In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

What do Deborah Sampson/Robert Shurtliff, Charity Bryant, Sylvia Drake, and Fitz-Greene Halleck all share in common? Each illustrates the need for a queer crip method in early American studies. Too often, disciplinary conventions have isolated the queer past from disability history. Stories of gender variance and sexual difference have deployed ableist rhetorics to legitimize recuperation. Meanwhile, histories of disability have highlighted the way preindustrial divisions of labor led families to make accommodations for disabilities without challenging heterosexist suppositions about what counts as kinship. This chapter examines the discursive tools of self-fashioning, erotic built interiors, and sensorial aesthetics that early national figures harnessed to compose queer disabled livelihoods. In a reconsideration of the focus on (de)pathologization in queer theory and disability studies, I propose a method attuned to sites of microhistorical transition, where queer disabled embodiment permitted a tailoring of one’s world to identities, intimacies, and forms of communication otherwise unattainable.

This chapter reads the late nineteenth-century genres of American naturalism and regionalism through the prism of climate, and finds that their authors depict characters whose characteristics are shaped by their responses to their ambient environments, including climate, and by the inherited effects of their ancestors’ adaptations to theirs. It argues that their thinking about climate was informed by the popular Lamarckian science of their post-Darwinian evolutionary era, by the climate theory of the historian Hippolyte Taine, and by turn-of-the-century geography. In the decades during which Frank Norris, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Hamlin Garland were at work on questions of determinism and/or a “determined indeterminacy,” climatic, genetic, medico-psychiatric, and sociological models of identity vied for authority. The writers drew their representations of the making of Americans from these competing claims.