Beyond 1620: A Forum on History and Memory in Early American Studies
- Beyond 1620A Forum on History and Memory in Early American Studies
What inspired us, the editors, to develop this special issue of Early American Literature were our questions about the ways the stories and conversations about 1620 have changed and are likely to change in the years ahead. As is often the case, our starting questions grew into more questions like How have America's origin stories been told and passed down? and How do the stories we tell, as scholars, resonate and affect public memory? Of course, no single voice nor argument could or should answer these complex questions. Rather, we chose to seek answers through multiple perspectives and applications. For this forum, we invited several scholars to reflect on the history and memory of early New England, and, in a larger sense, the evolving meanings of early American history and literature. Collectively, they trace the twists in popular memory around Plymouth and Wampanoag country, as well as other histories, and their contemporary impacts.
Carla Pestana tracks the shifts in how the memory of Plymouth colony was used by various promoters, over decades of American history. Lisa Blee and Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) follow more recent developments, especially thanks to the work of Indigenous public intellectuals, that suggest and encourage a "decentering" of 1620. Molly O'Hagan Hardy considers the relationship of New England archives to the places they document—and what happens when that tie is severed. Drawing on her own experience as a parent and grandparent, Rachel Byington (Choctaw) considers Native children's experiences learning about Thanksgiving in public schools, the traumas associated with those educational experiences, and their connection to an achievement gap among Native students. Finally, bringing past threads of interpretation into conversation with the events of 2020, James Egan examines early American literature in relation to the death of George Floyd. [End Page 157]
katherine grandjean is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College. She is the author of American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Harvard UP, 2015). Her essays have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Early American Studies, and her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and others. She is currently working on a new book about the violent legacies of the American Revolution.
sarah schuetze is an assistant professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Her work on historical disease and disability has appeared in Early American Literature, Early American Studies, Common-place, and the Arizona Quarterly. In 2018, Schuetze was an NEH fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, where she researched new chapters for her book project "Calamity Howl: Fear of Illness in Early American Writing, 1620–1832."
