Thom Nickels, Author and Journalist

Religious cults have marked every society since the beginning of time. Some have an audacious presence, while others seem to be the very soul of respectability. From Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement to Anton Szandor LaVey’s Church of the Process, join author Thom Nickels for an intimate look at religious cults in Philadelphia.

Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including: Philadelphia Architecture (2005), Literary Philadelphia, 2015 and Philadelphia Mansions, 2018. Nickels was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Two Novellas (1990) and awarded the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. His 1980s column Different Strokes in the Philadelphia Welcomat was first out gay column in a mainstream newspaper in the United States. His 2015 cover essay on Agnes Repplier was published by The American Catholic Studies Journal. He has written for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Passport magazine, Huff Post, Icon magazine, The New Oxford Review, PJ Media, Philadelphia Magazine and the Broad Street Review and currently writes for The Irish Edition, The Philadelphia Press, City Journal (New York), the Philadelphia Weekly, Delaware Valley Journal and Broad + Liberty.

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Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions.

Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history.

Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: the journal of early American life.
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Sara T. Damiano, Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University

In To Her Credit, Sara T. Damiano uncovers free women’s centrality to the interrelated worlds of eighteenth-century finance and law. Focusing on everyday life in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island—two of the busiest port cities of this period—Damiano argues that colonial women’s skilled labor actively facilitated the growth of Atlantic ports and their legal systems. Mining vast troves of court records, Damiano reveals that married and unmarried women of all social classes forged new paths through the complexities of credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amid demographic and economic turmoil. In turn, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses.

Sara T. Damiano received her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University and is currently an assistant professor at Texas State University. She is a social and cultural historian of early America and the Atlantic world. Damiano has previously published articles on female administrators of estates and on collaborations between male and female financial agents. In the Spring of 2016, she was a Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) postdoctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her research has also received support from organizations and institutions including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Damiano teaches courses on early America, the Atlantic world, law and society, capitalism and economic culture, and American women’s and gender history. Prior to arriving at Texas State University, she taught courses at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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Teresa A. Goddu, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Vanderbilt University

Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS’s dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery’s vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery’s appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

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Daniel Mandell, Professor of History, Truman State University

The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person’s right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a “rough” or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government.

Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved “rough” equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits.

This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.

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Billy Coleman, Postdoctoral Fellow in Early American History with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War. Based on deep archival research in sources such as music periodicals, songbooks, and manuals for musical instruction, Coleman argues that a particular ideal of musical power provided conservative elites with an attractive road map for producing the harmonious union they desired. He reassesses the logic behind the decision to compose popular patriotic anthems like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” reconsiders the purpose of early American campaign songs, and brings to life a host of often forgotten but fascinating musical organizations and individuals. The result is not only a striking interpretation of music in American political life but also a fresh understanding of conflicts that continue to animate American democracy.

Billy Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow in early American history with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) as well as articles about early American music and politics published in the Journal of the Early Republic the Journal of Southern History. His next project, “Making Music National in a Settler State,” explores the transnational origins of national music in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Sandra Moats, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Parkside

Navigating Neutrality explores the unexpected role George Washington’s 1793 Neutrality Proclamation played in energizing the U.S. government’s constitutional responsibilities to support and promote America’s commercial and sovereign interests. Designed to avoid warfare as Great Britain and France battled in the Atlantic during the French Revolutionary Wars, neutrality encompassed a wide range of issues, including diplomacy, law, defense, commerce, and domestic politics.

Proclaiming neutrality proved easier than enforcing it. American citizens eagerly accepted lucrative French privateering commissions, and Britain retaliated by attacking American ships, cargos, and sailors. In response, Washington and his cabinet formulated policies to enforce neutrality across all three branches of the government and around the globe. Maritime citizens, stranded in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, especially came to appreciate the government’s rescue efforts. As Sandra Moats shows, enforcing neutrality galvanized all three branches of the nascent U.S. government, serving as a manifesto of the young nation’s quest to be respected in its independence and helping to build a U.S. government capable of supporting its global aspirations.

Sandra Moats is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside and author of Celebrating the Republic: Presidential Ceremony and Popular Sovereignty, from Washington to Monroe.

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Zachary M. Schrag, Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University

Zachary M. Schrag will discuss the steps in a research project — as laid out in the newly-published Princeton Guide to Historical Research — with examples from his other new book, The Fires of Philadelphia.

The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian’s craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.

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This presentation examines the parallel lives of two white gentlemen who were born in Great Britain, became enslavers in the West Indies and West Africa, and then published works of History on Africa and peoples of African descent in the year 1793. It argues that their texts were reactions to the rise of the abolitionist movement. For over three centuries, enslavers had collaborated with metropolitan chroniclers to produce new knowledge about the Atlantic World. With the rise of abolition, enslavers lost their trust in these inherited structures of knowledge production and were compelled to create an archive of their own.

Devin Leigh is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. He studies the Atlantic World in the early-modern period, with a particular focus on connections between the British Isles, West Africa, and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. His research has been supported by such institutions as the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. His work has recently appeared in such journals as New West Indian Guide, History in Africa, and The Journal of Caribbean History.

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Kirsten Fischer, Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota

The first comprehensive biography of Elihu Palmer tells the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the early United States’ protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech. When the United States was new, a lapsed minister named Elihu Palmer shared with his fellow Americans the radical idea that virtue required no religious foundation. A better source for morality, he said, could be found in the natural world: the interconnected web of life that inspired compassion for all living things. Religions that deny these universal connections should be discarded, he insisted. For this, his Christian critics denounced him as a heretic whose ideas endangered the country.
Although his publications and speaking tours made him one of the most infamous American freethinkers in his day, Elihu Palmer has been largely forgotten. No cache of his personal papers exists and his book has been long out of print. Yet his story merits telling, Kirsten Fischer argues, and not only for the dramatic account of a man who lost his eyesight before the age of thirty and still became a book author, newspaper editor, and itinerant public speaker. Even more intriguing is his encounter with a cosmology that envisioned the universe as interconnected, alive with sensation, and everywhere infused with a divine life force.
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Van Gosse, Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies, Franklin and Marshall College

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution’s ratification through Abraham Lincoln’s election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states.

Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.
Van Gosse (he/him) is a Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles and books on post-1945 politics and social movements, including Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left. More recently, he has written on African American politics in the antebellum era. He is also co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy (www.historiansforpeace.org).

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