The spring 2023 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is now available in print and online at Project MUSE. The issue opens with Zachary M. Bennett’s “‘Canoes of Great Swiftness’: Rivercraft and War in the Northeast,” a fascinating look at the technological superiority of Wabanaki birchbark canoes. It is our featured article for this issue, which means it will be freely available on MUSE for the next few months.
From there, the issue moves to Katie A. Moore’s “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” which considers paper money as both artifact and object of heated public debate. At a time when the debt ceiling has been on everyone’s mind, Moore’s article about the perceived authenticity of eighteenth-century currency is a must-read.
Next in the issue is Adrian Finucane with “Utopian Dreams and Untenable Realities: The Georgia Trustees’ Failure to Stabilize the Frontier Through Foreign Migration”, a fascinating piece exploring what Finucane calls the “improvisational approach” the Georgia Trustees took to safeguarding the borderland between the British and Spanish empires in North America.
Next Daniel N. Gullotta’s article “Jews for Jackson: Isaac Harby, Southern Politics during the Election of 1824, and the Rise of Jacksonian Democracy,” explores how the Jewish journalist Harby found his place in U.S. politics by becoming a devoted Jacksonian.
Rounding out the issue is Bobby Cervantes’ “Texas or Territory? Borderlands Separatism and Postwar Politics in the Trans-Nueces, 1848-1850,” which historicizes the efforts by South Texas businessmen in the late 1840s to secede from the state of Texas to protect their landholdings in the Trans-Nueces.
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