News and Blog
(The World According to Carp?)
History of Fresh Produce
This was a fun and interesting podcast--"The History of Fresh Produce"--I'm in parts 3 & 4 of a 4-part series on the Boston Tea Party. Here’s Part 3!
Getting beyond the "Bedtime Story"
Shepherd has me doing one of their “Top Five” lists today: riffing on a line I love from a book review by Jan Lewis, I chose “The best books that get beyond the ‘bedtime story’ of the American Revolution.”
I probably should have written this more than a year ago, but I found it difficult to come up with a top five list! There are already quite a few lists on the American Revolution (Kathleen DuVal did one recently), and I have so many favorite books (and favorite authors) that it seemed impossible to narrow down. Most of my favorites, of course, are academic books, and the site tries to discourage contributors from being too academic. So I chose two of my favorite historical fiction books about the Revolution, two classics, and a relative newcomer that I’ve had success assigning to undergraduates. None had received a lot of attention on Shepherd yet (even though they are all well regarded books).
New article for Current and NYCFM talk tonight!
I’ve just written a piece for Current about the religious angle on the Great New York Fire. Check it out! "Timber Burning”: The Great New York Fire of 1776
Also, Bruce Twickler (author of New York Firefighting and the American Revolution) is having a “Fireside Chat” with me at the New York City Fire Museum tonight (March 7) , in conjunction with a private viewing of the Colonial Wing of the museum.
Paperback Party!
Hot on the heels of the audiobook release, today is the release of the paperback edition of The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution.
I now have a link where you can register for the talk I’m giving at the College of Staten Island on February 23
Jake Suggs of American HIstory Gazette chatted with me about the Boston Tea Party: you can watch the video or listen to the podcast version .
Happy Audiobook release day!
Today is the publication day for the audiobook of The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution. Have a listen! And if you’re still not sure whether it’s a book worth investigating, subscribers to the Journal of Military History can check out the great review that Professor T. Cole Jones wrote.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for the paperback release day next week!
Brooklyn College did a short video interview with me; I’m pretty sure my work on the Boston Tea Party is featured in the first 2024 issue of American Heritage magazine and there’s another online piece on the way.
In other news, I have just two more online talks scheduled, at the North Jersey American Revolution Round Table and the College of Staten Island History Department. I will also appear on a couple more podcasts in the near future, and I’ll let you know about those when they’re released, but since those are already recorded, I can start thinking about future projects. It’s been quite a year! Thanks to everyone who read, tuned in, or said a kind word.
Coming up in 2024
After a whirlwind fall of talks on both the Great New York City Fire of 1776 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which celebrated its 250th anniversary on December 16, 2023, my schedule finally seems to be calming down somewhat. But I am still doing a couple of Zoom events in January, as well as some private events in New Jersey, New York, and Florida, in January and February. Please see the Events page for more information!
I did publish an article reflecting on my experiences at the Boston Tea Party reenactment, which you can read about at HNN/Bunk History. I also chatted with Smithsonian Magazine.
Thanks to all the wonderful audiences who invited me to speak about the American Revolution and its legacy during the very busy year of 2023. Happy New Year to everyone!
Oh, and stay tuned! The paperback edition of The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution should be available soon, as well as (I think!) the audiobook! The great Vaughn Scribner wrote a really nice review of the book for H-Environment, and Gene Procknow (who previously reviewed the book for the Journal of the American Revolution) called the book one of the best he read in 2023.
Agh, there’s much more! Colonial Williamsburg published a cool piece on the Boston Tea Party, and I appeared on several podcasts, and even a couple of TV shows, over the past months. I’ve tried to stay on top of all that on social media, but not on this blog, for which I apologize! Best wishes to all for 2024.
We're Not Doing Enough for Grad Students at Conferences
reprinted with permission
We’re Not Doing Enough for Grad Students at Conferences
Networking won’t save us, but we should endeavor to clear pathways instead of pulling up ladders or staying in our bubbles.
AUGUST 23, 2023
When I was a graduate student, I flew 3,000 miles to give my first conference presentation, only to be relegated to a grab-bag panel with six different papers on wildly divergent topics. The session struck me as dispiriting and useless — except that a world-renowned scholar in my field took it upon himself to stay for my paper and afterward sat outside with me for half an hour to provide a critique. I am a tenured professor now, but that kindness has stayed with me for more than 20 years.
In-person conferences are back, for better and for worse. Such gatherings can be exclusionary and costly for many junior scholars, not to mention inaccessible for people with disabilities and for those who live far from the usual conference venues. Yet conferences remain the standard way we congregate and converse. Get a few dozen — or a few hundred — scholars in the same location, and the potential for priceless social and intellectual interactions skyrockets. So long as conferences are happening somewhere, they will be important catalysts for career advancement.
