Murderous Masculinities the Early Republic of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel, Wieland (1798), particularly as it engages and critiques gender and nationalism in the fictive treatment of familicidal murders that took place in the eighteenth century. More broadly, Brown’s novel highlights the competing realities facing men and women in the early republic, as they navigated the shifting landscape of political and religious ideology in the turbulence of post-Revolutionary America. A close examination of Wieland offers a revealing glimpse into the tensions between patriarchy and femininity, republicanism and religion, and competing masculinities in the newly born republic that was limitlessly optimistic even as it was beset by national and familial violence.

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

Analysis on Women’s Suicide and Government Governance in the Bottom Society of Beijing in the Early Republic of China (1912-1928)

The marital life of women at the bottom of society was very worrying in the early Republic of China in Beijing, with high suicide phenomenon. The main causes are poverty, couple conflict, contradiction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, as well as the persecution of traditional concepts such as “men are superior to women”, and “preserve chastity after the death of the husband”. Under the overall layout of building a modern country, Beijing local government tries to bring marriage crisis and women’s suicide into the scope of social intervention on police and government agencies, but there is always a huge tension between policy plan and concrete practice.

3. From republican to Romantic

‘From republican to Romantic’ discusses how Enlightenment ideas came under pressure from the dramatic changes in American life during the early republic. Rapid population growth, westward expansion, urbanization, and industrialization tested the limits of Enlightenment thought, while new Romantic sensibilities shaped Americans’ response to their changing political and social realities. A shared concern during this period was the perceived absence of a truly “American” democratic culture, and this fostered efforts to build a variety of new intellectual institutions. The transcendentalists played a central role in trying to create a unifying intellectual culture befitting a new democracy, while the mental and moral worlds of Northerners and Southerners pulled farther apart over the issue of slavery.

Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore

This article explores some of the possibilities and challenges of reconstructing the physical world of Early Republic Baltimore. Drawing on *Visualizing Early Baltimore*, a detailed visualization of Baltimore city following the war of 1812, "Slave Streets, Free Streets" asks readers to think about where the city's free blacks and enslaved workers lived and worked, and how space could be both integrated and segregated. Our research shows that blacks and whites lived in close proximity, but not necessarily in the same kinds of housing or on the same streets. Mapping also shows that the actual buying and selling of individuals, in the absence of a centralized market, took place all over the city, making it literally impossible for residents, both black and white, to avoid. This article illuminates the lives of ordinary people even as it acknowledges the limits of our ability to recreate the past.