Quarterly Notes

Stimulating Scholarly Conversation

The Quarterly has long been distinguished for its Reviews of Books section, in which reviewers analyze their assigned titles at length rather than produce thumbnail summaries constrained by tight word limits. Review essays, such as Jose R. Torre’s treatment of four works in “The Scottish Atlantic” (published in the October 2008 issue), offer frameworks to connect ostensibly little-related works and ways of seeing the field afresh. Imagining those connections is the work of Book Review Editor Karin Wulf, who receives dozens of books every month, selects for review those with the potential to “open out” onto topics of greater significance, and devises the combinations for insightful review essays.

In April 2008 David Armitage’s The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007) was the subject of the section’s first Critical Forum, designed to advance this spirit of exchange in a new form. Lynn Hunt (UCLA), Robert Ferguson (Columbia University), Laurent Dubois (Duke University), and Daniel Hulsebosch (New York University School of Law) considered this single book in a range of historical contexts; after a rejoinder from Armitage, each wrote a brief second response. The respondents’ range of disciplinary moorings inspired a wider-ranging conversation than is possible in our long-form reviews or even our review essays. Karin is now at work organizing the second Critical Forum, slated for publication in April 2009; the book under review is Stuart Schwartz’s All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, Conn., 2008).

This second Forum also dovetails with the topic of the 2009 William and Mary Quarterly & USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Workshop at the Huntington Library, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas.” Like its predecessors, this fourth annual WMQ-EMSI Workshop is intended to provide a small group of midcareer scholars the opportunity to engage deeply with one another’s work in progress. We received forty-one proposals by the October 30 deadline and look forward to a stimulating gathering next May. The conveners, Eric Hinderaker (who studies colonial British America) and Rebecca Horn (colonial Mexico), both of the University of Utah, will write an overview essay for the Quarterly.

Of more immediate note, the January 2009 issue presents articles by Timothy J. Shannon (the strange career of the Scot Peter Williamson, self-proclaimed king of the Indians), Kathleen Wilson (maroon culture and performance in Jamaica), Philippe Girard (Toussaint Louverture’s diplomacy), Gregory E. O’Malley (quantifying the transshipment of slaves from the Caribbean to North America), and Thomas Leng (Huguenots, the Hartlib Circle, and British colonization in the 1640s).

In addition to forthcoming essays and the press of regular submissions, we are in the midst of the long preparations for the October 2009 special issue derived from the Institute’s 2007 Ghana conference on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Described by Editor Christopher Grasso as a “doublewide,” this will likely be the Quarterly’s largest issue ever. Fifteen essays, selected from the conference papers, treat topics ranging from the moral foundations of British abolition to the aftermath of the slave trade in diverse African societies to the memory of the trade in contemporary Ghana. Producing this issue will involve more of everything: more facts and citations for our intrepid graduate student editorial apprentices to check, more copyediting and proofreading for Managing Editor Erin Bendiner, more maps and tables to acquaint readers with geography and history unfamiliar to most early Americanists. The result, we hope, will commemorate a remarkable conference and contribute to scholarship across geographic boundaries.

Scott E. Casper
Visiting Editor, William and Mary Quarterly