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In the last installment of “Quarterly Notes,” I mentioned two projects that would lead to articles in the Quarterly in 2007, both of which will help the journal mark the 400th anniversary of the beginning of English settlement at Jamestown. I’m pleased to be able to give readers an update on these initiatives.

On April 25, Willie Graham, Carter Hudgins, Carl Lounsbury, Fraser Neiman, and Jim Whittenburg presented “Inheritance, Adaptation, and Innovation: Archaeological and Architectural Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake” as the last paper in the OIEAHC’s spring colloquium series. The following summary of the project drew an overflow crowd to the Institute’s Kellock Library:

Archaeological evidence from excavations of several hundred sites from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tells the tale of the emerging solutions to the problems of living on the early Chesapeake frontier. Perhaps the most important finding is that English ways, whether they involved protection, diet, or buildings, did not simply appear in the New World and, after undergoing a trial-and-error process, develop along a straight-line trajectory into American ways. In the Chesapeake, at least, the progression was considerably less elegant and far more complex. The key to understanding this process is the acknowledgment that the early Chesapeake was never isolated from cultural currents in England and that those currents were themselves in continual flux. They contained archaic as well as progressive elements at any given time, all of them constantly at risk to cross the Atlantic with the seemingly endless stream of new immigrants. Thus old as well as new English ideas continually refreshed the wide range of choices available to Chesapeake colonists at any point. There was indeed a winnowing process and also an adaptive one by which serviceable ideas were selected, modified, and thereby morphed into innovation. However, the mix was ever subject to additions from abroad, and was always acted on by conditions in Virginia and Maryland. The development of the two-room “Virginia house” as the standard dwelling for almost everyone, the adoption of the ideal of the “polite house” as the highly desirable means to display status, and the evolution of plantation landscapes that segregated master from servant, and black from white are three related examples of this process.

The colloquium paper was an early draft of an essay currently being revised for publication in 2007. The collaborative effort of five authors, though unusual for historians working with texts and documents, is more common for architectural historians and the norm for archaeologists. The range of materials surveyed for this synthetic essay seemed to demand such collaboration. Willie Graham is the Curator of Architecture for Colonial Williamsburg; Carter Hudgins is the Hofer Distinguished Professor of Early American Culture and Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington and was formerly the director of the Historic Charleston Foundation; Carl Lounsbury is an architectural historian at Colonial Williamsburg whose most recent book is The Courthouses of Early Virginia; Fraser Neiman is a historical archaeologist at Monticello who wrote his 1990 Yale dissertation on the seventeenth-century Chesapeake; and Jim Whittenburg is chair of the history department at The College of William and Mary, is director of the National Institute of American History and Democracy, and has written on the social history and material culture of colonial Virginia and North Carolina. They have pulled together hundreds of site reports conducted in the past twenty-five years and have surveyed the “gray literature” that circulates among archaeologists and students of material culture. Their essay begins with the recent archaeological discoveries at Jamestown and follows developments past the turn of the eighteenth century.

Accompanying this essay will be four pages of color images, the first in the 115-year history of the William and Mary Quarterly. (I’m referring to the print version of the journal, of course; we’ve had color images in the simultaneously published electronic version on the History Cooperative Web Site for a few years now).

On May 19 and 20, 2006, eight scholars met at the Huntington Library and the University of Southern California for the first in a series of William and Mary Quarterly–Early Modern Studies Institute workshops. The theme was “The Seventeenth Century,” papers were precirculated, and participants spent two days discussing their works in progress. Nancy Shoemaker (University of Connecticut) led off discussion by proposing “ocean” history as a category of analysis, looking particularly at seventeenth-century Cape Cod to suggest, among other things, that coastal peoples from different regions may have more in common with each other than with their inland compatriots.

Brett Rushforth (Brigham Young University) took us to the Caribbean to examine how the French created their own form of Atlantic slavery. The history of the book was represented by David Harris Sacks (Reed College) with “Francis Brinley and His Books, 1650–1719,” which examined the intellectual and cultural world of this Newport, Rhode Island, figure through the list of books he owned. Mark Peterson (University of Iowa) described early Boston as a Renaissance city-state and, focusing on merchant, magistrate, and master of the mint John Hull, sketched the emergence of Boston in the political economy of the Atlantic world.

Ralph Bauer (University of Maryland) kicked off the second day with a comparison of the intellectual, religious, and political forces shaping the different responses of Increase Mather in Boston and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in Mexico City to the spectacular comets of the 1680s. April Lee Hatfield (Texas A&M University) discussed geography, law, and Anglo-Spanish relations in the western Caribbean and southeastern North America during the second half of the seventeenth century. Michael Winship (University of Georgia) offered the penultimate draft of “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity,” a piece that will appear in the July WMQ. The final paper in the workshop, by Simon Middleton (University of Sheffield), considered order and authority in New Netherland and also called for a reexamination of republican ideology (a fairly dormant line of inquiry for at least the past decade), which might help reconstruct a shared European colonial political culture. A concluding discussion, led by workshop convener Peter Thompson (Oxford University), began drawing together some of the larger themes of the two days’ discussions, including the question of whether “the seventeenth century” is simply a convenient chronological marker for some sets of questions (and not others) or if it could be considered a more substantial analytic category. Peter’s essay, which will relate the discussion of the workshop to recent trends in the study of seventeenth-century North America more generally, will appear next year in the WMQ.