Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Eric Herschthal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 352 pages, ISBN: 9780300236804, $33.

A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But this book demonstrates that abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Focusing on antislavery scientists and black and white abolitionists in Britain and America between the 1770s and 1860s, historian Eric Herschthal shows how these activists drew upon chemistry, botany, medicine, and mechanics to portray slavery as a premodern institution bound for obsolescence. These activists contended that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor. Historians have recently begun to challenge the myth that slavery was premodern—backward—demonstrating slavery’s centrality to the rise of modern capitalism, science, and technology. This book demonstrates where the myth comes from in the first place.

Eric Herschthal is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Salt Lake City.

From Harvard UP:

Lindsay Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2020), 432 pages, ISBN 978-0674986480, $30 / £24 / €27.

The U.S. Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government?

On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph—for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the U.S. Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges—and finding congressional help lacking—Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. In the early days, the cabinet served at the president’s pleasure. Washington tinkered with its structure throughout his administration, at times calling regular meetings, at other times preferring written advice and individual discussions.

Lindsay Chervinsky reveals the far-reaching consequences of Washington’s choice. The tensions in the cabinet between Hamilton and Jefferson heightened partisanship and contributed to the development of the first party system. And as Washington faced an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, he came to treat the cabinet as a private advisory body to summon as needed, greatly expanding the role of the president and the executive branch.

Lindsay M. Chervinsky is Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College, Senior Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and Professorial Lecturer at the School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Forged in War
2  The Original Team of Rivals
3  Setting the Stage
4  The Early Years
5  The Cabinet Emerges
6  A Foreign Challenge
7  A Domestic Threat
8  A Cabinet in Crisis
Epilogue

Citation and Abbreviation Guide
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

From Yale UP:

Edward Town and Angela McShane, eds., with essays by Glenn Adamson, Justin Brown, Edward Cooke, Gavi Levy Haskell, Nathan Flis, Angela McShane, and Keith Wrightson, Marking Time: Objects, People, and Their Lives, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2020), 512 pages, ISBN: 978-0300254105, $65.

The period from 1500 to 1800 brought extraordinary transformations to the society of Britain and the lives of those within its colonial reach. Many of these changes—on both a societal and individual level—centered on how time was sensed, measured, and understood. This engaging volume explores these various relationships with time through a remarkably diverse collection of objects, each of which is inscribed with a specific date. The dates mark significant events in the lives of these objects and the people who made and owned them. From posy rings to pastry jiggers, teapots to tape measures, these more than 450 objects—and the stories they tell—offer a vivid sense of the lived experience of time, while providing a rich survey of the material world of early modern Britain. Small, humble, but often surprisingly moving and poignant, the objects in this book show that the things we live with say a great deal about who we are and how we make our marks in time.

Edward Town is head of collections information and access and assistant curator of early modern art at the Yale Center for British Art. Angela McShane is head of research development, the Wellcome Collection, London.

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press:

Jessica Fripp, Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1644532027 (ebook), $70 / ISBN: 978-1644532010 (cloth), $70.

Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought.

Jessica L. Fripp is Assistant Professor of Art History at Texas Christian University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Friendship in the Academy
2  Celebrating Celebrity
3  Re-Evaluating Rivalry
4  Friendship Abroad
Epilogue

Endnotes
Bibliography
Index