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.

History and Its “Losers”

This article considers the historiography of the British Jacobites and American loyalists. It argues that they have been treated unfairly by history. In short, their importance has been minimized out of regard for dominant narratives. The article looks at older and newer historical accounts that reinterpret events in 17th and 18th century Britain and in revolutionary America to give Jacobites and loyalists a fairer share in these events. In conclusion, the article states that historiography will soon have to integrate the experience of these hitherto neglected currents into its main narrative.

Tobacco-Taking and Identity-Making in Early Modern Britain and North America

This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

Gendered Sounds of Revolutionary American Theater

This article examines the relationship of sound and gender politics in revolutionary America by reading two late eighteenth-century dramatic texts, the 1774 pamphlet A Dialogue, Between a Southern Delegate, and His Spouse (written pseudonymously by Mary V. V.), and Virginia playwright Robert Munford's five-act play The Patriots (written c1777, published only posthumously in 1798). Even though the sounds of early America cannot be accessed directly, as there was no sound recording in the modern, technology-based sense, and even though neither of the two dramatic texts has a known record of performances, the article sets out to explore how sound and speech were heard and negotiated, and how they reflected on prevailing cultural assumptions about gendered personhood, and the relationship between gender and politics. Arguably, attention to sound in these texts offers specific insights into the joint articulation of gender and transatlantic politics in the larger struggle over the American revolution. As this article shows, both texts, albeit for different reasons, strategically use gendered sounds to stage specific political interventions: By "listening" carefully to these sounds (as they are represented in writing), one can understand in more detail how acoustic environments impacted on the articulation, legitimation and deliberation of political argument in revolutionary America.

“Woman Proved Herself Man’s Helpmate”

This chapter examines the DAR’s gendered interpretations of patriotism and its efforts to commemorate the American Revolution. In addition, it explores the organization’s turn toward antiradicalism in the post-World War I era and analyzes its impact on their remembrance of colonial and Revolutionary America in the interwar period. The chapter shows that although the Daughters countered male-centered accounts of the War of Independence, insisting that Revolutionary women had been as heroic as men, they generally affirmed traditional gender dichotomies and used memory to defend gender hierarchies in the present. To the Daughters, preserving the memory of early female patriots remained crucial to safeguarding the American nation because its stability depended on the same gendered principles that had governed colonial America.