AHR Interview

Adam McNeil interviews Georgia State University historian Julia Gaffield about the legacy and ongoing influence of Julius S. Scott's The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution.

Julia Gaffield is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the early independence period in Haiti with an emphasis on connections between Haiti and other Atlantic colonies, countries, and empires in the early nineteenth century. She's the author of the 2015 book Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution and the editor of the 2016 volume The Haitian Declaration of Independence. Her current projects include a biography of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and a history of Haiti and the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century. Her article, "The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty," appears in the June 2020 issue of the AHR as part of the forum "Haiti in the Post-Revolutionary Atlantic World." The issue also includes a review roundtable that considers Scott's The Common Wind.

Adam McNeil is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History at Rutgers University where his research focuses on the experiences of Black fugitive women during the American Revolutionary era as well as on histories of Appalachian mountain slavery and labor histories in the nineteenth century. McNeil is a regular contributor to the academic blogs Black Perspectives and The Junto, and host of the podcast New Books in African American Studies.

In this episode we speak with historians Corinne Field and Nicholas Syrett about the April 2020 AHR Roundtable they co-edited titled "Chronological Age: A Useful Category Of Historical Analysis."

Corinne Field is Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia and the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Nicholas Syrett is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Together they co-edited the volume Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York University Press, 2015).

In this episode, Stanford University historian Ana Minian talks about her February 2020 AHR article "Offshoring Migration Control: Guatemalan Transmigrants and the Construction of Mexico as a Buffer Zone." Minian is the author of the book Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018). Her recent op-ed "America Didn't Always Lock Up Immigrants" appeared in the New York Times. She's currently writing a book about the history of immigration detention.

My guest is Tyler Anbinder who, along with Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone A. Wegge, authored the article "Networks and Opportunities: A Digital History of Ireland's Great Famine Refugees in New York," which appears in the December 2019 issue of the AHR.

Tyler Anbinder is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is author of such works as Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s; Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum; and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York.

Cormac Ó Gráda is Professor Emeritus at the University College Dublin's School of Economics. His books include Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1994); Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History.

Simone Wegge is Professor of Economics at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Wegge researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European emigration and the socioeconomics of nineteenth-century European villages. Her work has appeared in the European Review of Economic History, the Journal of Economic History, Social Science History, among other venues.

In this two-part interview, we speak with Michigan State University historian Sharon Leon. Known for her work in American religious history and in digital public history, before moving to MSU Leon spent over a decade at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University where she oversaw numerous award-winning digital projects as well as served as director for the web publishing platform Omeka, a tool whose ongoing development she continues to oversee. Her long list of digital history scholarship includes numerous chapters and articles on topics ranging from digital public history to critiques of the narrative of the field of digital history's own development.

In part 1 of the conversation, we focus on Leon's conception of a broader and better history of digital history as well as her own journey into that field. You can read more on this aspect of Leon's work in the 2018 volume Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities in the chapter "Complicating a 'Great Man' Narrative of Digital History in the United States."

In part 2 of this conversation with Michigan State University historian Sharon Leon, we examine the concept of historians as data creators. Among other things, we discuss Leon's chapter draft "The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation," which you can read and comment on at 6floors.org/bracket.

AHR Associate Editor Michelle Moyd speaks with T.J. Tallie about his reappraisal of Keletso E. Atkins's 1993 book The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900. Tallie is Assistant Professor of History at the University of San Diego and the author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). His reappraisal article "'The Myth Is Dead! Give Us Our History!' Reassessing Black Labor in African History" appears in the December 2019 issue of the AHR.

This episode is the next installment in our series exploring history and the digital world. AHR podcast editor Daniel Story and AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein examine the free and collaborative online U.S. history textbook The American Yawp in a conversation with the project's co-editors, Ben Wright of the University of Texas at Dallas and Joseph Locke of the University of Houston–Victoria.

You can access The American Yawp, as well as explore ways of contributing, at americanyawp.com.

AHR author Charles Francis speaks about his October 2019 issue article "Freedom Summer 'Homos': An Archive Story." Francis is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., an LGBTQ history society that partners with pro bono legal counsel McDermott Will & Emery to undertake archival research that brings to light hidden and suppressed aspects of LGBTQ political history in order to educate the legal community, community leaders, and the media—work the society conceives of as "archive activism."

Francis spoke about his article with AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein and Florida International University historian of queer history Julio Capó Jr.

In this episode AHR editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Karin Wulf, the Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. Wulf is a regular contributor to the Society for Scholarly Publishing's blog The Scholarly Kitchen and a founding member of the initiative Women Also Know History. Wulf is the author of Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia and two co-edited volumes of 18th century women's writing. She's currently completing a book exploring the relationship between genealogical practices and political culture titled "Lineage: The Practice of Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in 18th century British America."