texture of relationships in slave neighbourhoods in the Natchez region in Mississippi to connections beyond those neighbourhoods, and chronologically forward from settlement during the Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 467–489