Abstract: This provocation explores the various ways in which the history of Thomas Jefferson’s time at the Graff House (the modest eighteenth-century home in which he rented rooms while composing the Declaration of Independence) has been understood and interpreted at various crucial flashpoints in the 250 years separating Jefferson’s occupancy and our own contemporary moment. In particular, the provocation seeks to think about the life of Robert Hemings, Jefferson’s fourteen-year-old enslaved valet, who also occupied the Graff House while Jefferson worked on his draft. Taking its occasion public interest in this site in the lead-up to the Semiquincentennial, the provocation considers the work of the contemporary American visual artist Sonya Clark who sought to illuminate Robert Hemings life at a site-specific installation at the Declaration House in 2024.
Abstract: This Invention uses memories of growing up in Utah to reflect on the complications of memorializing past events of statecraft. What's at stake for compulsory memorials and commemorations, and how do they obscure and embed ideological content? Using the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I examine how Utah's commemoration of the 1847 Mormon Pioneers entering the Salt Lake Valley reimagines and reinvents roots to the foundations of the US government. Indeed, the fourth Mormon Prophet, Wilford Woodruff (1807–98), projected fantastical attachments to historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and dozens of signers of the Declaration, all for whom he was baptized by proxy. Through narrating and investigating these dynamics, we might better conceptualize the excessive, enthusiastic attachments that animate the commemoration of state documents.
This essay demonstrates how Benjamin Lundy's antislavery periodical Genius of Universal Emancipation served as a tool for the expansion and training of a growing abolitionist readership in the United States in the 1820s. Engaging Americans throughout the nation in person and in print, Lundy forged a network that connected antislavery sympathizers to one another, impelling them to act on their convictions. By analyzing Lundy's coverage of Frances Wright's Nashoba experiment's formation through dissolution, the essay explores how the Genius of Universal Emancipation served as a critical foundation for abolitionism as a national movement. Lundy's unique brand of embodied editorship-his physical movement across the Union in tandem with his editorial voice in Genius-helped set the stage for the abolitionist movement's prominence on a national scale.
This article performs a rare close reading of the disowned Quaker Benjamin Lay's sprawling book, All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1738), and argues for Lay as a serious political thinker concerned with the organization of social life. The article places Lay's work in intertextual relation with Ralph Sandiford, who, like Lay, opposed colonial Pennsylvania's religious and political elites. Ultimately, this article demonstrates, Lay theorizes and embraces reformist projects such as replacing corporal punishment with penal labor. He also offers his book as its own kind of print public sphere. Even as both represented alternatives to illegitimate colonial leadership meant to save Pennsylvanians from themselves, Lay's settler colonial assumptions still prevented him from acknowledging the dispossession of Indigenous people at a moment when members of Pennsylvania's elite were engaged in unprecedented land theft.
While the study of Quakerism has not been absent from the field of early American literature, scholarship in this area has often been limited to inquiry into a relatively small range of topics, such as spiritual autobiography, antislavery discourse, and women's writing. This special issue seeks to move Quaker literary history in new directions by exploring different authors, genres, and themes that are not usually investigated. This introductory essay discusses the reasons the study of Quakerism in early American literature has often been limited and argues for an expanded understanding of Quaker literary history. Previous approaches to Quaker writing are surveyed, and an overview of the essays in the special issues is given. The study of print culture emerges as a unifying theme across the essays, and this approach is identified as offering continued promise for a more developed understanding of Quaker literary history.
This essay reinterprets Jonathan Dickinson's God's Protecting Providence (1699) not simply as a captivity narrative but as a foundational work of early American Quaker literature. Drawing on a rediscovered manuscript and the text's transatlantic publication history, it examines how Quaker theology, collective authorship, and editorial intervention transformed Dickinson's account of shipwreck and survival into a spiritual narrative of faith and endurance. Emphasizing core Quaker principles, pacifism, inward spirituality, and communal humility, it explores how these values shaped both the narrative's content and its reception. Organized in three parts, the essay analyzes the collaborative construction of the text, the editorial reframing of the original manuscript, and the narrative's extensive republication across linguistic and geographic boundaries. It argues that God's Protecting Providence functioned simultaneously as a devotional manual and a vehicle for Quaker identity formation, offering moral instruction to Quaker readers and social credibility to broader publics. Through its circulation, the text helped articulate a distinctly Quaker worldview within early American and Atlantic literary traditions.
This Invention uses memories of growing up in Utah to reflect on the com-plications of memorializing past events of statecraft. What's at stake for compulsory memorials and commemorations, and how do they obscure and embed ideological content? Using the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Indepen-dence, I examine how Utah's commemoration of the 1847 Mormon Pioneers enter-ing the Salt Lake Valley reimagines and reinvents roots to the foundations of the US government. Indeed, the fourth Mormon Prophet, Wilford Woodruff (1807-98), pro-jected fantastical attachments to historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and dozens of signers of the Declaration, all for whom he was baptized by proxy. Through narrating and investigating these dynamics, we might better con-ceptualize the excessive, enthusiastic attachments that animate the commemoration of state documents.
This article directs attention to a short-lived Quaker literary annual, the Aurora Borealis. It was immediately successful on both sides of the Atlantic. However, its editors discontinued their work after a single issue when faced with the opposition of London publishers who saw it as a threat to their domination of the market. The article recovers the history of this unfamiliar volume using two archives located on different sides of the Atlantic. The literary ambitions of a group of Friends were channeled into the production of a publication that modeled itself on a highly popular secular genre while shaping it along denominational lines. The annual's producers borrowed from commercial techniques to advertise and produce a volume that was familiar but nonetheless distinctive due to its nonmetropolitan origins and its Quaker content. The article argues that the existence of the annual enables further speculation about other publishing ventures on both sides of the Atlantic that should be demanding our attention, reimagining the contours of Quaker literary history and transatlantic print.
