by Joshua Piker, Editor, William and Mary Quarterly October’s issue of the Quarterly went into the mail about two weeks ago and up on the OI Reader, Muse, and JSTOR soon thereafter. When you open your preferred format, you’ll see that we’ve published a joint issue with the Journal of the Early Republic around the theme of “Writing To and… Read More
Today’s post accompanies “The Revolutionaries' Army,” episode 158 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Women have volunteered service in all American wars, but they have always been exempt from the civic obligation to serve in the military. As Linda Kerber has argued, that meant that they found themselves “outside the boundaries of [civic] reciprocity and entitlement.” If the definition of “citizen” included bearing arms as a communal obligation, but one could not or would not bear arms for the state, could that person be a citizen entitled to all attendant rights and privileges? When that question arose well after the Revolution in debates over giving women the right to vote, suffragists argued that the obligation entailed more than bearing arms: it was “risking one’s life for the republic, and that childbearing women repeatedly satisfied that obligation.” Rights activists then and later also contended that women preserved the republic in other ways.[i] Nonetheless, activists accepted the premise that willingness to meet the obligation to sustain the nation, meaning to risk life and property, was key to full citizenship. One may also argue that it was key to full representation in history. Read More
Today’s post is by Elizabeth Losh, Associate Professor in the American Studies program at William & Mary. She is the organizer of the upcoming conference “Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities,” October 26–28 on the campus of William & Mary. The Omohundro Institute is a sponsor of the conference. The Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies… Read More
Today’s post is a special report from Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez of Texas State University on the Southwest Seminar, one of several conferences on #VastEarlyAmerica the OI is proud to support this year. From October 5 to 7, 2017, the University of California – San Diego hosted the fourth annual meeting of the Southwest Seminar Consortium on Colonial Latin America. The Southwest… Read More
Today’s post is by Nathaniel Holly, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at William & Mary. He attended Robert Morrissey’s VastEarlyAmerica lecture at W&M, an annual event that the OI sponsors in conjunction with various departments on campus, on Monday, October 2. Vast in its Vastness: Borderlands Hide Paintings and the Historical Processes of Early America by Nathaniel… Read More
Two weeks before the beginning of the fall semester, we welcomed a new group of editorial apprentices to the Omohundro Institute. The OI partners with William & Mary’s Lyon G. Tyler Department of History and the American Studies Program each year to administer the OI Editorial Apprenticeship Program. Now led by editors Virginia Chew and Meg Musselwhite, the decades-long… Read More
Today's post accompanies "Revolutionary Committees and Congresses," episode 153 of Ben Franklin's World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Ask any revolutionary: there’s an enormous gap between the idea of systemic cultural change and its actual implementation. How do you get the guy who’s just trying to, like, make barrels over here to co-sign something as world-rending as a revolution? For American patriot factions in the 1770s, the burden of bridging the gulf between ideology and practice fell in large part on Committees of Safety. From their inception as enforcement mechanisms for the Continental Association’s mass boycotts of British consumer goods, Committees of Safety were all about the material effects of ideas. They were the ones insisting that it wasn't enough to merely think poorly of British treatment of the Colonies—you had to perform that disapproval for your neighbors or else risk public censure. The whole point of a Committee of Safety, in other words, was to make it clear to ordinary people that potentially abstract questions of international diplomacy were also concrete problems that they had to care about in their everyday lives. Read More
What was the American Revolution? When did it start, why did it start, and did it end with the Treaty of Paris… or the Constitution, or is it still unfolding? These seem like simple questions, but Americans have been debating the answers since the Continental and British armies were still on the battlefield. Over the past century, historians have argued that the Revolution was political, ideological, social, cultural. Some have claimed that revolutionary ideas mattered most; others have explored the ways in which revolutionary ideals fell short in practice for many Americans. Read More
In today’s post, Jeffrey Glover, author of “Witnessing African War: Slavery, the Laws of War, and Anglo-American Abolitionism” in the July 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly, reflects on what it means to frame an article. I was surprised by the readers’ and editor’s reports on my submission to William and Mary Quarterly. I was not surprised by how… Read More
Today’s post comes from Matthew Kruer, author of “Bloody Minds and Peoples Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquehannock–Virginia War” in the July issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. Early Americanists are thinking big these days. When, in early 2016, Karin Wulf introduced[1] the twitter hashtag #VastEarlyAmerica and Josh Piker advocated[2] that “early… Read More
Today’s post is from Katherine Smoak, author of “The Weight of Necessity: Counterfeit Coins in the British Atlantic World, 1760-1800” (William and Mary Quarterly, July 2017). When I started the research for the larger project from which my recent WMQ article is drawn—a history of the practices and politics of counterfeiting in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world—I had been committed… Read More
Today’s post is by Nadine Zimmerli, Associate Editor of Books When I was in college, I remember wandering into my local bookstore—Four Seasons Books, a gem of a place in Shepherdstown, West Virginia—and asking the owner for a good recommendation for summer reading. She suggested I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. This book was one of the last… Read More