Episode Summary
How did average, poor, and enslaved men and women live their day-to-day lives in the early United States?
Today, we explore the answers to that question with Simon P. Newman, a Professor of History at the University of Glasgow and our guide for an investigation into how historians choose their research topics.
What You’ll Discover
- Life for the urban poor in early national America
- Size and population of early American cities
- How disease affected poor people in early American cities
- How historians find research topics
- How Simon found his first book project: Festive culture in the early American republic
- Overview of how plantation slavery developed in the British Atlantic World
- How Simon found his plantation labor and slavery project
- The role historic sources play in how historians find their research topics
- Daily life for poor people in Philadelphia during the late 18th century
- How Simon researched the bodies of poor people
- How historians research difficult topics like death and slavery
- What Simon does with all of the research ideas he doesn’t have time to pursue
- How Simon knows he has found a topic he wants to research
- The collaborative nature of historical research
Links to People, Places, and Publications
- Simon P. Newman
- Simon’s University of Glasgow webpage
- Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic
- Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia
- A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic
- Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
- Episode 049: Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds
- Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom