Browsing by Author "Johnson, Daniel"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
American Gothic; or, what Melville can teach us
(New Politics Associates, Inc., 2021-07-19) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
Crime in the city of brotherly love
(History Today Ltd., 2022-01) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
"Nothing will satisfy you but money" Debt, freedom, and the mid-atlantic culture of money, 1670–1764
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021-02-03) Johnson, Daniel
Politics in British America often centered on the issue of currency. Competing ideas about the nature of money and what constituted just relations of credit and debt also pervaded everyday colonial culture. By the late seventeenth century, some mid-Atlantic colonists believed that colonial debt laws and powerful urban merchants’ monopolization of coin led to the appropriation of debtors’ land and labor. Assembly emissions of bills of credit in New York and Pennsylvania in the 1710s and 1720s eased many debtors’ burdens, but the creation of provincial paper monies enhanced rather than diminished money’s importance as an object of social and political controversy in the region. By the middle of the eighteenth century, supporters of paper money believed that bills of credit uniquely embodied liberty, possessing the power to maintain ordinary inhabitants’ independence. Monetary scarcity, by contrast, portended dispossession and bondage. This article analyzes the petitions, pamphlets, editorials, broadsides, and crowd actions that contributed to the creation of a distinctive culture of money in the mid-Atlantic between the 1670s and 1760s.
Open Access
‘Profane language, horrid oaths and imprecations’: order and the colonial soundscape in the American mid-Atlantic, 1650–1750
(Routledge, 2021-08-04) Johnson, Daniel
One of the most important developments in the historical discipline in recent years has been the growth of histories of the senses, and studies of sound and soundscapes have made important contributions to this growing field. The relationship between a perennial early modern concern for social order and ‘noise’ has received relatively little attention, however. This article examines the formation of novel soundscapes between the 1650s and 1740s in the North American middle colonies, the most ethnically and culturally diverse region of the English Atlantic world. Placing special emphasis on the region’s two largest cities, New York and Philadelphia, it argues that the mid-Atlantic’s distinctive soundscapes posed significant problems of order for urban and provincial authorities during a period of elite Anglicization. Sound was more than a way to encourage new norms of politeness; it was a source of contestation between different cultural systems. Speech, music and other sounds were also instrumental in processes of class, ethnic and racial formation.