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Two conferences on widely different topics and held on opposite coasts engaged the attention of a varied cohort of early American and early modern scholars last fall.

An enthusiastic audience of some 150 people gathered in Philadelphia in mid-September to grapple with the religious, social, legal, economic, and political uses of antipopery, a phenomenon described by conference organizers as “a powerful language used by early modern Europeans to understand their world and their place in history.” The eight sessions that took place over the meeting’s two-and-a-half days sparked vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on a variety of themes subsumed under the meeting’s broad title “Antipopery: The Transatlantic Experience, c. 1530–1850.” Like the papers to which they responded, the conversations and exchanges convincingly laid to rest any notions that anti-Catholicism and antipathy toward the pope were simple matters of blind prejudice or ignorance. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture co-sponsored the conference, in cooperation with the School of Arts and Sciences of the Catholic University of America, the Columbia University Seminars, the Office of the Provost of Columbia University, and Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Department of History.

“Permanence and the Built Environment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” a conference jointly sponsored by the University of Southern California-Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, convened at the Huntington on Friday and Saturday, October 3–4, 2008. Buoyed by the beautiful scenery and by an invigorating rain shower on Saturday, unusual for California in recent months, conference attendees engaged in lively and spirited debates about the concept of permanence and its relationship to the structures the various peoples surrounding the Atlantic basin in the eighteenth century built to house and access their possessions, their livelihoods, their gatherings, and themselves. With papers on locales from England to Iroquoia to Brazil, conversation was far-ranging and evocative but still could not exhaust the complexities of the concept of permanence in the multifaceted Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. The dialogue will continue in a second meeting, “Permanence and the Built Environment of the Pacific Basin, 1700–1820,” scheduled to take place April 17–18, 2009, at the University of Southern California.