Thomas Simpson is an instructor at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy and has written a couple of great articles on Mormonism and higher education during the second half of the nineteenth century (see here and here), which was based on his dissertation at the University of Virginia. Well, that dissertation is now a book to be published by UNC Press, and from what I hear it’s a great one. Here is the press’s page for it, where you can read more about the project. Anyway, if you pre-order the book through the press right now and use 01DAH40 as a promo code, you can get 40% off. I’ve already done it, and I recommend you do as well. This will be a book for anyone with interest in American religious history.

I did a Q&A with Thomas Simpson over at Juvenile Instructor.

One of the things I hope this blog will do is be a repository for reading/writing assignments I’ve used in classes. This last semester I taught an 18th Century Atlantic Revolutions Class where we focused on the American, French, and Haitian Revolts. (I contemplated adding the revolutions within the Spanish Empire, but decided against it for a number of reasons. Mostly because we already had too much to cover.) The class had both undergraduate and graduate students, so I had to produce two different outlines. I’ll give an outline of the writing assignments and group projects at another time, but below are readings.

Undergraduate Students

• Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative Perspective (NYU Press, 2009).
• David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2004).
• Lynn Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (Bedford, 1996).
• Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Holt, 2007).
• David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Hackett, 2014).
• Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture (Vintage, 2007).

Graduate Students

• R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, updated edition (Princeton University Press, 2014).
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Harvard University Press, 1992).
• Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015).
• Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012).
• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2015).
• David Andress, 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
• William Doyle, Aristocracy and its Enemies in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2015).
• David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004).
• Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press, 2010).
• Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
• Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (UNC Press, 2015).

When I originally envisioned The Junto Blog, I wanted it to be a place where junior academics could come and share research tales, archival experiences, disciplinary thoughts, and other fun-but-important aspects of academic life. The tone, as I told the first contributors, was to be an engaged but informal discussion at a lunch table. To say the blog’s exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. As one example of the excellent work they’ve done, here’s a roundtable from last week on tips and advice for researching at various archives across the Atlantic world:

• Casey Schmitt on Spanish archives
• Hannah Bailey on French archives
• Jessica Parr on British archives
• Chris Minty on American archives for British researchers
• Aaron Graham on Caribbean archives

In case you missed them, I strongly recommend bookmarking these pages for future reference.

Last weekend I attended my last Kinder Institute event of my postdoctoral tenure: the Shawnee Trail Conference. You can read the program at this link; it was a mixture of history and political science papers, and the participants ranged from doctoral students to tenured professors. We even had a lunch-time presentation by Andrew Porwancher on his recently published book. (Frankly, I wish we could have heard about his current project, on Alexander Hamilton’s secret Jewish life.)

The group of presenters at the Shawnee Conference. It wasn’t very, um, diverse.

The conference was a reaffirmation of much of what I learned these last two years at the Kinder Institute: history and political science are very, very different fields. I mean, I learned a lot from the papers, and they were even interesting, but they are just framed around different questions and responding to different concerns. (I even tweeted about this at the time.) Now, it’s important to continue trying to reach across disciplinary boundaries–which I hope to do even after my Kinder stage–but it is a reminder of how much our scholarly contexts shape the way we look at our subjects.