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Martha Tomhave Blauvelt

Contact Information:

Office: Richarda P4
Phone: (320) 363-5235
mtomhave@csbsju.edu

Place of Birth:

Minneapolis, MN; raised in Hibbing, MN

Educational Information:

• Ph.D. - Princeton University, 1975
• MA - Princeton University, 1972
• BA - Summa Cum Laude, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1970

Academic Interests:

My research focuses on the late 18th and early 19th centuries of American history. Within that time period, I have studied and published on many different aspects of American women's history, from evangelical religious revivals to courtship, gossip, diaries, and expression of emotions. My book, The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830 (2007) is typical of my interests in that it uses sociology and literature to interpret history, examines how young women used diaries to build their emotions and their selves, and combines analysis with story-telling. Right now I am working on a new project on relations between daughters and fathers between 1780 and 1850, for which I am examining family letters, prescriptive literature, and popular culture.

• HIST 152: American Experience
• HIST 361: American Women to 1920
• HIST 362: American Women Since 1920
• HIST 364: American Religious Culture
• HIST 389: Historiography for Social Science Majors
• HIST 395: Historiography & Methods
• HIST 399: Senior Thesis

Story:

It was easy for me to become a historian: I grew up in a family of great storytellers and lived near a ghost town. When I was in college, I majored in not only history but German, because I loved German poetry and knew that "the past is a foreign country," and speaking a foreign language is a lot like practicing history. I then went to graduate school, where I focused on late 18th and early 19th century American history, which has always been my favorite historical period. I came to CSB in 1981 and have enjoyed its encouragement of interdisciplinary work and commitment to women's studies.

Hobbies:

Gardening and reading.

Publications:

Books

Book in progress: Daughters and Fathers: Negotiating Power and Gender within the Family, 1780-1850.

The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830, Jeffersonian America Series (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). Society for Historians of the Early Republic Best First Book Award.

Essays

"The Work of the Heart: Emotion in the 1805-1835 Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer." Journal of Social History 35 (Spring 2002): 577-92.

"Making a Match in Nineteenth-Century New York: The Courtship Diary of Mary Guion," New York History 76 (April 1995): 153-72.

"'this altogather precious tho wholy worthless book': The Diary of Mary Guion." In Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney and Carol J. Singley, SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism and Theory, 125-41 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

"Women, Words and Men: Excerpts from the Diary of Mary Guion." Journal of Women 's History 2 (Fall 1990): 177-84.

"Neither Housework nor Wage Labor: Women's Dairy Work." In Bringing Home the Cows: Family Dairy Farming in Stearns County,1853-1986. (St. Cloud: Stearns County Historical Society, 1988).

"The Mechanics of Revival: New Jersey Presbyterians during the Second Awakening." In Religion in New Jersey Life before the Civil War, edited by Mary Murrin, 89-103 (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1985).

"Women and Revivalism: The Puritan and Wesleyan Tradition" (with Rosemary Skinner Keller). In Women and Religion in America Volume II: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, 316-67 (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1983).

"Women and Revivalism." In Women and Religion in America Volume I: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, 1-45 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).