It has been a privilege to read Violent Appetites, the latest installment of a debate about hangriness that unfolded at Nursing Clio in 2017. At that time, Carla Cevasco and I agreed about the importance of recovering the myriad meanings of hunger in the eighteenth century and disagreed over who experienced “hangriness” – the sensation… Read more →
Tag: Early American History
Liberty and Insanity Sitting in a Tree
In 2011, I participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar entitled “The Problem of Governance in the Early Republic.” Our group was housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and for three weeks the participants, led by Purdue University professors John L. Larson and Michael A. Morrison, talked and argued about a… Read more →
“We lost our appetite for food”: Why Eighteenth-Century Hangriness Might Not Be a Thing
In August 2015, Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word “hangry” had entered our common vocabulary. Surely most people living in the twenty-first century have experienced the sense of being simultaneously hungry and angry. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hunger was also everywhere. A recent NPR essay examines how slaveholders withheld food from enslaved people,… Read more →