History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

My first article, "The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability and Race," appears in this month's issue of American Quarterly, the journal of the American Studies Association. If your library has a subscription to Project Muse, you can read the article in HTML or in PDF.

I think the longest I've spent on a blog post is about two or three hours. By contrast, this article has been in the works for about four years now, including press time. Extra time certainly does not entail perfection. (Would that it were so!) But hopefully there is some appreciable difference between the two genres!

In a generic sense, journals are still not as interactive and dialogical as blogs. I think there may be good reasons for that. But this post provides the article with a response thread, and I'd be delighted to hear of comments or criticisms. As I've argued before, I'm aware that scholarship does not end when publication begins. Scholarship is drafts all the way down. (I'll leave you to judge whether that means "drafts" in the sense of corrigible manuscripts, or "drafts" in the sense of sudden feelings that wind has broken loose.)

While you are at American Quarterly, it looks like the issue also contains some great articles on Christian heavy metal, polygamy debates, and transnationalism in American Studies.