CFA: Inaugural SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop (Extended Deadline)

SHEAR is pleased to announce the creation of the SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop and to invite applications for its inaugural session at the annual meeting 20 – 23 July 2017 in Philadelphia.

The journey from first to second book can be a difficult one. From choosing a topic for a second book to finding the time and support to research and write, the structure that guides the writing of the dissertation and first book disappears. Many of us struggle with this transition. We wonder if it makes sense to continue a research trajectory clearly laid out in our first project or to try something entirely new. We search for research support at the same time as teaching and service obligations increase. For some scholars, these difficulties are compounded by the obligations of family and child rearing that can make residential fellowships or long-term travel seem impossible. Yet the second book is an essential step in career advancement: a requirement for the promotion to full professorships or even at some institutions, for tenure. Recognizing the unique challenges of this stage, SHEAR has launched a new program designed to support its members at this transitional point in their scholarly careers.

The SHEAR Second-Book Writers’ Workshop will replicate some of the structures of feedback that dissertation writers experience. The goals of the workshop include both practical advice and the motivation that comes from writing for and with your peers. To accommodate the many stages of second book production, the workshop will encourage flexibility in pre-circulated materials. Organized into genre-based groups, the workshop will provide a space for discussion of drafts of book proposals, fellowship applications, chapter drafts, and other documents related to the writing of a second book. A mentor who has successfully published a second book will lead each workshop group.

In 2017, workshops will take place in the afternoon of Thursday, July 20 prior to the plenary session. Committed mentors include: Johann Neem, Matthew Mason, and Amy Greenberg.

To apply to participate, writers of second books should submit via e-mail to Emily Conroy-Krutz (conroyk5@msu.edu) or Jessica Lepler (jessica.lepler@unh.edu) a single .pdf or Word file that contains a one-page CV and a one-page document comprising a description both of your second book project and of the document that you would like to circulate for the workshop. Applications to participate in the workshop should be submitted no later than March 15, 2017, and applicants can expect to hear back by mid-April.

Accepted participants’ materials for pre-circulation will be due June 15.

Evangelical Religion, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South

The Sacred MirrorRobert Elder is an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University. He is the author of The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860 (2016). Elder is currently working on a biography of John C. Calhoun.

Histories of southern evangelicalism between the Revolution and the Civil War usually hold to a modern historiographical version of the old Puritan declension narrative. In the modern version, early evangelicals initially challenged both slavery and a deeply ingrained honor culture among white southerners, but sometime around 1820 they sold their birthright as social radicals for a mess of hominy in order to win influence and souls, especially white male slaveholding souls. As one historian eloquently put it, “Southern whites came to speak the language of Canaan as evangelicals learned to speak with a southern accent.”[1]

The evangelical transition from opposition to accommodation in the South has some merit, and a compelling narrative arc, but it sets up a binary that obscures as much as it reveals when it comes to honor culture, which most historians of evangelicalism have equated with a sense of pride and a propensity to violence among southern white men. In my book I set out to move beyond the opposition/accommodation binary and this narrow definition of honor in order to describe the more complex ways that the language, practice, and structure of evangelicalism overlapped and intersected with honor culture in the South in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Nothing illustrates this complexity better than a story told by the Methodist minister William Capers, which I tell at the beginning of my second chapter. In his autobiography, Capers vividly describes an incident that occurred at one of the small, backcountry churches that lay along his circuit in the Chester district of South Carolina in the first decade of the nineteenth century. At one of his stops, a place called Carter’s meeting house, a large congregation had gathered, composed of members of the local Methodist society as well as the local community, all interested in the church trial of a woman accused of adultery, which Capers conducted according to the Methodist mode of government. As Capers remembered, “Her father-in-law, and the connections on that side generally believed her guilty,” while the woman’s husband loudly and pitifully proclaimed her innocence, being, as Capers thought, “partially deranged” by the shame of the situation. All the community, including the society members, were “intensely enlisted” on one side or the other of the matter, and when a group of society members chosen by Capers found the woman guilty, the crowd erupted into violence. In the midst of the fight, Capers saw several society members doing their part and the “poor crazy husband fighting his father.”

This story serves as a striking illustration of the way that the practice of church discipline in evangelical churches throughout the South intersected with the concerns of honor, shame, and reputation. And this was not an accidental or isolated occurrence. From the eighteenth century onward, evangelical churches worked their way into the fabric of communal life in the South as public spaces where community opinion coalesced in the form of church verdicts, and where rumors, insults, and reputations were openly probed in ways that don’t fit easily into the opposition/accommodation model. As I argue in the book, I think the best definition of an honor culture is one in which individual identity is largely defined by communal authority and opinion. In a society with few institutions that could plausibly claim to represent “the community,” the united verdict of a church court was an incredibly powerful thing, and churches were inescapably part of the manufacture and maintenance of honor, reputation, and standing in their communities. This process was not without friction, as the ideals of the evangelical community sometimes clashed with the trappings of male honor and the rowdy world of male recreation outside the church. But the areas of congruence were always at least as significant as the areas of conflict, and the assumptions that underlay both honor and evangelical life about the relationship between individual identity and communal authority allowed the church to speak in a way that southerners understood and embraced.

The story also illustrates my larger argument about the nature of evangelicalism during this period. I see my work as an of exploration in a specific historical and cultural location of the arguments that scholars like Charles Taylor have made about the emergence of the modern self, especially the emphasis on personal knowledge as the only true knowledge and the anchor of identity. I argue that southern evangelicalism nurtured both an individualistic sense of the self, as evidenced by its emphasis on conversion, AND a deeply rooted respect for communal authority that is clearly evident, for instance, in church disciplinary records and stories such as the one Capers told. The tension for early southern converts was not, or not only, individual identity vs. community and family (or religion vs. honor), but which community should serve as the community of authority in their lives. That’s very different from our usual notion of evangelicalism, southern and otherwise, as the religious mode of modern individualism. It points to the deep structural harmonies that existed between honor and evangelicalism during this period and suggests that instead of seeing evangelicalism as the harbinger of modern forms of identity, we should see it instead, as Bruce Hindmarsh has argued in the context of early modern England, as embodying a significant alternative to modern identity.

[1] Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 27.

CFP: Lenses and Contacts: Framing Early America

Call for Papers

Lenses and Contacts: Framing Early America
McNeil Center Biennial Graduate Student Conference
Philadelphia, 5–7 October 2017

How vast is too vast? How small is too small? Where do you get your frames? In recent years, scholars have been questioning traditional boundaries and envisioning new frontiers. The advent (and departure?) of the Atlantic World has sparked new ways of framing the field and mapping the space of early America. Scholars are also polishing off traditional lenses of analysis such as politics, economics, and intellectual history. This conference will focus on  established historiographical frameworks and new directions. Papers could address topics including but not limited to: spatial lenses, including Atlantic, continental, global, and local; people, places, and ideas on the margins; histories from above and below; perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality in early America; ways of knowing, including religion, environmental, scientific, and medical histories; networks and crossings—disciplinary and otherwise.

Graduate students in any relevant discipline are invited to submit proposals, which should include a 250-word prospectus and a one-page curriculum vitae together in one pdf document labeled with the applicant’s last name. Please include your name, your paper title, your institutional affiliation, and your email address at the top of the first page of the proposal. Conference presentations will be limited to twenty minutes. Participants will receive some financial support for travel and lodging expenses. Applicants should e-mail their proposals by 15 March 2017 to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.

Decisions will be announced in late May 2017.

Introducing The Panorama: Expansive Views from the Journal of the Early Republic

Check out the newly launched The Panorama, the digital forum for the Journal of the Early Republic. The Panorama explores teaching, researching, and communicating about the Early American Republic in an informal and collaborative fashion, supported by, and extending, the scholarship published in the JERThe Panorama is planning roundtables on a variety of subjects over the coming year, each with a series of posts by practitioners in the field; we look forward to having readers join freewheeling and productive conversations in the comments.

In Memoriam: David Jaffee

Sadly, SHEAR lost our good friend, scholar, and teacher David Jaffee on January 20, 2017, after a valiant struggle with pancreatic cancer.  A native New Yorker, David received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Trained in colonial American history, David soon became interested in American material and visual culture and reinvented himself as a scholar who focused on how objects and images could speak to history. He was Professor and Director of New Media Studies from 2007 to the present at the Bard Graduate Center; from 1987 to 2008, he taught at City College of New York.  The author of People of the Wachusett (1999) and A New Nation of Goods (2010), he was a prolific essayist and workshop instructor who introduced many students to the study of non-literary documents. He is survived by his daughter Isadora Jaffee, his beloved Schneider cousins, and by legions of friends and students inspired by his kindness and generosity. Memorial gifts may be made to the David Jaffee Fellowship in Visual and Material Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, 185 Salisbury St., Worcester, MA 01609 (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/jaffee-fellowship).

A memorial session will be held Sunday, March 26, 2017, 10:30-1:30 at the Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street (between Columbus and Central Park West) New York, NY; His exhibit on the Crystal Palace will be on view at the Center.

Deadline Extended: SHEAR Dissertation Prize

Deadline for submissions for the SHEAR Dissertation Prize extended to Friday, February 17.

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic invites submissions for the SHEAR Dissertation Prize. The Prize will be awarded to an exceptional dissertation pertaining to the history of North America from 1776 to 1861. Within that period, the dissertation may treat virtually any aspect of history, including political, social, cultural, or literary history.

Dissertations successfully defended in calendar years 2015 and 2016 are eligible. To submit a dissertation for consideration, please first send a one-page letter of inquiry accompanied by a brief prospectus, sample chapter, and current CV to:

Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor

University of Pennsylvania Press

3905 Spruce Street

Philadelphia, PA 19104

The prize committee will then invite finalists to send complete dissertations for consideration, and the winner will be announced at SHEAR’s annual conference in July, where a workshop with the prize committee will also be held. The author will receive a publishing contract, and the manuscript will be published as a volume in the book series Early American Studies, cosponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Press.