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The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is pleased to announce the appointment of Robert G. Parkinson as the 2006-2008 Institute/NEH postdoctoral fellow. Currently a member of the Department of History at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Mr. Parkinson received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2005. Geographically precocious, he is a native of New Jersey but grew up in five different states. He completed his undergraduate degree and his M.A. at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Robert Parkinson’s powerfully written dissertation, “Enemies of the People: The Revolutionary War and Race in the New American Nation,“ centers on the 28th article of the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson says of George III: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages . . .“ Jefferson’s accusation-the identification of the British as agents in encouraging slave insurrection, Indian massacres, and German mercenary atrocities-forms the crucible in which Parkinson contends the nationhood of the United States was founded. In what can only be described as a relentless investigation of the intersection between war, race, and the formation of nationhood, the author constructs a narrative of the war years that established the essential elements upon which the Revolutionary nation created its identity as an imagined people. The Declaration, writes Parkinson, “provided the patriots with their founding, a civic myth that cordoned off ’domestic insurrectionists,’ ’merciless savages,’ and ’large armies of foreign mercenaries’ as proxy enemies that should be excluded from the new nation.“

Acknowledging that he is building an argument upon preexisting racial sentiments and prejudices, Parkinson is most engaged by how pervasively printers and publicists deployed these images in newspapers, prints, pamphlets, and broadsides. He impressively documents the ubiquitousness of these accounts from 1775 to 1783, as Indians and blacks were stigmatized as subhuman enemies of the people. Although Parkinson recognizes the misleading and reductionist character of these representations, he nonetheless posits how these stories contributed to the shaping of “tangible racial boundaries“ in the postwar years. And while German mercenaries were ultimately absorbed into the new nation, blacks and Indians were not, with the result that “ideas about race were given a whole new valence.“

Rob has elected to postpone taking up his fellowship until July 1, 2007. The Institute looks forward to welcoming him, his wife, Sharon, who is executive director of a preschool in Ashburn, Virginia, and their daughters, Abby and Carly, ages five and four, to Williamsburg next summer.