For rookie and experienced attendees alike, there is no shortage of advice about how to make conferences work for yourself. But established scholars have a second obligation to make conferences work for others — for our own graduate students, especially, but also for other junior scholars we might encounter at a meeting. Recalling how I benefited from such serendipitous mentoring got me thinking: What should we do to help emerging scholars at conferences?
For academics, networking at professional meetings can lead to publications, future conference panels, and other avenues for making your intellectual mark. A senior professor from any institution can serve formally or informally as a reader of a junior scholar’s manuscripts. Sometimes networking can even pave the way to future employment, both within and beyond academe, through letters of recommendation, support for tenure and promotion, and informal referrals. In that sense, conferences are places of privilege, and it would be highly unfair for better-connected professors to hoard that privilege too closely.
For a fledgling graduate student, a scholarly conference can be both heady and daunting. So a positive interaction with an established professor is everything: Senior scholars can offer feedback to improve a dissertation chapter; they can be generous with their attention, and even a brief exchange has potential for further exchanges down the road.
Yet the gap between expectation and reality is wide for many graduate students. For example, after a recent conference, a doctoral candidate at my university reported that he had met students from other programs who felt that their advisers had shown an “unwillingness to help them network throughout the weekend.” Granted, not all advisers can attend every conference, and when they do, they want to see old friends or they have their own clout to chase. Maybe graduate students will always feel that their advisers could be doing more for them, no matter how much effort the professors expend.
Still, this complaint reminded me that, although much of conference mentoring can involve small-bore or even unthinking acts of kindness, such gestures matter in a profound way.
Tenured professors with long-standing friendships may have forgotten that conference attendees often feel alienated, excluded, lonely, or overwhelmed, particularly graduate students who are new and inexperienced. Established academics, whose conference fees and travel expenses are often paid by their institutions, also might forget the monetary sacrifice required of graduate students and job candidates to attend. In any case, that one professor at my first conference didn’t forget his responsibility to make the financial sacrifice worthwhile.
Networking can be a particular challenge at large conferences — like the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association — where almost all attendees feel invisible. But most subfields have smaller, more manageable meetups. Even more intimate are boutique conferences that often require some networking (or a particularly appealing project) just to get in the door.
The students who complained about their advisers were attending the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, a mid-sized conference that makes admirable efforts to forestall such dissatisfaction: It reduces registration fees for student attendees (the fee is zero when they present a paper); sponsors a graduate-student reception and special graduate research seminars; has recently started a diversity, equity, and inclusion program; and offers a post-meeting workshop online on how to turn a panel presentation into a published journal article.
At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I teach, our doctoral students in history get great practice in networking before they ever leave the nest. In addition to a well-organized student council and a peer-mentor program, CUNY graduate students belong to the university’s labor union when they serve as instructors and have seats at the table in program governance. The student-run seminar in my subfield invites presentations from our students as well as students and faculty members from other institutions. Students are also eligible for partial funding to attend conferences.
Such formal and institutional mechanisms are vitally important.
Yet an informal touch is necessary, too. Connections can make a big conference feel smaller while also broadening the networks of individual scholars. For instance, some graduate programs will organize a small breakfast or cocktail reception for faculty members, current students, and alumni. That is more of an internal network than an external one, but small networks can breed bigger ones. The key is to help students learn the unwritten rules of the profession and find an entree into the networks they need.
Even without prior planning, simple connection and reconnection are important. Among the many ways for senior professors to take the lead on this at a scholarly meeting:
Doctoral advisers should check in with all of the program’s current and recent students who are attending the conference. Pass on something interesting from a panel, point out a promising talk, or even just say hello.
Spend time talking with junior scholars about their scholarship — not just because they carry on, and challenge, their elders’ work, but because newbies to a profession sometimes need a low-stakes opportunity to join informal scholarly conversations.
Advisers should look out for one another’s mentees, too, perhaps cynically as deposits in the favor bank but also because of the Golden Rule.
There is something more memorable about fostering relationships in person. But senior scholars can obviously support and encourage younger scholars throughout the year, too, via the internet — by exchanging email addresses or scheduling a future virtual meeting.
Attend as many panels as possible where students from your program are presenting. Offer the students feedback. Even if your program’s students are just sitting in the audience, they might appreciate sitting near a professor so as to share reactions as the session ends, or even get an introduction to the panelists.
At the next level of intensity, professors can ask their advisees and mentees if there is anyone in the field they particularly want to meet. Then make the introductions: to journal editors, institutional players, wizened intellectuals, academic celebrities. It’s easier to be shamelessly pushy when it’s on an advisee’s behalf.
Additionally, if there is a small reception sponsored by a university press, library, or graduate program, ask to bring some graduate students along. Add extra spots to dinner reservations so that you and your peers can spontaneously invite a couple of students to follow you from a chaotic reception to a cozier meal. And when the bill arrives for the meal, coffee, or a bottle of water, plop down your wallet.
