Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Wendy Raphael Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sustained Attention ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Verse Forms

This chapter states, and briefly explains, the main claims of the book: that early evangelicalism must be understood as a central aesthetic movement of the eighteenth century; and that to understand early evangelicalism as it first took shape requires sustained attention to its prolific poetry. The chapter situates the book, which is the first history of early American non-hymnal poetry, within the current scholarship of early American culture and poetry, early evangelical history and hymnody, and British eighteenth-century enthusiasm. The author defines evangelicalism (as primarily a way of feeling and doing “authentic” Christianity) and then three new terms this study introduces: revival poetry (a constellation of verse forms, which addresses the tendency to associate evangelical poetry soley with hymnody); poet-minister (a revitalized role at the nexus of the affective sermon and aesthetic oriented conversion); and print itinerant (an evangelical conception of print within the new practices of itinerancy). The author concludes with a narrative summary of the book and each of the chapters.

Histrionics of the Pulpit

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-337
Author(s):  
Scott Larson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Masses

Abstract The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses “out of their senses,” and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to “trans tonality”—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean D. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Literature ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

A Loyalist Who Loved His Country too Much: Thomas Hutchinson, Historian of Colonial Massachusetts

2017 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-384
Author(s):  
Liam Riordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Culture ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
British Atlantic World

A history of the book approach to Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay (published 1764-1828) recovers his commitment to preserve facts and his place in eighteenth-century historiography. Hutchinson's vilification by patriots still obscures our understanding of his loyalism. The article reassesses late colonial society, the American Revolution, and Anglo-American culture in the British Atlantic World.

Love in a Village and a New Direction for Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Sterling E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
New World ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Early American ◽  
Production Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional History

This chapter reviews the compositional history of Love in a Village, a pastiche—a form in which borrowed songs are blended with original music--by Arne, Giardini, Geminiani, and Boyce, among others. In this case study, Murray examines the foundations of music theater in eighteenth-century America through the lens of David Douglass’s American Company, which first performed Love in a Village in the New World in Charleston in 1766. The author raises the question of how Douglass’s troupe succeeded financially and how in doing so it created a “new direction” for early American musical theater, an orientation and production concept that required trained voices and fuller orchestras, forces well in excess of those typically used for older ballad operas.

Legitimacies, Indian Identities, and the Law: The Politics of Sex and the Creation of History in Colonial New England

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (01) ◽  
pp. 55-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Marie Plane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Colonial New England

In an early-eighteenth-century legal contest on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, an Indian leader, Jacob Seeknout, appealed a ruling that undermined his political authority. Seeknout's lawyer, Benjamin Hawes, crafted an argument that intertwined the sexual legitimacy of Seeknout's ancestors with his political legitimacy; at the same time, Hawes also linked Indians' collective chastity as a “nation” to their sovereign status. This paper examines the economic, religious, criminal, and historical contexts of this argument, exploring the history of Indians' conjugal practices and their reinvention as the criminal acts of fornication. The case illustrates some of the diverse sources of early American law, links between these legal structures and colonialism, and the importance for scholars of attending to the local level in exploring the power of colonial law to shape new racial identities.

Patchwork Quilts: Connections with Geometry, Technology and Culture

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-50
Author(s):  
Leah P. McCoy ◽  
Jean M. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early American ◽  
Technology And Culture ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Young Students

Patchwork quilts are an important part of American culture and history. The patchwork designs are geometric, and early American women used mathematics and artistry as they sewed warm covers for their families. The history of quilts can be traced through several cultures, including that of Native Americans, western pioneers, slaves escaping through the Underground Railroad, and immigrants from Europe and Asia. Often, students have seen quilts in their homes and are interested in exploring the patterns. Quilt making is related to family heritage, and the study of quilts may connect young students with their grandparents or family histories.

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