CFP: British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH)

This e-mail in this morning:

Call for Papers

BrANCH Conference at Madingley Hall, Cambridge,  14-16 October 2011

The 18th BrANCH annual conference will take place from 14-16 October 2011 at Madingley Hall, Cambridge.

The BrANCH committee will meet in the Spring to put the programme into preliminary shape.  Please let me have paper proposals—with synopsis (on a single page) and the briefest C.V.—by Friday 15th April at the latest.

Individual papers and panel proposals are welcome on any aspect of the period 1789-1917.  Postgraduate contributions will be warmly received, and we hope to be able to offer generous subsidies to British-based graduate students.

Please note that all program participants will be required to register as BrANCH members.  Membership fees for 2011 will remain unchanged from 2010 and full subscription information will be circulated shortly.

Send all proposals to me by e-mail at m.s.crawford@ams.keele.ac.uk

I greatly look forward to hearing from you.

Martin Crawford

Chair, BrANCH

I went to BrANCH for the first time last year and had the loveliest time. I very much hope to go this year. I'm thinking Julia Griffiths Crofts might want some attention at this one. She was, after all, British herself, and I could use some advice on local archives -- if such exist in England -- for more on her life there. Do you know how much I would love to find an image of her?

Besides, who doesn't love to hear about a good "Jezebel" about whom William Lloyd Garrison wrote:

For several years past, he [Douglass] has had one of the worst advisers in his printing-office, whose influence over him has not only caused much unhappiness in his own household, but perniciously biased his own judgement; who, active, facile, mischievous, has never had any sympathy with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but would doubtless rejoice to see it become extinct; and whose sectarianism is manifestly paramount to any regard for the integrity of the anti-slavery movement. (Liberator, 18 Nov 1853)

Oh, Garrison, you could be a catty fellow when you tried! Parker Pillsbury called her "devilish," Mary Estlin said that she "would weary out the most determined of believers," Eliza Wigham said that she was "a thorn in the flesh of many of the true A.S. friends here [in Scotland]," and Maria Weston Chapman, always good for a scathing comment described her as having "fastened on the cause as the Leech does the Swimmer." In short, they hated her. Perhaps that is too strong. They hated slavery, they saw her as a threat to their cause, or at least to their organization and networks eminating out of Boston. Throw in the whiff of a sex scandal, and you have an exciting story charged with unexamined racism rubbing up agains unexamined sexism, mixed in with financial wheelings and dealings, and intra-movement betrayals.

Now, how to explain that in a more scholarly tone?