Mellon Foundation Supported New York Historical Society Fellows Announced

 

New York - The New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce ten fellows who will be in residence during the 2015–16 academic year. Leveraging its incomparable collections of documents, artifacts, and works of art detailing American history from the perspective of New York City, New-York Historical’s fellowships—open to scholars at various times during their academic careers—provide scholars with material resources and an intellectual community to develop new research and publications that illuminate complex issues of the past.   

 

“The ambitious and diverse range of research topics that our incoming fellows will tackle—from the role European and African women in expanding slavery, to how turn of the 20th-century New York elite clubs redefined the city’s architectural and social history—are a testament to the reach and importance of New-York Historical’s collections and their relevance to  today’s world,” said Valerie Paley, Vice President, Chief Historian, and Dean of Scholarly Programs at New-York Historical.

 

New-York Historical offers fellowships to scholars dedicated to understanding and promoting American history. Fellowship positions at the New-York Historical Society are made possible by the generous support of Bernard and Irene Schwartz, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sid Lapidus, The Lehrman Institute, and Patricia and John Klingenstein. All fellows receive research stipends while in residency, and Bernard & Irene Schwartz Fellows each teach two courses at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts during their year as resident scholars.

 

This year’s fellows are:

 

T. Cole Jones is currently Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. He received a BA in History from Duke University in 2006, an MA in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2009, and completed his PhD from that same institution in 2014. Jones’s proposed research project, “Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Radicalization of the American Revolution” is a comprehensive analysis of revolutionary American treatment of enemy prisoners and will illuminate the role of wartime violence in the social and political transformations of the era. With the support of the N-YHS, Jones will spend the 2015–2016 academic year mining the Library’s vast assemblage of regimental orderly books, as well as the papers of several Continental Army figures. Jones will also consult the diary of Thomas Gilpin to contextualize the plight of Philadelphia’s Quaker exiles within the larger history of American prisoner-of-war treatment during the revolution. Jones’s work will challenge common understandings of violence during the revolution. He will uncover the central role brutality played in the war.  Initially the revolutionary leadership adhered to European rules of war, but their vision of restraint did not endure. Jones will examine how American military practices evolved during the war, analyzing the factors that precipitated the escalation of violence and redefined treatment the revolution’s prisoners of war.

 

Matthew Karp is currently Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. He received a BA in History from Amherst College in 2003 and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. During his residency at N-YHS, Karp will undertake a full revision of his book manuscript The Foreign Policy of Slavery. This work will consider proslavery internationalism and revise the way we see southern slaveholders in the broader context of modern world history. As presidents, cabinet officers, diplomats, and military leaders, southern elites controlled international policy within the powerful American federal governments. Karp will examine how their unwavering dedication to slavery shaped the course and destiny of U.S. foreign relations.

 

Stephen Petrus received a BA in History and Philosophy from Gettysburg College in 1995, an MA in History from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa in 1997, and a PhD in History from the City University of New York in 2010. While at N-YHS, Dr. Petrus will conduct archival research within the Library’s collections, including the Shirley Hayes Papers, the Margot Gayle Papers, and the N-YHS Washington Square Park Redevelopment Collection, to complete a project entitled “The Politics and Culture of Greenwich Village and the Rise of the Tumultuous Sixties.” What made the Village a distinct political and cultural entity in the 1950s and 1960s, and why did many political and artistic movements emerge and flourish there? Petrus’ narrative attributes the political and artistic ferment to community organizations; they were engines of political and cultural change. The concentration of its neighborhood institutions attracted an influx of talent from all over the nation. More than simply a bohemian sanctuary during an age of conformity, Greenwich Village was a hub of resistance to the dominant political and cultural order of the mid-century United States.

 

Christine Walker is currently Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University. She received a BA in American Studies from Yale University in 2000, an MA in History from the University of Connecticut in 2007, and completed her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2014. Walker’s project at N-YHS, entitled “The Jamaica Ladies: Gender, Authority, and Atlantic Slavery,” will adapt her PhD dissertation into a manuscript for publication. Her scholarship argues that free women of European and African descent were crucial investors in the expansion of slavery, and situates the lives of free and enslaved people in a broader colonial context. To complete her research, Dr. Walker will review the John Brown Papers, focusing on the letters of Brown family women, and will mine New-York Historical’s extensive print collection to support research on how local and imperial events influenced women’s lives.

