The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, The Library
Company of Philadelphia, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Stenton
Museum have issued a call for papers for a conference on "James Logan and the Networks of Atlantic Culture and Politics, 1699-1751," which will be held on September 18-20, 2014 in Philadelphia. The CFP invites proposals for a conference "reconsidering early Pennsylvania culture in an Atlantic World
context." From the CFP:
James Logan (1674-1751), Provincial Secretary to the Penn family, and
his vast political, trade and knowledge networks provide a lens for examination
of the Atlantic World in the first half of the eighteenth century. This
conference is an effort to consider Logan’s milieu in the widest possible way.
James Logan studied the sexuality of plants, mentored Benjamin Franklin and
John Bartram, served as Mayor of Philadelphia and Chief Justice of
Pennsylvania, shaped his province’s relationships with Native Americans, traded
furs, owned slaves, was a gentleman-merchant, book collector, and scholar. His nearly
3,000-volume library remains intact at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The
Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives include numerous papers collections
related to his activities, and The National Society of The Colonial Dames in
America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania preserves his house, Stenton.
Committed participants include Anthony Grafton of
Princeton University, Bernard Herman of the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, and Gary B. Nash of the University of California, Los Angeles.
Among possible themes for paper proposals are intellectual history, knowledge
networks, natural and moral philosophy; books, poetry and literature,
collecting, and botany; religion, in particular Quakerism; material culture,
archeology, architecture, houses, foodways, landscapes, land acquisition and
urban development; economics, industry, commerce; gender, servitude,
enslavement and social structure; and politics, imperialism, and
European-Native American interactions. …
Please submit 250-word proposals and a one-page c.v. via
e-mail no later than 30 September 2013; proposals should be headed with the
title of the paper and the presenter’s name, affiliation, and contact
information. Submissions and queries may be directed to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
Since Logan was chief justice of Pennsylvania in the 1730s — and published, as I recall, two charges to Philadelphia juries — I assume someone's going to be talking about his ideas about law. At least I hope so.