Program

Research Programs: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

Period of Performance

1/1/2014 - 6/30/2017

Funding Totals (outright + matching)

$198,600.00 (approved)
$188,357.00 (awarded)


Long-Term Fellowships at the Massachusetts Historical Society

FAIN: RA-50119-13

Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA 02215-3631)
Conrad Edick Wright (Project Director: August 2012 to December 2019)

Sixteen months of stipend support (2 to 4 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated wtih the selection of fellows.

The Massachusetts Historical Society requests a grant of $278,400 in outright funds and $21,000 in matching funds, a total of $299,400, for a program of long-term post-doctoral fellowships. To this sum the Society will add $21,000 raised from outside sources and $40,500 in its own funds, a total of $61,500. The initiative will complement three other research fellowship programs at the Society: 1) short-term fellowships; 2) regional fellowships (in collaboration with the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium; and 3) a two-month Civil War fellowship (in collaboration with the Boston Athenaeum). In the Spring of 2012 the four research fellowship competitions the Society sponsors considered 226 applications and made 37 awards. Fellows employ these grants at the Society, where they make use of one of the great research collections for the study of American history.





Associated Products

"'Slavery' and 'To Mrs. Eliot on the Death of Her Child': Two New Manuscript Poems Connected to Phillis Wheatley by the Bostonian Poet Ruth Barrell Andrews" (Article)
Title: "'Slavery' and 'To Mrs. Eliot on the Death of Her Child': Two New Manuscript Poems Connected to Phillis Wheatley by the Bostonian Poet Ruth Barrell Andrews"
Author: Wendy Roberts
Abstract: Reports on two recently discovered poems connected to the eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley.
Year: 2016
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Literature
Publisher: Early American Literature

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Book)
Title: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave’s cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.
Year: 2016
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300181371
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Avery O. Craven Award
Date: 4/1/2017
Organization: Organization of American Historians
Abstract: Awarded for "“the most original book on the coming of the Civil War, and Civil War years, or the Era of Reconstruction, with the exception of works of purely military history.”

American Capitalism: New Histories (Book)
Title: American Capitalism: New Histories
Editor: Christine Desan
Editor: Sven Beckert
Abstract: AMERICAN CAPITALISM presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars of the subject. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women's rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-capitalism/9780231185240
Primary URL Description: Publisher's catalog
Access Model: hardcover book; e-book
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780231185240
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism (Article)
Title: The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Historical Review

Frederick Douglass and Fugitivity (Article)
Title: Frederick Douglass and Fugitivity
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2018
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Black Perspectives

Preface (Book Section)
Title: Preface
Author: Manisha Sinha
Editor: Michael Roy
Editor: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol
Editor: Claire Parfait
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2018
Publisher: Paris: Editions Rue d'Ulm
Book Title: Undoing Slavery: American Abolitionism in Transnational Perspective, 1776-1865

"Do Something": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to an Abolitionist in Ireland (Book Section)
Title: "Do Something": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to an Abolitionist in Ireland
Author: Manisha Sinha
Editor: Nicole Seary
Editor: Justine Ahlstrom
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2018
Publisher: Gilder Lehrman Institute in American History
Book Title: Frederick Douglass: A Life in Documents

The Lion of All Occasions: The Great Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass (Blog Post)
Title: The Lion of All Occasions: The Great Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: N/A
Date: 01/01/2018
Primary URL: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-now/2018-02/frederick-douglass-200
Blog Title: History Now
Website: The Guilder Lehrman Institute on American History

Hymnody and Song (Book Section)
Title: Hymnody and Song
Author: Wendy Roberts
Editor: Greta LaFleur
Editor: William Huntting Howell
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition, Volume One, 1770-1828
ISBN: 9781108675239

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Book)
Title: The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the 'corrupt bargain' of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha's startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote--and which Sinha calls the 'last Reconstruction amendment'
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1379265882
Publisher: Liveright
Type: Single author monograph

A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment (Book)
Title: A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment
Editor: Sven Beckert
Editor: Christine Desan
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Type: Edited Volume

Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (Book)
Title: Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism
Author: Wendy Roberts
Abstract: In 1740, Benjamin Franklin published the first American edition of Gospel Sonnets, by the eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister Ralph Erskine. The work, already in its fifth British edition, quickly became an American bestseller and remained so throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin was aware of what most scholars of American religion and literature have forgotten -that poetry played a central role in the "surprising works of God" that birthed evangelicalism. The far-reaching social transformations precipitated by the transatlantic evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century depended upon the development of a major literary form, that of revival poetry. Literary scholars and historians of religion have prioritized sermons, conversion narratives, periodicals, and hymnody. Wendy Roberts here argues that poetry offered a unique capacity to "diffuse celestial Fervor through the World," in the words of the cleric Samuel Davies. Awakening Verse is the first monograph to address this large corpus of evangelical poetry in the American colonies, shedding light on important dimensions of eighteenth-century religious and literary culture. Roberts deftly assembles a large, previously unknown archive of immensely popular poems, examines how literary history has rendered this poetic tradition invisible, and demonstrates how a vibrant popular poetics exercised a substantial effect on the landscape of early American religion, literature, and culture.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/awakening-verse-9780197510278?cc=us&lang=en&
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197510278

The London Jew's Society and the Roots of Premillennialism, 1809-1829 (Book Section)
Title: The London Jew's Society and the Roots of Premillennialism, 1809-1829
Author: Wendy Roberts
Editor: Stefano Villani
Editor: Simone Maghenzani
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Converting Europe: British Protestant Missions in the Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries

Ecclesiology and the Varieties of Romanticism in American Christianity, 1825-1850 (Book Section)
Title: Ecclesiology and the Varieties of Romanticism in American Christianity, 1825-1850
Author: Wendy Roberts
Editor: Benjamin E. Park
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: A Companion to American Religious History

The Calvinist Couplet: Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets and Espousal Poetics in Early Evangelicalism (Article)
Title: The Calvinist Couplet: Ralph Erskine's Gospel Sonnets and Espousal Poetics in Early Evangelicalism
Author: Wendy Roberts
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Christianity and Literature 78.3

Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office (Article)
Title: Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Isis 10

Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on 'Invention of a Slave' (Article)
Title: Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on 'Invention of a Slave'
Author: Kara W. Swenson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Columbia Law Review

Making Patents: Patent Administration, 1790-1860 (Article)
Title: Making Patents: Patent Administration, 1790-1860
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Case Western Reserve Law Review 777

Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents (Article)
Title: Inventing the Woman Voter: Suffrage, Ability, and Patents
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19

Prizes

Martha Trescott Prize
Date: 3/3/2022
Organization: Society for the History of Technology
Abstract: The Martha Trescott Prize will be given annually for the best published essay in one of two areas. In even-numbered years (2022, 2024), the prize will be awarded to an outstanding published historical essay in the area of women in technology. In odd-numbered years (2023, 2025), the prize will be awarded to an outstanding published essay in the area of social responsibility of engineers in history.

Centering Black Women: Passing and the Patent Archive (Article)
Title: Centering Black Women: Passing and the Patent Archive
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Stanford Technology Law Review

Centering Black Women: Passing and the Patent Archive (Book Section)
Title: Centering Black Women: Passing and the Patent Archive
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Editor: Anibal Rosario-Lebron
Editor: Jamie Abrams
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2023
Publisher: Thomson Reuters
Book Title: Gender and the Law

Beyond the Progress of the Useful Arts: The Inventor as Useful Citizen (Article)
Title: Beyond the Progress of the Useful Arts: The Inventor as Useful Citizen
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Houston Law Review 363

They Knew It All Along: Patents, Social Justice and Fights for Civil Rights (Book Section)
Title: They Knew It All Along: Patents, Social Justice and Fights for Civil Rights
Author: Kara W. Swanson
Editor: Lateef Mtima
Editor: Steven D. Jamar
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2024
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: The Cambridge Handbook of Intellectual Property and Social Justice