Dear readers,
We’re coming to the end of our five-year terms as editors of ANCH, and feel both excitement and melancholy at the prospect of turning the journal over to a new editorial team. The next issue will be a bumper-sized special issue on music in the nineteenth-century United States, ably guest-edited by Billy Coleman and JoAnne Mancini, so this one is really “our” final production.
That said, we’re pleased to present yet another set of articles that fully represent the diversity of our subfield. One is from Thomas Kidd, a leading historian of American religion, who brings the familiar story of John Brown into dialogue with the history of American evangelicalism. In his essay, we see the transatlantic success of the English preacher Charles Spurgeon undermined by Southerners’ horror at his public support of Brown in the wake of the latter’s insurrection at Harpers Ferry. Religion is also the subject of Benedict Carton’s analysis of the intriguing experiences of three formerly enslaved people who went as Christian missionaries to colonial South Africa in the late nineteenth century; they were fascinated by Zulu culture but alarmed by the ways in which mission stations replicated some features of the antebellum plantation world into which they had been born. Carton is an established scholar of African history, but this is his first publication in a journal focused on the US. Our other contributors are the winners of this year’s Peter Parish Prizes for BA and MA theses. Sophie Salway’s essay draws upon a vast corpus of primary sources to explore the involvement of African-Americans in the temperance crusade, emphasizing the significant role played by black men and women in what has generally been viewed as a white-led movement. Sophie received her first-class BA in history from Durham University last summer and is now in non-academic employment. Our MA winner, Brianna Cheng, a graduate of McGill University, received her MSt last year from Oxford and is currently working at that university’s Exeter College. Her thesis deploys a postcolonial perspective to examine discourses about the allegedly dangerous sexualities of Chinese migrants to the West Coast, exploring how “Manifest Destiny” affected not only the Native Americans it displaced but also the immigrants that it attracted.
We hope to see you at BrANCH’s annual conference, to be held September 22–24 at Oxford University. As always, we encourage you to submit your work to ANCH.
With all best wishes,
Natalie and Matthew