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Current Issue Article Abstracts Spring 2010 Vol. 8.2 • • • • • • • • A Historical Archaeological Study of Eighteenth-Century Newport: Three Middling Households Christina J. Hodge and Diana S. Gallagher How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status and gender and standards of gentility, refinement, and propriety? How and why did new fashions become common necessities? With these issues in mind, three households are considered in two archaeological studies of colonial Newport: Pratt, Tate, and Brown. Archaeologists use artifacts and organic remains alongside visual, oral, and written records to reveal life and experience in these households. In subsequent articles, the authors will address, archaeologically, daily experiences of status, identity, and community in Newport, an early modern commercial town. The sources archaeologists use may be the same as those used by other disciplines, but a focus on things- materiality, physicality, embodiment, and lived experience -distinctly shapes both the questions archaeologists ask and the answers we find. Widow Pratt's World of Goods: Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island Christina J. Hodge The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations; in particular, those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Widow Elizabeth Pratt considers dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision-making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors; neither did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt's choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and constitutive of social values in the long term. Parasites and Sanitation in Eighteenth-Century Newport, Rhode Island: The Pratt, Brown, and Tate Families Diana S. Gallagher Archaeologists see privies as goldmines of information, as an assemblage of materials that can tell us much about people's daily lives. The artifacts excavated from privies were not saved deliberately and, in fact, no one who put anything in one ever thought it would come back out. Broken dishes, a lost button or pin -no one would ever try to retrieve those things. Even less would a person be thinking about the human intestinal parasites that can tell us about diet, sanitation, yard use and gardening, domestic animals and, of course, health. Can we look at parasite levels, specific species and lifecycles and say something about the daily lives and relative status of three households in the thriving commercial town of Newport? We can, although this is an area of study that is still developing. In this paper, three eighteenth-century privies from Newport, RI will be discussed in terms of the questions they can help us answer about the levls of health and sanitation for each of these households and how that relates to their residents' experiences and status within the larger community. The parasites from these privies, along with seeds, bones, and artifacts, will be used to help illuminate an eighteenth century landscape of daily life, sanitation, health, and illness. Calvin and Locke: Dueling Epistemologies in The New-England Primer, 1720-1790 Stephanie Schnorbus Most historians agree there was a shift away from Calvinism and toward Enlightenment thought during the eighteenth century. When discussing that shift in relation to children's literature or education, some historians use The New-England Primer as an example of unchanging Calvinism. Other historians argue that changes, especially the addition of certain illustrated lessons, secularized the primer. "Calvin and Locke" argues that the changes to illustrations and their accompanying text in The New-England Primer can best be understood through a grasp of John Calvin's and John Locke's theories of knowledge. An examination of text, images, and epistemology in The New-England Primer reveals that the shift from Calvin to Locke was neither complete nor terribly secularizing. The changes that did occur, beginning with significant ones in the 1750s, are an excellent example of how Christianity and the Enlightenment interacted, and call into question whether secularization is the best characterization of that interaction. "Astrology's from Heaven not from Hell": The Religious Significance of Early American Almanacs T. J. Tomlin Although the astrological content of eighteenth and early-nineteenth century almanacs has most often been characterized as offering an "occult" spirituality, this essay argues that almanac astrology could not have been practiced and would not have been popular without its connection to mainstream Protestantism. Almanac-makers, like natural philosophers, viewed the cosmos as a legible text through which God communicated. Astrology, a clearly-organized system to explain occurrences in the natural world, was a means toward that end. As used by almanac-makers, it did nothing to challenge and everything to promote British America's prevailing religious sensibility. For some almanac-makers, this was a sincere and intentional effort to instruct readers in spiritual truth; for others, it was merely a successful attempt to meet readers' expectations. Influenced by European practice, the American market for books, and an interplay between producers and consumers, the astrology at the center of early America's most widespread form of print was, as one almanac-maker put it, "a handmaid fit for bless'd theology." "Light might possibly be requisite": Edgar Huntly, Regional History, and Historicist Criticism Andrew Newman Charles Brockden Brown's celebrated novel Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), set in the Forks of Delaware region of Pennsylvania, has been related to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the basis of a mistaken understanding that its action takes place during the summer of 1787. The correct date is 1785. However, the narrative's connections to the local history of Indian relations are systematic and profound. Its villain, the Indian crone "Old Deb," is modeled after an elderly Delaware woman from Chester County, Hannah Freeman. Edgar himself is modeled in part after Moses Marshall, who walked off the measurement for the 1737 Walking Purchase land fraud. Moreover, a pivotal scene between Edgar and the traveler Weymouth is a symbolic reenactment of the mid-century treaty meetings at which the Delaware spokesman Teedyuscung sought restitution for the Walking Purchase. These claims provide an occasion to reflect on the methods of historicist criticism: how connections to history illuminate a literary work. "Ready to act in defiance of Government": Colonial Philadelphia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747-1748 Jessica Choppin Roney This article examines the Defense Association formed in Philadelphia in 1747-48, an extra-legal militia that for a short time usurped governmental powers when the city feared attack during King George's War. The piece argues that the Defense Association was no aberration, but must be understood as the fruition and extension of patterns of voluntary organization that had been developing in Philadelphia for twenty years. The Association, in turn, expanded the scope of what was politically possible through voluntary organization and carved out space for future extra-legal organizing up to and including the Revolutionary groups of the 1770s. "A Flag of Defyance at the Masthead": The Delaware River Pilots and the Sinews of Philadelphia's Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century Simon Finger This essay explores a neglected link in the chain of Atlantic commerce by examining the role of river pilots, who conducted maritime traffic from the ocean to the Port of Philadelphia, nearly 100 miles up the Delaware River. Pilots' specialized knowledge made them a vital part of the city's commercial economy in peacetime, and of its defensive posture in wartime. The need for their services also granted them an unusual degree of leverage in negotiating the terms of their labor. By tracing the development of this profession, the article provides a new perspective into how Philadelphia managed its relationship with the broader Atlantic World. "Jacobins in this Country": The United States, Great Britain, and Trans-Atlantic Anti-Jacobinism Rachel Hope Cleves Conservative vitriol against domestic "Jacobinism" suffused American political culture from the early 1790s to the Civil War. Yet this transnational counter-revolutionary discourse has received far less attention than transnational radicalism during the recent Atlantic turn in early American history. Seeking to correct that oversight, this article argues that American anti-Jacobinism developed simultaneously and in conversation with British anti-Jacobinism. American prints and events influenced British opposition to French Revolutionary violence, just as they were influenced by Britain. At the same time, British and American counter-revolutionaries frequently clashed over national interests. Recovering American contributions to transatlantic anti-Jacobinism opens new questions about the sentiments underlying it. I argue that American anti-Jacobinism grew out of deeply-rooted concerns about domestic civil violence. Ultimately, these fears of bloodshed transformed anti-Jacobinism into a powerful weapon against the violence of slavery. Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785-1800 Robert Battistini Americans did not have the luxury of merely contemplating the Muslim world between 1785 and 1800. Over a hundred American sailors were captive in Algiers in this period. The escalation and temporary resolution of this dispute informed the imagery of Muslims in hundreds of articles published in American magazines. These Muslim people and places ranged across centuries of time, thousands of miles, and multiple ethnicities, and the images did not conform to one or even a few models. American magazine readers learned that the diversity and complexity of Muslims were akin to their own. This study considers much of the magazine archive from this period and finds clear patterns that parallel the historical experience of America with Algiers. While the non-Barbary regions (Persia, Arabia, and Turkey) remained objects of fascination and even delight, the Barbary coast emerged as a pragmatic political concern by the mid-1790s. These magazines are a significant source about a crucial moment in American nation-formation. Muslims were an ethnic, religious, and cultural other by which Americans began to imagine themselves. Though nineteenth-century Americans learned to think of Muslims through the familiar Orientalist categories, this periodical archive reveals an anxious, uncertain dance before the eventual swagger. |
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