Public Lecture, Dr. Richard Godbeer, October 4, 6 PM

Posted on September 28, 2012 by John White

Dr. Richard Godbeer, Professor of History at the University of Miami will deliver a talk entitled “’Your wife will be your biggest accuser’: Reinforcing Codes of Manhood at New England Witch Trials,” at the Arnold Center in the Jewish Studies Building on October 4, 2012 beginning at 6:00pm. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Richard Godbeer received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1989. He specializes in colonial and revolutionary America, with an emphasis on religious culture, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Godbeer was born in Essex, England, and grew up in Shropshire and Gloucestershire. He then lived in Oxford for three years as an undergraduate before crossing the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1984. He moved to southern California in 1989, where he taught for fifteen years at the University of California, Riverside. He moved to southern Florida in the summer of 2004 to join the Department of History at the University of Miami. He offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution.

Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (published in 2011 as a volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture). Godbeer is currently working on a joint biography of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a Quaker couple who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Hines Prize, 2013

Posted on September 26, 2012 by John White

Hines Prize, 2013: Do you have a manuscript in hand or in preparation that would fit the scope of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) book series. Do you know others who do? If your manuscript is for a first book, you should consider entering it for the sixth biennial award of the Hines Prize, given to the best first book relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/or the Atlantic World. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program’s book series.

Previous winners of the Hines Prize are as follows:

2003—This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725-1775—Bradford Wood
2005—Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820—Nicholas Michael Butler
2007—Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World—T.J. Desch-Obi
2009—Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History—Barry Stiefel — 2011 — Michael D. Thompson — Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life Along Charleston’s Waterfront, 1783-1861.

For a full listing of the books in the USC Press’s series in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World, seehttp://www.sc.edu/uscpress/claw.html.

Deadline for submission: May 15st, 2013

Please send your complete manuscript, either in hard-copy to: Professor Simon Lewis, Associate Director, CLAW Program, Department of English, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424-0001;
or in electronic format to Dr Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu.

For further information, please contact Professor Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu

CLAW publishes its Eighteenth Volume with USC Press

Posted on September 10, 2012 by John White

Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans

Edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis

An examination of the 1808 international slave trade ban and its impact on the American South and
Atlantic World

In March 1807, within a few weeks of each other, both the United States and the United Kingdom passed laws banning the international slave trade. Two hundred years later, Great Britain, an instigator of the slave trade and the chief source of slaves sold into continental North America, was awash nationwide in commemorations of the ban. By contrast the bicentennial
of the ban received almost no attention in the United States. Ambiguous Anniversary aims to remedy that omission and to explain the discrepancy between the two commemorative responses. Edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, this volume examines the impact that closing the international slave trade in 1808 had on Southern American economics, politics,
and society.

Recasting the history of slavery in the early Republic and the memory of slavery and abolition in
American culture, the foreword, introduction, and ten essays in this volume present a complex picture of an important but partial step in America’s long struggle toward the ambitious but ambiguous goal of liberty and justice for all.

A native of Ireland, David T. Gleeson is a reader in history in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne and a former director of the College of Charleston’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. He is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World.

Simon Lewis is a professor of world literature at the College of Charleston, where he is also an associate director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program. Lewis is the author ofWhite Women Writers and Their African Invention and British and African Literature in Transnational Context.

(Text from The University of South Carolina Press)