Figure 18 from Miss Beecher’s Housekeeper And Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Recipes For Economical And Healthful Cooking: Also, Many Directions for Securing Health And Happiness.
Spatial metaphors infuse and shape scholarly conversations about 19th century US history, especially intellectual history. Notions of the public and private, of borderlands and expansion, and especially of domesticity—all of these are powerful concepts for understanding ideas in action. But they are also rooted in the material realities of spaces that constituted the 19th-century US landscape—homes and workplaces, prisons and hospitals, schools and theaters, plantations and reservations, boundaries and borderlands, and the land and sea themselves—as well as the lived experiences of those who created, occupied, shaped, and maintained them.
Many of these spaces have been protected, restored, opened, and interpreted for the public. What does 19th-century US intellectual history look like in those spaces, and how might greater consideration of these spaces and the work done in them reshape broader conversations in the field?
These questions form the framework for an innovative dual-platform collaboration between Contingent Magazine and the Society for US Intellectual History as part of the Society’s year-long virtual conference: a week of short essays published in Contingent, followed by a public virtual roundtable with the essayists which S-USIH will host and Contingent editor Erin Bartram will chair. The essays will be published in Contingent the week of March 29, 2021, and the virtual roundtable will take place the following Monday, April 5. After the roundtable, the video will be hosted publicly on the S-USIH website with a transcript of the conversation on the Contingent website.
Contingent is now open for pitches from potential contributors. Participants should be actively engaged in the work of historic interpretation in 19th century US spaces, and must be able to commit to both the essay and roundtable portions of the collaboration if accepted. To be considered for participation, send an email to pitches@contingentmag.org with a brief description of the historic space where you work, your position there, and how you do intellectual history in that historic space.
The essays will be 300-500 words in length; compensation is $100. S-USIH requests that all presenters be members of the society. Decisions on participation will be made solely by the magazine’s editorial board. Pitches are due by November 15, 2020.