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One from the vaults: we repost Randall Stephens's contribution, which originally appeared on November 24, 2009. [crossposted at Religion in American History ] Randall Stephens As Americans prepare to stuff their faces with turkey, pie, turkey pie, and all manner of bread-related foods, and clock in millions of hours of TV football viewing, it’s worth considering the Pilgrims, originators of America's holiday. (I was just thinking that a Martian would have a very hard time understanding how football and overeating are linked to an otherworldly religious sect.) How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general? How low the founders of our national myth have fallen. Nineteenth-century Protestants celebrated the Pilgrims as hearty, pure-of-heart forbearers. Yet even in the 19th century Pilgrims had their share of detractors. Eli Thayer, the Kansas prophet, and the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale fussed about the place of Pilgrims in American history...

Chris Beneke Pauline Maier passed away Monday . Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position, but hardly does justice to the person who filled it. I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming, ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh. Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The first two changed our understanding of pre-Revolutionary politics ;  the third upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence ;  the fourth provided the first full account of how the U.S. Constitution was ratified . Each was definitive, the sort of book that every early American historian n...

Gabriel Loiacono    One evening, chatting with friends from church, one asked me what kind of history I focused on. I told him: the history of welfare in early America.  He said: what welfare in early America? "The drunkard's progress, or the direct road to poverty, wretchedness & ruin," 1826. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. I find myself having a conversation like that one more and more these days.  Whether on the left or the right politically, high school grads or Ph.D.s, most Americans I talk to assume that welfare is a creation of the twentieth century: midwifed by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson.  Those hearty, independent minutemen of the Revolutionary period, they assume, either made the poor find work or relied only on churches for charity.  Occasionally, this assumption is voiced explicitly in national, political discourse.  For example, in a famous September 12, 2011 Republican Presidential Primary debate, Representative R...

Randall Stephens The following excerpt is from Michal Jan Rozbicki's review essay in the June 2013 issue of Historically Speaking .  Rozbicki uses Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (Random House, 2012) to delve into "the cult of great individuals," which even in the present, does not lack enthusiasts.  Rozbicki is professor of history and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011). One would be hard pressed to find a dull period in Thomas Jefferson’s life. Mindful of that, I began devouring Jon Meacham’s 800-page Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power anticipating a gourmet biographical feast. It started off as an enjoyable and well-paced story but it was not long before the taste of syrup began to take over. By the time I reached page eight I had already been informed that “Jefferson was the most successful ...

Randall Stephens In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking .  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers.  The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.   Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treat...

Joseph Stromberg, "Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism New archaeological evidence and forensic analysis reveals that a 14-year-old girl was cannibalized in desperation," Smithsonian , May 1, 2013 The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl. >>> "Study reveals cannibalism in first US colony," AlJazeeraEnglish , May 1, 2013    raherrmann, "Digging Out My Cannibal Girl Hat," The Junto blog, May 2, 2013 . . . . So, funny story. When I first submitted my article on cannibalism and the Starving Time at Jamestown to the William and Mary Quarterly, the piece strong...

Eric Schultz Brian Williams recently featured a story on the NBC Nightly News about the bureaucratic nightmare that has more than 900,000 American veterans awaiting disability benefits from the government. The Veterans Administration is promising to have the backlog cleared by the end of 2015, but for now, the average wait time is 273 days. After hearing this I had a flashback of sorts and walked downstairs into the basement, past the water softener and over by the Christmas ornaments to find the musty blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with my King Philip’s War notes from over twenty years ago.  Sure enough, there was the file marked “Veterans.”  I began leafing through it. In December 1675, 696 Massachusetts Bay soldiers mustered on Dedham Plain, thought to be the present Hyde Park section of Boston. They were to march south and meet with soldiers assembling in Plymouth and Connecticut colonies to form a thousand-man army and attack the Narragansetts in their large fort at today’...

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation.  This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar. The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Con...