history carnival xvi is up...
...and hosted by Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows").
...and hosted by Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows").
New this fall from the University of Georgia Press is Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, a biography of eighteenth-century Afro-Briton Olaudah Equiano by my dissertation director, Vincent Carretta. Equiano is the author of the autobiographical work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, first published in 1789, and lately the subject of sometimes heated academic debate over whether he was truly born in Africa, as he claims in his Narrative. One of the issues at stake in this debate is whether or not we have a first-person account of the middle passage, the brutal trans-Atlantic nautical route by which millions of Africans were taken to and enslaved in the Americas.
When disciplines collide. David Brewer, an English professor, has put out an interesting call for papers for ASECS 2006. This CFP evidences two trends in eighteenth-century studies, the interdisciplinary nature of the field (which has long seen a close relationship between the work of historians and of literary scholars), and a relatively new focus on the importance of international exchange during the period.
Continue reading ""atlantic history and literary history"" »
Project MUSE has now picked up the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. The new editors provide this statement in the demo issue currently available for free:
Yesterday afternoon I met Cath Feely for a few hours worth of conversation about various topics including interdisciplinarity, theory, and the field of book history. Cath, a history PhD student here at the University of Manchester, has an online essay--"'Interdisciplinarity run riot': the pleasures and pitfalls of research design in book history"--touching on some of these issues at the Book History Research Network.(1)
One comment she made in our conversation struck me as particularly well expressed, and so I wrote it down:
People are realizing that they can engage with theory without being beholden to it. You can take something away from Foucault without becoming a Foucauldian.
This is certainly my sense of where things currently stand in the humanities, where it seems that scholars are willing and able to embrace a kind of self-conscious eclecticism without abandoning a sense of intellectual consistency.(2)
We talked awhile about studying the history of reading, and she encouraged me to get my hands on Robert Darnton's "Readers Respond to Rousseau" in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. And so I shall.
Of course, we talked about blogging, too. Cath doesn't have a blog, but she's a good candidate to contribute to a group project that's just a spark in my imagination at the moment.(3)
Oh, and Cath's mother is a school teacher who, back in the day, had as students the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Apparently, somewhere there's a video of a school production of Jesus Christ, Superstar featuring a young Gallagher lad in one of the roles.
1. Cath notes that this is not a fully polished essay, and that she is not sure she still maintains all of the opinions expressed in the essay.
2. On a related note, this week sees the launch of a discussion of Theory's Empire over at The Valve. I think the discussion is a worthy project, but I'm just not that interested. The topic does not speak to my current scholarly interests or needs...I think. That statement may come back to haunt me.
3. Speaking of such group-authored endeavors: it will take me just an hour or two of work to get the teaching-oriented Palimpsest back online, which I promise to do before the next school term starts. Hosting complications appear to have been resolved.
Litera Scripta Manet (The Written Word Endures)-Motto in painting on ceiling at Library of Congress
I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.-The Bodleian Declaration
Oxford University's Bodleian Library gift shop sells a metal plaque declaring "Litera Scripta Manet," accompanied by a card that explains the motto is featured at the LoC and that it "perhaps comes from Horace."
Before you can get a reader's card at the Bodleian, you must recite and then sign a printed version of the Bodleian Declaration.
The two quotes highlight a paradox in attitudes toward our Western cultural heritage. On the one hand, we believe in the lasting power of the ideas contained in the most valuable documents archived in our libraries. On the other hand, we know that we must remain vigilant to protect the often quite fragile objects upon which the written word is preserved; every time a reader handles a letter, a book, a pamphlet, a will, a map, the object is one (often quite tiny, but sometimes not) step closer to oblivion. Ask any physicist: entropy is unavoidable. Librarians know this, of course, and the special collections in libraries are an attempt to keep the inevitable at bay. They are the place where abstract ideas concerning such things as art, history, and philosophy collide with the reality of the material world.
I've been thinking about writing a post on digital archives, commercialization, scholarship, teaching, and access, but Ray Rosenzweig, in "Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely" (Chronicle, sub req'd) has pretty much beaten me to it. Although Rosenzweig's focus is on teaching, he brings up a central concern of mine, namely the cost of commercial offerings of digitized cultural heritage resources: if my university cannot afford to subscribe, then my scholarship and my teaching (i.e. my students' education) are going to suffer.
Continue reading "there are archives, and then there are archives" »
Friday and Saturday were awesome research days at the British Library. I found some really juicy stuff that's going to be very useful. I was there yesterday from 9:30 until closing at 5:00 yesterday, and I was so excited by what I was finding that I didn't want to leave.
My time has not been filled only with work, however. Friday night I saw a very good production of Henry IV Part 1 with Laurie and her friend Jessica at the National Theatre. Tuesday night we'll catch the second part. Jessica totally kicks ass for landing tickets to supposedly sold-out shows.
Last night my friend Nancy and I headed out to the hip joint of the moment, which goes by the name of the Boogaloo. It's supposed to be the place to see and be seen, but it seemed just like any other pub I've been to in London. Well, there was one difference: the beer was about twice as expensive. Still, it was fun to hang out there, and the way the juke box works is pretty cool. The rumor is that Coldplay went there once to take in (or contribute to) the vibe and got angry when no one recognized them.
