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On June 6–8, the Fourteenth Annual Institute Conference, like the Celtics and the Lakers and the Red Sox and the Mariners, met in Boston, Massachusetts. Our location, on the campus of Suffolk University in the heart of the city, immersed us in Boston’s early history. Before the conference officially began, two special walking tours focused on Boston’s famous revolutionary sites and legacies of the African American experience gave us a unique chance to explore the area—Bob Allison’s Revolutionary War tour in particular drew rave reviews. Evening events took attendees to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Armory of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts in Faneuil Hall, and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and in all these venues we behaved much more sedately than the teams at Fenway Park.

Conference sessions began on the afternoon of Friday, June 6, with a plenary session, “Introducing Early American History into the Classroom,” chaired by David Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University. The technological skills and the genuine enthusiasm of the presenting teachers impressed—even dazzled—the audience. We were intrigued on Saturday morning by presentations on creolization, forms of the written word, women’s engagement with trade, and the public sphere of the early national period and in the afternoon by discussions of material culture and trade, Indians and masculinity, relations between Indian groups in the colonial northeast, new perspectives on loyalists in the American Revolution, the Revolution in New England, and movement of people during the eighteenth century. Sunday morning’s fare involved us in considerations of trade and its relationship to empire and the British Atlantic, Jeffersonian conceptions of state power, indigenous Christianities throughout the Atlantic world, religious moderation, and law and rights in the British Atlantic.

Robert J. Allison, Suffolk University, and Susan E. Klepp, Temple University, chaired the conference program committee. Other members included Robert Bellinger (Suffolk University), Mary S. Bilder (Boston College Law School), Jill Lepore (Harvard University), Pauline Maier (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Martha J. McNamara (Wellesley College), John W. Tyler (Groton School), Ted Widmer (John Carter Brown Library), Lisa Wilson (Connecticut College), and Conrad Edick Wright (Massachusetts Historical Society). For the energy and time these busy people devoted to thinking about and planning the sessions and for the commitment to early American scholarship their service represents, the Omohundro Institute and everyone who attended the conference thanks them all.