Tag Archives: Early American History

The Professor and the Process: Dr. Steven Stoll and Ramp Hollow

The History Department blog recently caught up with Dr. Steven Stoll to discuss his newest book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017). The book illuminates how the persistent poverty and pejorative perceptions associated with Appalachia are a result of the industrial powers that utilized the people to strip the land of its natural resources.

History Department: So how did the entire project begin?

Steven Stoll:  I originally set out to write a book about the collision between agrarian people (peasants, settlers, campesinos) in the Western Hemisphere. I then decided Continue reading

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Filed under Faculty News, Publications

Fordham Professors in the News

Dr. Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, the author of A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America, and a recognized authority on the Second Amendment, has recently published two online articles about the gun debate: “Gun Anarchy and the Unfree State, the Real History of the Second Amendment” in The Baffler (October 3), and in Salon (October 22), “Five Types of Gun Laws the Founding Fathers Loved: Were muskets in 1777 better regulated than assault rifles in 2017?”

Dr. Asif Siddiqi’s highly regarded book, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974, was quoted in a recent New Yorker article. The article, “Remembering Laika, Space Dog and Soviet Hero” (November 3, 2017) quoted Dr. Siddiqi’s description of the stringent requirements that Soviets followed in choosing dogs for the space mission.

Dr. Steven Stoll’s forthcoming new book, Ramp Hallow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang) received an in-depth review in Washington Monthly, published jointly with ProPublica (October 30). As described by the reviewer, Stoll, “has set out to tell the story of how the people of a sprawling region of our country—one of its most physically captivating and ecological bountiful—went from enjoying a modest by self-sufficient existence as small- scale agrarians for much of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries to a dreary dependency on the indulgence of coal barons or the alms of government.” Dr. Stoll will discuss his new book at The New School on November 13.

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Filed under Essays in History, Faculty News, Publications, This week in Fordham History

New Directions in Early Modern and Modern History: The 2015 Fordham Graduate Colloquium Conference, May 8 4PM

The History Department is pleased to announce the schedule for the 2015 Graduate Colloquium Conference “New Directions in Early Modern and Modern History”. The conference will take place on Friday May 8 at 4PM in Walsh Library 040.Presentations cover evenly almost the whole period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with presenters addressing topics as diverse as royal succession and government in Tudor England, torture and public disorder in Colonial America, and mass consumption, labor justice, and education in the modern US. Read on for the conference schedule and paper abstracts…

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Fall Courses: Writing Early America (Crane)

Among the new course on offer in Fall 2015 will be HIST 5644: Writing Early America with Professor Elaine Crane. This course will focus on the “creation” of early America by historians whose ideas have strongly influenced our conception of Euro-America’s first centuries. We will consider the work of well known authors such as Edmund Morgan, John Demos, Bernard Bailyn, Al Young, Mary Beth Norton, Simon Schama, Laurel Ulrich, Linda Kerber, David Hall, and Paul Boyer/Stephen Nissenbaum. In doing so, the class will obtain a richer understanding of the evolution of American society through a variety of topics: slavery, Native Americans, the Revolutionary  movement, gender issues, the invisible world.

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Fordham Seniors Selected for Early American Studies Workshop

John Taylor & Sons, the brewery at the center of a libel lawsuit brought against the teetotaler Edward Delavan

John Taylor & Sons, the brewery at the center of a libel lawsuit brought against the teetotaler Edward Delavan

Two FCRH seniors, Tim Derocher and Chris Nolan, were recently selected to participate in the McNeil Center for Early American Studies’ annual Undergraduate Research Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Together, Nolan and Derocher will present a panel on two unique libel cases in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a product of research completed for Dr. Elaine Forman Crane’s “Laws and Outlaws in Early America” seminar. Over the next few months, they will be working with a graduate mentor from Penn to enhance their research and form a more cohesive panel on libel and slander cases in early America, which will be presented in April in Philadelphia. Read on to learn more about their research. Continue reading

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Filed under Student Awards, Undergrad News

New Course to Explore Material Culture in Early America

Perforated cooking spoon: eighteenth century

Perforated cooking spoon: eighteenth century

This Fall, Professor Elaine Crane will offer a new course, HIST 4658 Home Sweet Home: the Material Culture of Early America. The course will meet on Tuesdays 3:30-5:30 at the New York Historical Society in Manhattan.

Professor Crane writes:

Home Sweet Home will explore early America through objects in daily use. We will look at candle molds to see how hot wax and string turned darkness into light.  We will handle utensils and cooking ware to learn how people produced the food they ate and the beverages they drank without the help of microwave ovens and processors. Wooden plates and porcelain cups will distinguish rich from poor as will the furniture and textiles people passed from one generation to another. Room by room and article by article early Americans will reveal how they lived their lives.

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New Book Confronts Bestiality, Society, and the Law in Early American History

tamingLustimageThe Fordham History Department celebrate the publication of an exciting new book by one of our most distinguished faculty, Professor Doron S. Ben-Atar. Taming Lust:  Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic, which Professor Ben-Atar wrote together with Richard D. Brown, begins as an inquiry into two separate cases of bestiality brought before the courts in Massachusetts and Connecticut in the 1790s.  Continue reading

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