This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

James Logan (1674–1751) led many lives. The son of a schoolmaster, he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1699 as William Penn’s secretary. The fur trade made him rich. His political career included stints as mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice, and acting governor of Pennsylvania. Above all, he pursued books and learning, systematically building a collection of almost 4,000 books in fields from classical scholarship to Newtonian physics. His profuse and vivid annotations traced his progress in fields as diverse as Arabic philology and botany, recorded striking incidents in his life as collector and scholar, memorialized his creation of bibliophilic and scholarly networks, and provided the foundation for the learned essays that he published in both American and European periodicals – all characteristic ways of using books in the world of contemporary European scholarship. Drawing on the evidence of Logan’s books, papers, and his writings, and comparing Logan’s practices to those of the Mathers, the Winthrops, Francis Daniel Pastorius and other contemporaries, this essay offers a case study in the migration of Protestant late humanism to the English colonies in North America.

This essay is based on a singular archive of “relations” made by lay people when they were made candidates for church membership in New World Cambridge, Massachusetts ca. 1638–1648. In these narratives, women and men recall the social experience of being among the “godly” in England, reflect on the decision to emigrate, and above all, map the ups and downs of their spiritual histories. These “relations” are paired with sermons preached by Thomas Shepard, the town minister, who addressed the same topics both in sermons and in a journal. Bringing these two sources together makes it possible to explore various dimensions of lay experience and pastoral perspective: continuities between old and New England, disruptions and self-critiques arising out of the transition to Massachusetts, echoes of the “Antinomian” controversy and its objections to some aspects of the practical divinity. Overall, this essay will attempt to redefine “Reformation” as a challenging mixture of the local and the general, and of adaptation and continuity.