Today was an eighteenth-century geek's idea of paradise. Nancy and I shared a delicious lunch at a Thai restaurant, then visited Dennis Severs' House (see photo below), which is one part living history site and two parts happening.
Subsequently, we walked up City Road to John Wesley's chapel, built in the 1760s, and to Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists' cemetery right across the street.
The Museum of London was our next stop, and coincidentally enough, there is a sculpture next to the entrance that marks the site of John Wesley's conversion experience; Wesley described feeling a "strange warming of the heart" while walking along Aldersgate Street. Not exactly the most dramatic of descriptions given that some of Wesley's evangelical peers were passing out and speaking in tongues.
The Museum of London is a well-done presentation of the history of the city, with artifacts from the last several hundred years. We each bought a reproduction of a 1745 London map, and then headed straight for the Restoration and eighteenth-century sections, which has an exhibit on the Great Fire of 1666, and then several other exhibits organized thematically around themes like "printing" or "prison." Perhaps I'm making it sound too dry, but it really is well done. I especially like this "sermon glass".
Next on the agenda: more walking! We ended up at a pub for a couple of pints of John Courage (produced by a brewery founded in 1787), and capped off the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant of my favorite kind.
Now I'm going to bed...
Those of you in the D.C. area might want to stop by this exhibit at the Folger:
This exhibition devotes itself to the myriad processes of letterwriting: the penning, sending, receiving, reading, circulating, copying, and saving of letters. The text of a letter provides one part of the story, while its very tangibility --the ancient folds, the grime and fingerprints deposited by the writer, deliverer, and readers, the broken seals, the ink blots, the idiosyncratic spelling, the location of a signature--tells another. An understanding of a letter's written and unwritten social signals brings into focus a fuller, grittier, and ultimately more convincing picture of everyday life in early modern England.
(Via WaPo.)
This 2005 summer institute at the National Humanities Research Center looks interesting:
Benjamin Franklin: Reader, Writer, Printer
Led by Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania)
July 10-15
This seminar will focus upon Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, and in particular upon his detailed descriptions of what and how he read from when he was a child, on his material practices as a writer, on his fascination with authorship and anonymity, and on his work in every aspect of the book trade.
This summer institute from the National Endowment for the Humanities looks interesting:
THE HANDWRITTEN WORLDS OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Dates: June 20-July 29, 2005 (6 weeks)
Steven W. May, Georgetown College, KY
Faculty: Julia Boffey, Victoria Burke, S. P. Cerasano, A.S.G. Edwards, Mary C. Erler, Margaret J.M. Ezell, Adam Fox, Laura Gowing, Harold Love, Alan Stewart, Paul Werstine, H. R. Woudhuysen
Information: Kathleen Lynch
Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol St., SE
Washington, DC 20003-1094
202-675-0333
i n s t i t u t e AT f o l g e r DOT e d u
Maybe I'll apply. I'll write for more information. What is an NEH Summer Institute?
Institutes provide intensive collaborative study of texts, topics, and ideas central to undergraduate teaching in the humanities under the guidance of faculties distinguished in their fields of scholarship. Institutes aim to prepare participants to return to their classrooms with a deeper knowledge of current scholarship in key fields of the humanities.
Keep this in mind the next time proposals come around (and they will be coming around) to gut the funding for the NEH.
I have been searching my notes in vain for reference to a practice I remember reading about.
I can remember learning that in the eighteenth century Anglo-American world, members of a religious community would gather to listen to letters from abroad (concerning spiritual matters) being read out loud.
Am I imagining this, or is this a well-known practice that somehow slipped below the radar of my note-taking habits?
Cross posted at C18-L
Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I've just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:
I'll blog more about SHARP 2004 when I'm back in KC. Right now there are too many fun things to do over here. Suffice it to say that the conference was great. I'm back in London, now, where the weather is mercifully cooler.
As I was leaving the British Library yesterday, I passed three Americans looking at the enormous statue of Isaac Newton in the library's courtyard.
Man with strong southern (American) accent: Issac Newton. Now what was he famous for?
Young Woman, looking at the compass Newton is using: Drawing a circle?
Other Young Woman: The laws of gravity.
Me: He invented calculus.*
Man: Yeah, or an apple fell on his head or somethin'.
Me: [blank stare]
*This is not entirely correct, it turns out. According to the Wikipedia entry "Newton ... shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of differential calculus."
The British Library has made available online the Crace Collection of Maps of London, "the essential guide to the development of the capital from the 16th to the 19th centuries, brought together by the Victorian designer, Frederick Crace." This exhibit is part of a BL site entitled Collect Britain, "the British Library's largest digitisation project to date ... By summer 2004 you can view and hear a staggering 100,000 images and sounds from our world-renowned collections without ever needing to visit the prestigious building in London." (via Andrew Pink on C18-L)
Via WaPo: The Library of Congress, as part of their amazing American Memory site, has launched "Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories."