The easiest thing in the world would be to do all this in the service of old boys’ networks (or old networks of any gender). But the profession will never become more equitable or inclusive unless it can diversify the pipeline of junior scholars. When some senior professors are organizing conferences, looking for new work to publish, or offering job, program, and fellowship opportunities, the rest of us can make efforts to call attention to students from underrepresented groups.
Over time, it becomes possible to make deeper connections at conferences — the kind that go beyond brief interactions and allow younger scholars to ask external mentors for help with professional and personal crises. Even with former students who are happy and thriving, it’s nice to catch up and discuss advice about publishing, work-life balance, and other issues.
The jobs crisis in higher education, particularly in the humanities, is real, and it isn’t going away, but we are all in it together. Networking won’t save us, but we should endeavor to clear pathways instead of pulling up ladders or staying in our bubbles.
Our mentors and perhaps near strangers were kind to us many years ago, when we first started out. We can rarely repay them directly, but we can pass on their kindness with large and small gestures at conferences and beyond. Perhaps some advisers will stick to their “unwillingness to help,” but the rest of us can offer assistance, solidarity, and respect.
Anniversary of the Great New York Fire
Today is the 247th anniversary of the Great New York Fire of 1776 (and also the first anniversary of this humble blog!) Some exciting things have been happening in the past few weeks!
To commemorate the event I published a piece in the New York Daily News today. Subscribers can read it here!
I published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “We’re Not Doing Enough for Grad Students at Conferences”
I wrote a review for EH.Net on Jeremy Land’s Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, 1700–1776; apparently it’s a rule now that I have a movie reference in every book review I write
Erik Ofgang wrote a piece for Connecticut Magazine, “Did CT soldiers help spark the Great New York Fire of 1776? It's very likely, according to a new book”
Over the summer I helped supervise students for the Gardiner Foundation Semiquincentennial Student Fellowship Project (follow the link to read more about it) and a Brooklyn College student was featured in this story!
Thanks to everyone who has gotten in touch with me via the website with inquiries and invitations!
Summer's End: Upcoming Events
Well, after a long break from the blog, here are some upcoming events! You can see fuller details for some of these on the events page, too.
August 23 (Wednesday), 7 pm to 8:30 pm, In Person, “The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution,” Non-Fiction at the Bryant Park Reading Room series, Bryant Park, NY [free]
September 17 (Sunday), 2 pm, Online, Book Breaks, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
September 17 (Sunday), 7 pm to 8:30 pm, Online, “The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America,” Emerging Revolutionary War [link to livestream]
September 26 (Tuesday), 7 pm to 8 pm, Online, “A Hat Trick with author Benjamin L. Carp!” HistoryAuthorTalks.com [click here to register]
October 12 (Thursday), 6:30 pm (preceded by reception at 5 pm), In Person, “American Creation, American Destruction: The 250th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and 1776,” H. Nicholas Hamner Lecture, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
October 25 (Wednesday), noon to 1 pm, Online, “The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution,” New York State Library Public Webinars [click on link to register]
…and stay tuned for more Boston Tea Party talks in December!
More exciting news!
I haven’t been updating the blog very much, for which I apologize! But there have still been some exciting things going on.
I had a wonderful talk at Mount Vernon, which you can watch via that link.
I also had a great exchange at the CUNY Graduate Center, hosted by the Early American Republic Seminar, with David Waldstreicher about our books: you can check out his The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley which has also recently come out.
The Graduate Center of CUNY interviewed me: “Who Burned New York in 1776?”
Erik Ofgang, writing for Smithsonian Magazine, asks more specifically, “Did George Washington Order Rebels to Burn New York City in 1776?”
Dozens of colleagues were recognized at the Brooklyn College Faculty Authors Reception, which is held each spring.
Along with other colleagues, I will receive an Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Achievement at Brooklyn College, at a ceremony at the end of the Annual Faculty Day Conference this week.
And there is more to come! Upcoming talks:
May 18 (Thursday), 6:30 pm, In Person, “Lost Stories: How the New York City Fire of 1776 Illuminates Unfamiliar Lives of the American Revolution,” sponsored by New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Fraunces Tavern, New York. Please register using the link!
May 22, 7:30 pm (Monday), In Person, “The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution,” American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia, Montgomery, PA (arrive an hour early for food and drink)
May 23 (Tuesday), 6 pm, In Person and Online, “The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Tale of the American Revolution,” General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York in partnership with the New York Landmarks Conservancy, in New York (advance registration required, whether online or in person).
May 30 (Tuesday), 7 pm, Online, “Benjamin L. Carp on Urban Geographies of the American Revolution,” Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library and the American Revolutionary Geographies Online (ARGO) project. Free and open to the public. Register here!