Tag: 19th Century
Looking for Purloined Letters
Last week, I explored the benefits of mastery when approaching a text — namely the meanings that are made possible to those who know what to look for. While I mentioned that those who didn’t know what to look for are likely to “miss out,” this week I am interested in the ways in which
Recognizing Heroic Domesticity
An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic draws attention to the varied ways in which Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is read. The main suggestion is that knowledge of Alcott’s biography can drastically change a reader’s interpretation of the text. This knowledge about the author’s biography, one of many types of topic
The Joy of Recognition; or, The Occasional Dangers of Mastery
A bit of an open secret exists in academia for graduate students. We sometimes experience frustrations with teaching. While most of us view teaching as perhaps the most rewarding thing that we do, we love to complain about our students (it is usually good-natured, I promise). After spending the past year without any teaching responsibilities,
Feeling the Affects
To some degree, all of our posts this month have flirted with affect. Whether it’s waking up dazed in confused in graduate school or exploring the significance of melancholia, memory, and reverberating energies, all of these topics point to a larger picture of attempting to understand and read feeling in texts and our daily lives.
“While the dearest of friends lays in the cold ground”: Epidemic Disease, Incarceration and Patriarchal Control; The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding
After Josiah Spaulding, Jr. was chained to the floor in his room in about 1812 by his minister father, he would never again live a life unfettered by his father’s religious and patriarchal control—a control which extended over the Spaulding family long after the Reverend’s death in 1823. Oral history of Buckland tells the tale
Only a Being of Senseless Existence: The Continuing Story of Josiah Spaulding, Jr.
Josiah Spaulding outlived almost everyone in his family by many years. He was about age 81 when he died, and at that time had been put on display at the Deerfield Poor Farm, where admission was charged to see him. Massachusetts journalists traveled to the area to view Josiah and write articles about him, but
Fifty Seven Years in a Cage: A Story of Psychiatric Disability from the late Puritan Era
My historic work is not about famous able-bodied men, battles or presidents as many think of when they think of history; it is about women, epidemic disease, art, slavery, mental illness, reform and disability. It is about those were marginalized, the ones lost to history whose stories have been long forgotten or never told. The