CFP Roundup 9.18.2013

Below are a number of recent Calls for Papers:

5th Annual LSU History Graduate Conference
 
When? March 21-22, 2014.
Where?  Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Deadline: December 1, 2013.

We invite submissions for panels or individual papers from graduate students at all levels of study. Proposals may cover all fields and approaches of historical scholarship and span all chronological and geographical boundaries…The keynote speaker is Edward L. Ayers, President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond and author of Vengeance & Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South and What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History.

 

Bloggin' the Bookshelf: Peter Mancall's "Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic. 

Neither Indians nor colonists could sever the alcohol trade from the workings of empire. The peculiar vice of Europeans had become a fixture in Indian country, deadly medicine that remained to poison relations between the peoples of North America (180).

So concludes Peter Mancall's nearly twenty-year old work on alcohol in early America. Mancall, now at Southern Cal, wrote this book not only with an eye towards trying to figure out the roots of the conundrum of rampant alcoholism in modern Native American communities, but also to try and highlight how contingency - and not simply a biological predisposition - played such an important role in the early alcohol trade. According to Mancall, "Indians in colonial America made choices when they drank" (8), more often than not as responses to opportunities that became available to them. 

Edmund Morgan, 1916-2013

Today is a sad day: at around noon I found out that Edmund Morgan, the dean of early American history, passed away. 

I have struggled to try and figure out how to describe how much Dr. Morgan has meant to me. One skill that I always admired about him was his ability to simply explain the complexities inherent in the historical actors he wrote about (John Winthrop and Ezra Stiles to name a few). With that in mind, I'm going to (attempt) to write as Ed did, clearly and passionately. 

How Bibliocentric was Early America?

Earlier this month, Mark Noll provided perhaps the most provocative argument of the 3rd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture when he claimed that the America of 1740-1820 was a "creation of the Bible," bolstered by the Protestant non-establishment. He went further, arguing that public use of scripture is always political in the United States. When pressed to elucidate further, most notably by John Corrigan's question of how Noll's understanding of the period in question differed from previous arguments made by Jon Butler, Noll stood his ground (Charlie McCrary penned a fantastic summation of the conference on the Junto; for a tweet by tweet timeline, see this Storify).