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"Howell, William Huntting"
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The Garies and their friends
\"Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb's novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their Friends tells the story of two families struggling for different sorts of respectability: the Garies, a well-to-do interracial couple who relocate to Philadelphia from the plantation South in order to legalize their marriage, and their friends the Ellises, free black Philadelphians hoping to make the move from the working class into the bourgeoisie. Along the way the families confront racialized violence, melodramatic villainy, and sentimental reversals. Entertaining and fast-moving, the novel has a Dickensian mix of uncanny coincidence and interwoven personal experiences. The historical documents accompanying this Broadview Edition provide reviews of the novel along with extensive materials on slavery, the color line, and contemporary Philadelphia.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Entering the Lists: The Politics of Ephemera in Eastern Massachusetts, 1774
\"Entering the Lists\" traces the relationship between printing and coercion that underlay the consolidation and maintenance of Revolutionary-era \"patriotism.\" Focused on a set of related ephemeral texts produced in eastern Massachusetts in the spring and summer of 1774, the essay models an approach to the world of printed material that does not assign it automatically to the Habermasian categories of \"abstraction,\" \"impersonality,\" or dispassionate critique. In so doing, it provides a counterpoint to long-held narratives of the natural flowering of American liberalism and the remarkable spontaneity of the American Revolution.
Journal Article
\Read, Pause, and Reflect!!\
First: All politics is literary. [...]All literature is politics. The Senate never acted on the report of their committee; and this son of Zeruiah marched off in triumph; and still lives to boast of his having overawed Congress, and compelled Senators to skulk home in secret, to save their ears!\"6 A fourth anti-Jackson pamphlet from 1828, signed \"Franklin,\" directs its attention to the Jacksonian opposition to infrastructural improvements: it reproduces the text of a Democratic statement of \"fundamental principles,\" and implores its audience to take up the banner of careful analysis. The question is, will you remove the men who agree with you in principle; who harmonize with you in feeling; who will foster your agriculture, protect your manufactures, improve the navigation of your rivers, pierce your mountains with canals, unite your navigable waters, and shield your rivers from the tempest by moles and jettys: will you remove the men who are pledged to do all this, in order to bring in other men, who hold all internal improvement to be unlawful, and who deny that protection of manufactures, is a power granted to Congress, and maintain that the tariff is unconstitutional.7 In and of themselves, these four instances of reading, pausing, and reflection do not add up to a preponderance of historical evidence for anything in particular.
Journal Article
A More Perfect Copy: David Rittenhouse and the Reproduction of Republican Virtue
After commonplace invocations of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson offered up natural philosopher, instrument maker, and philomath David Rittenhouse. \"We have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught. As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. He has not indeed made a world; but he has by imitation approached nearer its Maker than any man who has lived from the creation to this day. Here, Howell talks about that this remark fits easily into Jefferson's well-documented admiration of Rittenhouse and into the popular conception of the natural philosopher, who had gained wide notice as a designer and builder of orreries. Like the deist metaphor of the clockwork universe, popular visions of Rittenhouse yoked scientific probity and replicability with republican disinterest to promote the myth of American ideological unity.
Journal Article
Starving Memory
Like so many wars of the distant past, the American Revolution narrates beautifully in the popular imagination. There is a beginning: April 1775—what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “the shot heard round the world”—in which a once-reluctant and economically diverse populace beats its ploughshares into swords.¹ There is a set of progressive middles, unfolding against now-hallowed spaces: independence is declared in Philadelphia; epic battles are fought at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, at Trenton, at Cowpens, at Yorktown. There are colorful heroes—George Washington, Ethan Allen, the Marquis de Lafayette, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Casimir Pulaski—who rise to their various occasions;
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