 

Brendan P. O’Malley he earned a BA in History at Vassar College in 1992 and a PhD in History from the City University of New York in 2015. Dr. O’Malley’s project, “Protecting the Stranger: The Origins of U.S. Immigration Regulation in Nineteenth-Century New York,” will be the first book-length examination of the New York State Board of the Commissioners of Emigration— the first government agency in the United States devoted entirely to immigration. The creation of the Emigration Board in 1847 marked a watershed moment in the relationship between government and immigration, expanding it from a local to a statewide and national concern. The commissioners protected vulnerable immigrants from those who sought to defraud them, facilitated their migration West and gave immigrants access to numerous amenities to ease their transition into a new life in the United States. The N-YHS’s papers of Gulian C. Verplank, the president of the Emigration Board from 1848 until his death in 1870, are critical to this study.

 

H. Horatio Joyce is currently a doctoral candidate in History at Oxford University. He received a BA in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Chicago in 2010 and an MA in the same subject from Boston University in May 2012. Joyce’s project, “Building and Belonging: McKim, Mead & White and the Making of New York City’s Clubland,” is a social and architectural study of private clubs in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His focus on both elite identity and urban transformation connects the threads of social and architectural history. The project is organized around the architects and clubmen McKim, Mead, and White, and will utilize the records of the Harmonie Club and the Seventh Regiment.

 

Brian Broadrose is currently Assistant Professor in Sociology/Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He received degrees in Anthropology (Archaeology) from the Metropolitan State College of Denver (BA) in 2002, the University of Colorado (MA) in 2008, and from Binghamton University (PhD) in 2015. Broadrose will expand upon the research for his dissertation, “The Haudenosaunee and the Trolls under the Bridge: Digging into the culture of Iroquoianist Studies.” This project examines the disparity between Native American accounts of their past and the opposing interpretations of professional historians and archaeologists. Broadrose will consult the Cadwallader Colden Papers, as well as the Lewis Henry Morgan Letters.

 

Paul Polgar is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi and is one of three Klingenstein fellows for 2015– 2016. He graduated with a BS in journalism from Boston University in 2004, an MA in History from George Mason University in 2007, and a PhD in History from the City University of New York in 2013. Polgar will work on his project, “A Well Grounded Hope: Abolishing Slavery and the Racial Inequality in Early America and Enacting Freedom.” Scholarship on the first emancipation has demonstrated the gradual and incomplete nature of African American liberation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, leading many historians to characterize period activists as inherently conservative. Polgar argues against these prevailing views by considering the first abolitionists who posed a sweeping challenge to slavery and black inequality in a story that largely remains untold. Polgar will be consulting a wide range of sources in N-YHS’ collections, including pamphlets and records relating to the New York City, the State Colonization Society, and the New Jersey Colonization Society.

 

Hendrik Hartog is currently the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. Until July 2015, he was the director of Princeton University’s Program in American Studies. He holds a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Brandeis University (1982), a JD from the New York University School of Law (1973), and an AB from Carleton College (1970). He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983), Man and Wife in America: a History (2000), and Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012). As a Lapidus Fellow, Hartog will be working on two book projects that take place in northern New Jersey and New York City during the first 40 years of the 19th century. Both are shaped by the sense that 19th-century American Federalism was not just a formal constitutional structure, but became the field upon which the legal culture emerged and developed.  The significance of New York (particularly, New York City) as a dominant presence in the law and in the economy of the young country is central to both narratives. The first project is a history of Gibbons v. Ogden, the famous steamboat case in which John Marshall first articulated and applied the Commerce Clause as a constraint on state economic regulations. Fashioned as an intimate history of litigation, the work will explore the legal, familial, and corporate lives of Thomas Gibbons and Aaron Ogden. It brackets off the familiar story of how the Commerce Clause would come to be invoked by the Supreme Court, in order to tell a surprising and even mysterious story of how individuals and states fought to control the new technology of the steamboat around and across the Hudson River. The second project is based on another case study, Force v. Haines(1840), regarding compensation for the care of an “unproductive” slave. The case includes language that has become canonical in legal considerations of the rights of good Samaritans and those who voluntarily care for others.  It also offers a revealing window onto the legal regime of gradual emancipation in New Jersey.