Commonplace: the journal of early American life
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Commonplace: the journal of early American life
@commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
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Commonplace: the journal of early American life since 2000. Published by a partnership of the OIEAHC and AAS. Commonplace.online
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commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
From August 2024, Timothy Messer-Krause shared the story of Prince Whipple and others who felt the disconnect between Revolutionary ideals and those who claimed to practice them most acutely: commonplace.online/article/what...
What Freedom Meant to Prince Whipple, The Black Revolutionary Soldier Famous for Rowing Across the Delaware - Commonplace
Prince and the other enslaved men had no fondness for their fetters and felt acutely the contradiction between American ideals and their condition.
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 12:31 PM
commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
In 2010, William Huntting Howell declared that "the American Revolution narrates beautifully." Huntting Howell's essay looked at Joseph Plumb Martin to caution against glazing over the artificiality that such narratives produce: commonplace.online/article/star...
Starving Memory: Joseph Plumb Martin Un-tells the Story of the American Revolution - Commonplace
In conjuring an audience for which the rules of fictional narrative are more immediately recognizable and count as surer argumentative proof than the empirical facts of the everyday, Martin neatly dis...
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 12:24 PM
commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
How does our understanding of American independence deepen when we stay firmly entrenched in the broader Age of Revolutions? From 2017, Julia Gaffield discusses considers the relationship between America and Revolutionary Haiti: commonplace.online/article/on-t...
“On the list of free nations”: Haitian Foreign Relations in the Revolutionary Atlantic - Commonplace
We talkwith Julia Gaffield about Haiti’s foreign relations in its early years of independence, the place of the Haitian Revolution, and the impact of the Haitian Declaration of Independence.
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 12:06 PM
commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
From 2015, Kate Carté Engel connects the historiographies of religion, American Revolution, and the Early Republic to contextualize an anxious 1799 sermon from Jedidiah Morse: commonplace.online/article/tria...
Triangulating Religion and the American Revolution through Jedidiah Morse - Commonplace
“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings […]
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 12:01 PM
commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
Feeling bewildered by today's political climate and "unprecedented times"? You're not alone. From February of this year, Robert Parkinson writes on bewilderment as a means of understanding the past:
commonplace.online/article/bewi...
Bewilderment as a Way of Understanding America’s Present – and Past - Commonplace
Circumstances in which people are feeling extreme disorientation are potent breeding grounds for people who are willing to exploit it to take advantage in moments of crisis.
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 11:59 AM
commonplacejrnl.bsky.social
From September 2024, Antonio T. Bly, Simon P. Newman, Billy G. Smith, and Gloria McMahon Whiting wrote on the importance of centering histories of Black liberation in the Revolutionary Era and beyond:

commonplace.online/article/free...
Freedom Seekers: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond - Commonplace
Freedom Seekers will show how all kinds of men, women, and children who escaped were important actors in the challenge not just to their own enslavement but to slavery more broadly.
commonplace.online
July 4, 2025 at 11:57 AM