Michael McCoy

SUNY: Orange County Community College, Global Studies, Faculty Member

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Michael B. McCoy (BA, MA, University of Pittsburgh) is Professor of History and Special Assistant to the Chair in the Department of Global Studies. He teaches a range of courses, including the US History surveys, Age of Revolutions, and Medieval and Renaissance Europe. In addition he has also taught honors seminars on the development of slavery and the ideas of race from Rome to the present, and Medieval Monstrosity. He is currently collaborating in the development of courses on the Early American Republic, Work and Working People in American History, and an interdisciplinary exploration of Civil Rights.

Michael hails from a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania, but currently makes his home in the Hudson Valley. He did his graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh. Working under the direction of Marcus Rediker, Van Beck Hall and Richard Oestreicher, he studied American and Atlantic History. Under the direction of John Markoff, he studied patterns of resistance and accommodation in historic and recent rural/peasant societies.

His research and publication look at the intersections of race/slavery, class, capitalism and citizenship in America before and after the American Revolution. His publications include:

Book:
The Anxious Republic: An Interpretive Anthology of the New American Nation, 1788-1848 (Kendall Hunt. 2014)

Essays:
“Forgetting Freedom: White Anxiety, Black Presence, and Gradual Abolition in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1780-1838,” PHMB: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 136.2 (April 2012), 141-68.

“Hybridity and Creolization in Early Pennsylvania,” Eighteenth Century Studies 45.1 (Fall 2011), 153-56. [Review Essay]

“The Margins of Enlightenment: Benjamin Rush, the Rural World, and Sociability in Post-Revolutionary Pennsylvania,” in S. Breuninger and D. Burrow, Sociability and Cosmopolitanism: Social Bonds on the Fringes of the Enlightenment (Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 141-62.

“Absconding Servants, Anxious Germans, and Angry Sailors: Working People and the Making of the Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 74.4, (Fall 2007), 427-51.

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Papers by Michael McCoy

Barbarian Philosophe: Market, Modernity, and the Enlightenment on James Smith's Frontier

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2009

Commerce mattered deeply to authors like Patrius and Rush, for it was inextricably linked to huma... more Commerce mattered deeply to authors like Patrius and Rush, for it was inextricably linked to human progress.4 Across the Atlantic, and motivated by issues little different from those broached by the two Philadelphians, empiricists like Hume, Robertson, and Ferguson had turned their quills to the study of human society and material progress.5 Like Patrius and Rush's Pennsylvania, their Scotland was in the midst of transformation, as traditional economies were giving way to capitalist forms, and as a new set of actors?"merchants and traders"?were translating their economic

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Absconding Servants, Anxious Germans, and Angry Sailors: Working People and the making of the Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742

Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 2007

Spence told Lloyd "that if the Quakers would give him fifteen hundred acres of land, they should ... more Spence told Lloyd "that if the Quakers would give him fifteen hundred acres of land, they should have the Election." After three years of bitter intra-elite division sparked by the War for Jenkins' Ear, Lloyd probably entertained the offer. Repulsed, however, by the mariner's audacity, Lloyd quickly retorted, "It was not in.. .Spence's power to help or hinder" any party, nor was it his place. Indeed, while laborers like Spence represented a growing segment of the urban population, inadequate taxable wealth meant most could not participate directly within the polity. Likely, maritime laborers represented from ten to and as much as twenty or twenty-five percent of the population, making them the single largest group of wage laborers.1 Given their mobility, wage fluctuations, and the inconsistency of employment, they

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Forgetting Freedom

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 2012

and Phi Alpha Theta for the encouragement and the opportunity to work through some initial ideas.... more and Phi Alpha Theta for the encouragement and the opportunity to work through some initial ideas. Thanks also to Gregory Geddes, Michael Strmiska, Tamara Gaskell, and the anonymous readers for the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography for their invaluable comments and criticisms. Finally, thanks to the students in my seminar on race and slavery for not telling me what I wanted to hear. S HORTLY AFTER ARRIVING in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1801, newly appointed state supreme court judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge sat down to finish the sequel to his lengthy and peripatetic satire on the dangers of popular democracy, Modern Chivalry. As in the work's earlier installments, it followed the quixotic adventures of the educated and virtuous Captain John Farrago and his naïve "bog-trotting" servant, Teague O'Regan-the former symbolic of thoughtful republican citizenship, the latter of the recently enfranchised, unlettered voter who elected unqualified men to high station. Yet Brackenridge offered more than a lesson on republican citizenship. As John Wood Sweet, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and others have shown, Modern Chivalry had a much broader ambit. Had they the opportunity to read it, Brackenridge's Cumberland County neighbors might have found neatly summarized in the text's later pages their own struggle to define citizenship in the age of emancipation. Like Brackenridge, rural citizens were living amid one of the Revolution's most profound and flawed legacies: abolition. In Pennsylvania, full-scale emancipation began in 1780, when the state 1

