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Joseph Brown’s Adventures with the Jerks

I was recently invited to contribute a blog post for a roundtable discussion of religion in The Panorama, the online forum of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. In “Joseph Brown’s Adventures with the Jerks,” I reflect briefly on my recent work on the history of the jerking exercise and consider the “tangled legacy” of American evangelicalism, “settler colonialism, Native American dispossession, and the expansion of slavery.”

Hope you’ll consider checking it out and sharing your reactions on the SHEAR website.

Col. Joseph Brown (1772–1868), n.d., photographic print. Source: Picture Collection, ca. 1800–1970, Box 2, Folder 35, THS 193, Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville. Courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives.