Oct 21, - Oct 22, Wetzell GHI. This workshop brought together scholars from Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom researching topics of rumors, gossip, and scandals in American history. In his introduction, Sebastian Jobs described the theoretical concept of "uncertain knowledge" as an umbrella term for various practices of knowledge production such as rumors, libel, slander or denunciation.
Contrary to many scholars who consider these phenomena mere disturbing interferences in communication, Jobs proposed to use the lens of "uncertain knowledge" to go beyond the dichotomy of historical "true" and "false" and to take these irritations and crises of knowledge seriously in order to analyze the dynamics of knowledge production. Thus, rumors and gossip could be a means to understand networks of communication and to bring into focus the fluidity and dynamic changes of categories with which Americans organized their lives and assigned meaning to their experiences.
Furthermore, Jobs introduced the general outline and highlighted the three basic areas of inquiry on which the workshop discussions would touch, namely, actors, media, and practices within the field of "uncertain knowledge. In his paper on same-sex relations in New England in the early nineteenth century, Bruce Dorsey dismissed monocausal historical interpretations of homosexuality. Describing the case of a Christian minister who was said to have sexually harassed a fellow parishioner, he emphasized instead the fluidity of categories employed to understand and describe sexual encounters.
Thus, he offered a variety of perspectives contemporaries could have used to understand the behavior he was alleged to have committed: as a homosexual advance, as an educational measure, as an act of Christian brotherhood. Moreover, his contribution questioned the adequacy of today's analytical concepts for grasping same-sex relations in the early American republic.
In the same panel, Jennifer Manion gave a thought-provoking presentation about violence among women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. Interpreting trial records of assault and battery cases, she explored ways to decode these violent encounters as instances of physical intimacy and desire. In doing so, Manion addressed the uncertain knowledge toward same-sex relations and emotions as produced in official reports and as stored in archives.
