#lcpresearch

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Check out the Library Company blog to read our most recent Reader Spotlight: 

Michele Navakas studies the cultural significance of coral. At the Library Company, she found Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children (Boston, 1889), which includes the story "Sea-Life" -- featuring talking coral. The polyps explain the anonymous, self-sacrificing labor of building reefs to a starfish: "We are here to build, and building is all we care to do."  The author Jane Andrews discusses collective labor, but is strangely silent about oppression. #LCPFellowFriday

Andrews, Jane. The stories Mother Nature told her children. Boston.  Lee and Shepard. 1889. 

Illustration from James Dwight Dana’s Corals and Coral Islands (New York, 1872).

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Tim Cassedy’s Figure of Speech (University of Iowa Press, 2019) examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order.

Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. #LCPFellowFriday

From the University of Iowa Press Website: https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609386122/figures-of-speech

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In the "Keywords" issue of Early American Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Nora Slonimsky’s “Commerce” looks at the geographical works of Jedidiah Morse to show how “the intersection of market, governmental, and military demands rendered maps powerful political as well as commercial objects.” #LCPFellowFriday

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Check out Dr. Brett Goodin's recent article, published on The Conversation website: 

"Sailors’ journals shed new light on Bennelong, a man misunderstood by history"

Dr. Goodin is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy & Society the Library Company, and a lecturer at the Australian National University. His research focuses on the transnational history of American sailors. He is currently completing the manuscript of his first book, a collective biography of American sailors held captive in the Barbary States, and is beginning writing a second book on American sailors in the Pacific between 1784 and 1914 

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Vagrants. Vagabonds. Hoboes. Identified by myriad names, the homeless and geographically mobile have been with us since the earliest periods of recorded history. In the early days of the United States, these poor migrants – consisting of everyone from work-seekers to runaway slaves – populated the roads and streets of major cities and towns. These individuals were a part of a social class whose geographical movements broke settlement laws, penal codes, and welfare policies. This book documents their travels and experiences across the Atlantic world, excavating their life stories from the records of criminal justice systems and relief organizations.   

Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (NYU Press, 2019) examines the subsistence activities of the mobile poor, from migration to wage labor to petty theft, and how local and state municipal authorities criminalized these activities, prompting extensive punishment. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan examines the intertwined legal constructions, experiences, and responses to these so-called “vagrants,” arguing that we can glean important insights about poverty and class in this period by paying careful attention to mobility. This book charts why and how the itinerant poor were subject to imprisonment and forced migration, and considers the relationship between race and the right to movement and residence in the antebellum US.  Ultimately, Vagrants and Vagabonds argues that poor migrants, the laws designed to curtail their movements, and the people charged with managing them, were central to shaping everything from the role of the state to contemporary conceptions of community to class and labor status, the spread of disease, and punishment in the early American republic. 

#LCPFellowFriday

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We’re excited to share the latest episode of the Library Company’s podcast Talking in the Library: Season 1, Episode 4: Benjamin Franklin and Immigration with Dr. Carla Mulford.

In this episode, the Library Company’s Director of Scholarly Innovation, Dr. Will Fenton, speaks with former Library Company fellow, Dr. Carla J. Mulford, Professor of  English at Penn State University and the Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists.

Dr. Mulford has published widely in the field of early American studies; however, Benjamin Franklin has been her preoccupation for over 25 years. In fact, she has published over 20 articles and book chapters on Franklin, in addition to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2008) and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of  Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015). In spring 2019, Dr. Mulford led the Library Company seminar "Benjamin Franklin and  Immigration," which considered how Franklin's ideas about immigrants and immigration evolved as his career moved from being a colonial leader in Philadelphia to a citizen of the world.

Talking in the Library is also available for streaming on SoundCloud, ITunes, and Google Play.

map from: Benjamin Franklin, “Remarks Upon the Navigation from Newfoundland to New York in Order to Avoid the Gulf Stream,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1786. 17 Per A 160:1769 v.2 12330 .F (McNeil).

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Head over to the Library Company blog to read 2019 Mellon Scholar MaDeja Leverett’s experience as a research intern last month:

“Through the Eyes of Black Women: Intersectionality, Sexual Violence, and Reproductive Rights”

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mellon Scholars Research Fellowship Program aims to promote research in the collections of the Library Company and to enhance the production of scholarly work in African American history of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. These competitive programs are designed to increase the participation of scholars from underrepresented backgrounds and others in the field of African American history prior to 1900.