Quarterly Notes

It is my pleasure to record here that the following essays were awarded prizes in the past year:

  • Heidi Bohaker, “Nindoodemag: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701” (January 2006): The Robert F. Heizer Prize for the best article in the field of ethnohistory, awarded by the American Society for Ethnohistory.
  • Michael A. McDonnell, “Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia” (April 2006): Best American History Essays for 2008, selected by the Organization of American Historians.
  • Max M. Edling, “‘So immense a power in the affairs of war’: Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit” (April 2007): James Madison Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of the Federal Government.
  • William A. Pettigrew, “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688–1714” (January 2007): Co-winner, James M. Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Richard L. Morton Prize, awarded by the WMQ Editorial Board.
  • Catherine Molineux, “Pleasures of the Smoke: ‘Black Virginians’ in Georgian London’s Tobacco Shops” (April 2007): Co-winner, James M. Clifford Prize, awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
  • David J. Silverman, “Indians, Missionaries, and Religious Translation: Creating Wampanoag Christianity in Seventeenth-Century Martha’s Vineyard” (April 2005): Douglass Adair Award, presented by the WMQ Editorial Board.
  • Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic” (October 2007): Lester A. Cappon Award, presented by the WMQ Editorial Board.

The July 2008 issue brings a Forum, “Salem Repossessed,” featuring new work on the Salem witch trials by Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal, Richard Latner, and Benjamin C. Ray. The Forum is introduced by Jane Kamensky and includes comments by John Demos, Mary Beth Norton, Carol F. Karlsen, and Sarah Rivett; it concludes with a response by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, who reflect on and assess challenges to their classic work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974).

Future issues will also present articles by Carolyn Eastman (Indian eloquence in the early Republic), Douglas Bradburn (opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts), Sophia Rosenfeld (Tom Paine and the notion of “common sense”), Claudio Saunt (the American West and the historiography of early America), and Michael Meranze (the convener’s essay from the 2007 WMQ and USC-Huntington EMSI Workshop on the cultural history of eighteenth-century America).

A special issue will eventually emerge from the Institute’s Ghana conference on the end of the Atlantic slave trade. Joseph Miller of the University of Virginia will join me as a guest co-editor of that issue. The submitted essays are currently out for external review. In April, Susan Juster (University of Michigan) and I co-chaired a conference at Yale, “Religion and Violence in Early America,” sponsored by the Yale Graduate School and the Omohundro Institute. We hope to develop a special issue from that conference as well.

Meanwhile, the work of the Quarterly goes on. As I quickly learned when I took the helm in July 2000, that work does not follow the rhythms of an academic calendar. The term “spring break” loses its meaning, and “summer,” as professors shift their energies from teaching to their own projects, means more of the same here at WMQ (only it is hotter outside). It is an honor and a privilege to do this work; nonetheless, I was looking forward to July 1, when I began a year’s leave to concentrate on my own research and writing. I am delighted to announce that my replacement for the year will be Scott E. Casper, Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Scott earned his B.A. at Princeton in 1986 and his Ph.D. at Yale in 1992. His second book has just been published: Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (Hill and Wang, 2008). “Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon,” he writes, “explores the public and private lives of the African American community at George Washington’s historic estate from 1800 to 1920, a span that includes slavery, emancipation, and the beginnings of Jim Crow segregation in the United States and at Mount Vernon itself. Over four generations, these black people became the workforce for the Washingtons who owned Mount Vernon until 1860, and then for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which bought the hallowed grounds in 1860 and owns and operates them to this day. To visitors, Mount Vernon was supposed to be an unchanging shrine to the past and a bulwark against the changes that roiled American society; these same African Americans became Mount Vernon’s foremost living, speaking links to the place’s sacred past—even though most of them were born long after George and Martha Washington died. Inside, the people who worked there—people like Sarah Johnson—experienced those changes first-hand, making Mount Vernon less a refuge from national transformation than a microcosm of it.”

”Scott’s first book, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), won the SHARP prize for outstanding work in the history of the book and Honorable Mention by the American Culture Association’s Cawelti Prize committee for outstanding books on American culture. He has co-edited or edited five volumes, including the following: A History of the Book in America, vol. 3 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850–2000 (Nevada Humanities Committee and University of Nevada Press, 2001). He has coauthored one textbook and is working on another; he has also written more than twenty articles and essays in scholarly journals, essay collections, and encyclopedias, and more than twenty-five book reviews in various academic journals as well as the Chicago Tribune. He is a contributing editor for the Journal of American History, responsible for the annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the University of Nevada Press.

In 2005, Scott was given the Nevada Regents’ Teaching Award as the outstanding university teacher in the state. He has completed two terms as department chair and two as director of graduate studies, and in his spare time (!) he presents at numerous summer teacher institutes around the country.

The Quarterly will be in very good hands.

Chris Grasso
Editor, William and Mary Quarterly