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By John Balz August 27, 2018

OI Books: On the Road to Germany

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I unexpectedly came across Horst Dippel’s Germany and the American Revolution, 1770-1800 last September while scrolling through the OI online catalog of publications. I was only a few weeks into graduate school and wondering how serious my interest in Germans actually was. Fast forward to the present and I can say no book had a greater influence on year one, showing me that early American histories could end in Germany and that traveling to the country sooner rather than later in my studies could help me start figuring out what history I wanted to tell. Chuffed by where it’s taken me so far, the story of its imprint on me is much different from what I had imagined last September. It’s become a real-time lesson in contingency on the path to becoming a historian and on how to appreciate the many indirect influences on our final products. Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 15 min read
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By James Rice August 22, 2018

Acknowledgements: The Unabridged Edition

This post comes to us from James Rice (Tufts University), author of “Early American Environmental Histories” in the July 2018 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly.  In a recent series of Uncommon Sense posts, Karin Wulf, Ann Little, Anna Mae Duane, and Lynne Withey celebrated the 75th anniversary year of the Omohundro Institute by writing about the… Read More

WMQ 7 min read
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By Daniel Mandell August 20, 2018

OI Books: The Invasion of America and Me

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I first encountered Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America early in graduate studies at the University of Virginia. Unlike Christine DeLucia, I cannot remember that precise date (sometime in mid-1981), nor why I picked it up, but there is no forgetting its effect. In the first half of the book, Jennings broadly examined how first European rulers and then American intellectuals created a deceitful and destructive depiction of Native Americans, and then used that false construction to justify their subordination, dispossession, and near-extermination. In the second half, he applied those lessons in a slashing, no-holds-barred reexamination of New England’s origins from first English settlement to King Philip’s War, including a scorching scornful takedown of puritan saint John Eliot. In college I had been involved in Native American studies, and at Virginia had become interested in colonial social history and the newish New England town studies. It was not surprising that I was captivated by Jennings’s passionate, revisionist view, and went on to other recent works on early New England encounters. It now seems strange that there were so few: a handful of articles, Alden Vaughan’s New England Frontier (1965), and James Axtell’s The European and the Indian (1981). Read More

books 13 min read
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By Vineeta Singh August 15, 2018

Meet Vineeta Singh, OI-W&M Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow

Vineeta Singh began a two-year term at the Omohundro Institute on July 1, 2018, as the OI-W&M Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow. The fellowship was created to study the history of institutions and economies of oppression with a preference for higher education and slavery in connection with the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation at William & Mary. The fellowship… Read More

fellowships 7 min read
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By Rebecca Brannon August 13, 2018

OI Books: Fertile Thoughts About Fertility

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I first picked up Susan Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (2009) when I was at loose ends planning a seminar course on early American cultural history. I had just moved from one assistant professor gig to another, and the students were new to me. I thought the book might be an engaging read for my mostly upper middle class students. I think what I was really thinking was that if I couldn’t get the students to read and talk about sex, I had no hope. I mean, even as a scholar, I expected that sometimes rare thing—a genuinely enjoyable read. What could be better, really, than the struggles of people trying to exert control over that most personal of choices—how many children to have? So I assigned it alongside Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies and waited to see what I and the students made of sex, bathing, and birth control that semester. Read More

books 12 min read
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By Laurel Daen August 09, 2018

Meet Laurel Daen, OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow

Laurel Daen started her two-year term at the Omohundro Institute on July 1, 2018, as the OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow. You can read more about the fellowship, including how to apply, on our website. Hello! I started last month as the 2018-20 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow. I’m happy to be here! I’m actually not new to the OI or… Read More

fellowships 7 min read
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By Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz August 08, 2018

Short answer: what to do with 5,000 more words

Today’s post, by July 2018 WMQ authors Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz, authors of “Nature’s Battalions,” comes in response to the following question: “WMQ articles are capped at 10,000 words (plus notes). If you had 5,000 more words to play with, how would the article be different?” by Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz Our article “Nature’s Battalions” was born out of our… Read More

WMQ 4 min read
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By oieahc August 01, 2018

Continuing the Conversation: "Poor Relief"

The following post is the result of questions raised during a panel (#33) at the OI’s 24th annual conference, June 14–17, 2018. If you have a conversation you would like to continue post-conference, or materials to share (such as a bibliography), please send them to the OI at oieahc@wm.edu. And be sure to join us for the 25th… Read More

conferences 11 min read
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By Christine DeLucia July 30, 2018

OI Books: Telling Histories of Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistances

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I first encountered Francis Jennings’ scathing The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) on September 19, 2008. I know this date not because I have a frighteningly good memory for events a decade past, but because I recently unearthed the syllabus and notes for “Readings in American Indian History” in the sweaty process of relocating my home and office. It was in this graduate seminar in American Studies at Yale University—in the heart of the very New England at which Jennings trained his critique—that I began to think in more concerted ways about the mechanisms of settler colonialism, alternative approaches to Indigenous and early American studies, and the ideological stakes of “doing history.” Read More

books 17 min read
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By oieahc July 25, 2018

Meet the 2018 Scholars' Workshop

The 2018 Scholars’ Workshop convened at the Omohundro Institute on July 2. Each summer up to eight untenured scholars gather for two weeks to work both as a group and individually with OI editors and staff on either a manuscript chapter or a journal article in progress. The weeks include seminar-style meetings on conceptual development, manuscript editing, and source… Read More

fellowships 14 min read
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By Lynne Withey July 23, 2018

OI Books: Borderlands in View

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. As a historian-turned-publisher, I love the idea of celebrating the Omohundro Institute’s 75th anniversary by celebrating its books. When I was a graduate student, back in ancient… Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 16 min read
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By Anna Mae Duane July 16, 2018

OI Books: The Emergence of a Field

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. I had just finished an exhilarating but exhausting first year at the University of Connecticut and was petrified about turning my dissertation into a book. It had been an incredible stroke of luck to land at UConn, and it seemed particularly miraculous in light of how my dissertation project had perplexed many of the hiring committees I had met the previous year. My work focused on how the visceral emotional response to child-victims worked as a political force in colonial and early republican America. In 2003, few people in early American studies saw children as something that could or should be analyzed. How, I was asked again and again, could the early American child be a historically legible factor in political theory and action? Children were too innocent, too incompetent, and (perhaps most important for someone who needed to land a peer-reviewed book contract within the next three years) too inaccessible to write about with any real rigor. Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 11 min read
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