Project MUSE®: Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/322
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2003) through current issueLatest Articles: Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary JournalTWOProject MUSE®Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal1559-08951543-4273Latest articles in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Multilingualism, Language Education, and Text Circulation in New Netherland: The Library of Gysbert van Imbroch and Rachel de la Montagne (1665)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989501
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In 1665, a barber-surgeon named Gysbert van Imbroch, widower of the late Rachel de la Montagne, passed away in Wiltwyck (Kingston, New York), a small New Netherland settlement along the North (Hudson) River. He was survived by their three children. To provide for their upbringing, local officials compiled a probate inventory to auction off the couple’s possessions, including an extensive collection of approximately 540 books.1 This inventory included some forty-six unique titles likely from their personal library, as well as numerous schoolbooks present in multiple copies. The titles, content, and educational methods of these schoolbooks, the quantities in which they were present when the probate inventory was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/322/image/coversmallMultilingualism, Language Education, and Text Circulation in New Netherland: The Library of Gysbert van Imbroch and Rachel de la Montagne (1665)2026-05-02text/htmlen-USMultilingualism, Language Education, and Text Circulation in New Netherland: The Library of Gysbert van Imbroch and Rachel de la Montagne (1665)2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1702732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02“Bought from the Ship”: Dangerous Naturalizations in Aphra Behn’s Widdow Ranter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989502
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Two decades ago Jennifer Morgan observed that in the historiography of early Anglophone America, “all the women are still white.”1 Scholars have since made great strides in uncovering how women’s lived identities were homogenized or erased within colonial archives, but Noémie Ndaiye has shown how these kinds of assumptions can still shape the ways we read feminine characters on the early modern stage.2 This essay reconsiders one such figure: the Widdow Ranter, in the Restoration writer Aphra Behn’s (1640–89) play of the same name, her final work for the stage. Behn’s tragi-comedy, set in Virginia’s colonial capital of Jamestown, is split into two sub-plots: a highly fictionalized version of Bacon’s Rebellion as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/322/image/coversmall“Bought from the Ship”: Dangerous Naturalizations in Aphra Behn’s Widdow Ranter2026-05-02text/htmlen-US“Bought from the Ship”: Dangerous Naturalizations in Aphra Behn’s Widdow Ranter2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1551082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02“Impossible for Us to Sleep”: Nocturnal Ecologies and Modes of Becoming in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989503
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A peculiar scene in Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) clinches the weird entanglement that frequently haunts the narrative between sleeplessness, darkness, Caribbean nocturnal ecologies, and political disorganization. In the novel’s climactic letter, one of the white American protagonists, Clara, flees her violent husband and shelters in a small Cuban village with a friend. One night, she is awoken by “a most unaccountable noise . . . not unlike the clashing of swords.” Her friend screams; a “large cold animal” has found its way into her bed and “seized her hand” in the dark. The intruders, it turns out, are land crabs, which descend annually from the mountains
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/322/image/coversmall“Impossible for Us to Sleep”: Nocturnal Ecologies and Modes of Becoming in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo2026-05-02text/htmlen-US“Impossible for Us to Sleep”: Nocturnal Ecologies and Modes of Becoming in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1220012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02Writing Educated Femininity: Race, Class, and Intellect in Early American Women’s Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989504
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In his 1809 essay “On Female Education,” Pennsylvania Congressman James Milnor warned that while “a polite and well-informed woman is the most welcome companion of the intelligent of our sex, a female pedant is in all respects the reverse”; she is a figure obsessed with “ostentatious display of the decorations of her mind.”1 Ten years later, Emma Hart Willard, in her Plan for Improving Female Education, reassured New York legislators that women’s learning would serve only “proper” purposes. She argued, “[I]f the female character be raised, it must inevitably raise that of the other sex.” Williard continued, “As evidence that this statement does not exaggerate the female influence in society, our sex need but be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/322/image/coversmallWriting Educated Femininity: Race, Class, and Intellect in Early American Women’s Literature2026-05-02text/htmlen-USWriting Educated Femininity: Race, Class, and Intellect in Early American Women’s Literature2026-05-022026TWOProject MUSE®1075962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-05-02