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Hybridity and Creolization in Early Pennsylvania

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2011

too often, when we think of William Penn’s colonial project, we think of it in terms that disavow... more too often, when we think of William Penn’s colonial project, we think of it in terms that disavow the very colonialism that underpinned it. Part of the problem lies in the persistent mythology surrounding Pennsylvania’s founding, a tradition inherited as much from scholars as it was from the founding generation. Writing more than a century ago, isaac sharpless, professor and dean at haverford college, helped to naturalize the myth that colonial Pennsylvania was from its start a social and political democracy. For sharpless, it just made good sense. after all, the colony had been born that way; a liberty-loving people like the Quakers, sharpless concluded, could not help but produce a society that was democratic. Yet, despite the powerful images of tolerance and pluralism that thoughts of the Quaker colony evoke, the history of Pennsylvania—and early america—needs to be interpreted in a fashion similar to other imperial endeavors: as a site of contestation and negotiation not only between indigenous and settler societies, but between the acrimonious admixture of colonists as well. to tell Pennsylvania’s history in this fashion is to discard a triumphant narrative of democratization and replace it with a story of creolization and hybridity. each and together, John smolenski’s Friends and Strangers and Judith Ridner’s A Town In-Between help to trouble the democratic narrative with more complex investigations of culture creation. Read together, smolenski’s focus on the decades after Pennsylvania’s founding and Ridner’s close study of carlisle, Pennsylvania, give important attention to the generative and adaptive processes of creolization and the resistant, sometimes subversive, responses of hybridity.

“’The High Price of Living’: The Lives of Insolvent Laborers in Jacksonian-Era Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1815–1842,” Pennsylvania History 84 (Spring 2017): 171-213.

2019 Philip S. Klein Pennsylvania History Prize (PA Historical Assoc.) 2018 Arline Custer Memori... more

"Forgetting Freedom: White Anxiety, Black Presence, and Gradual Emancipation in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 1780-1838"

“The Margins of Enlightenment: Benjamin Rush, the Rural World, and Sociability in Post-Revolutionary Pennsylvania”

“Black Rioters, White Writers: Race, Citizenship and Historical Memory after the McClintock Riot, 1847"

This essay is explores the public and private writing produced in the aftermath of the 1847 McCli... more This essay is explores the public and private writing produced in the aftermath of the 1847 McClintock Riot in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to study the convergence of race and historical memory. Calling on Carolyn Dinshaw’s theory of “touch,” the essay explores how an African American-led riot, by offering the potential for racial equality, revealed the artificiality of Carlisle’s economies of race and power and thus threatened the neat border between the races. Arguing that historical memory is shaped within a complex matrix of power, the piece then examines how (un)sympathetic whites filtered and co-opted the historical memory of the event in ways that disavowed the problems black rioters brought to the surface. By exploring these acts of historical mis-remembering and forgetting, we may expand our understanding of the complex and contentious negotiations of race, place, power, and memory in the Antebellum rural north.

“Hybridity and Creolization in Early Pennsylvania” (Review Essay)

“Absconding Servants, Anxious Germans, and Angry Sailors: Working People and the Making of the Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742”

•“Barbarian Philosophe: Market, Modernity & The Enlightenment on James Smith’s Frontier,"

• “Absconding Servants, Anxious Germans, and Angry Sailors: Working People and the Making of the Philadelphia Election Riot of 1742,”

• “An Unflattering Mirror: Truth, Lies and Capitalist Exploitation in James Smith’s Shaker Tracts,”

• “Monsters and ‘Money-Making Machines:’ Civilization, Barbarism, and the Transition to Capitalism on the Pennsylvania Borderlands.”