May 2023 Newsletter

Danielle Kinsey Blog Post

Living in a Material World

 

MAY 2023 NEWSLETTER

 

A monthly roundup of what we’re reading this month – or listening to – in the world of material culture, alongside any updates from our editorial board.

 

The upgrade of our H-Material Culture website is coming this summer! If you’re curious about what the new platform will be like and how you can use it to build a personal public profile, there’s a 90 second trailer available here: https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/h-net30teasertrailerv2.mp4

 

What we’ve been reading

 

Jennifer M. Black:

This past week my university sponsored a

Reconstruction and the Secession Crisis

David Prior Blog Post

In this post for H-CivWar’s Authors’ Blog, David Prior explores the meanings of the term reconstruction during the secession crisis. He asks: has the term always had two valences, one conservative, the other transformative?

               One of the goals of my current research is exploring how the term reconstruction became a name for the postbellum, post-abolition moment in the United States. It is a more perplexing and important topic than it may first seem. Scholarly disagreement about the nature of America’s Reconstruction goes beyond the ironic questioning of inherited wisdom. Even as the

 

Christopher Menking is a Professor of History at Tarrant County College. His research focuses on the United States-Mexico War and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands. The current focus of his research is the influence of the US Army Quartermaster Department on South Texas. The research conducted at the Amon Carter contributed to a manuscript on the above topic and informs the following post. He is also working on a manuscript on the soldiers’ experience during the Mexican War and a concert of Mexican War Era music. If you would like to contribute to this blog as well, I'm solicing new

Northern Slavery Under the British and French Empires

Aaron Ackerley Blog Post

Chris J. Gismondi,

McGill University

Slavery in North America conjures up images of West Indies plantations or the American south, but its presence in northern sites is noteworthy and under examined. This amnesia is despite Rhode Island’s role as a major hub of the slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century. Figures like Sue fleeing James Clark in Niagara, laboured, toiled, and resisted systems of slavery without cash crops, but served and provided for enslavers in cold, isolated, frontier settlements. Although various regions from Mexico to Canada at different times enslaved both Indigenous

Handgrenade Temporary Hiatus for October

John Kuehn Blog Post

Handgrenade Hiatus

All---since I have been posting the McMulllen wrap up posts on the main H-WAR discussion thread, I will be delaying my next handgrenade (which is already half written) until November.   See you in about 4 weeks.

 

John T. Kuehn

Fort Leavenworth KS

 

I am happy to continue our series on transnational research. If you are interested in contributing to this blog, click here. Vera Blinn Reber (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison), taught for 38 years at Shippensburg University and is now Professor Emerita. She is author of British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810-1880 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) and over twenty-five articles. Four of the articles have received awards including “The Demographics of Paraguay: A Reinterpretation of the Great War, 1864-1970,” HAHR 68, no. 2 (1988) which received the

I am pleased to conclude our three-part series on both how scholars can collaborate to increase their research output and on transnational work on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. If you missed the first or second post, please check them out. Andrae Marak is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences & Graduate Studies and a Professor of History and Political Science at Governors State University. Laura Tuennerman is a Professor of History at California University of Pennsylvania. They are co-editors (with Clarissa Confer) of Transnational Indians in the North American West (Texa

 

I am pleased to continue our three-part series on both how scholars can collaborate to increase their research output and on transnational work on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. If you missed the first post, please click here. Andrae Marak is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences & Graduate Studies and a Professor of History and Political Science at Governors State University. Laura Tuennerman is a Professor of History at California University of Pennsylvania. They are co-editors (with Clarissa Confer) of Transnational Indians in the North American West (Texas A&M Press

I am pleased to begin today with the first of a three-part series on both how scholars can collaborate to increase their research output and on transnational work on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Andrae Marak is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences & Graduate Studies and a Professor of History and Political Science at Governors State University. Laura Tuennerman is a Professor of History at California University of Pennsylvania. They are co-editors (with Clarissa Confer) of Transnational Indians in the North American West (Texas A&M Press, 2015). Their blog posts will

Camp Nelson, a National Monument

Randolph Hollingsworth (she/her) Blog Post

The first national monument in Kentucky is Camp Nelson, (see the National Park Service website here). It was formerly owned by Jessamine County and widely revered as the Camp Nelson Civil War Heritage Park. A five hundred and twenty-five acre plot of the site was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2013 (see the Herald-Leader article on this recognition), and the planning for the National Park Service to conduct a feasibility study for national monument status got under way.

Camp Nelson was originally established by an order by President Abraham Lincoln and included a supply depot