I trained as a historian of early America and spent the first part of my professional life studying how Americans made knowledge, institutions, communities, and arguments about themselves. Then I wandered off.
These writings mark a return of sorts—not to the academy exactly, and not necessarily to the questions I left behind. Some begin with old research. Others begin with birds, disability, religion, technology, a town meeting, a building, or something else that makes America suddenly seem strange enough to investigate again.
The category is intentionally broad. American Studies was always most interesting to me when it allowed different kinds of evidence and different ways of knowing to collide: history with literature, institutions with lived experience, archives with landscapes, serious scholarship with the peculiar things people actually do.
After a long absence, I find myself interested in those collisions again.
This is where that work will accumulate.
Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Peale pulls back the curtain on a cabinet of American wonders: art and animals, science and history, national heroes and ordinary visitors, all occupying the same room. An appropriately unruly entrance to American Studies. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection), 1878.1.2.
