books
By oieahc December 12, 2022

2026 and Insurance: A Conversation with Hannah Farber

In this installment of interviews with OI Book authors about the Semiquincentennial, Hannah Farber discusses marine insurance—a topic that seems below the surface but that nonetheless had a significant impact on the Revolution and American independence. Her 2021 book, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding, navigates a cast… Read More

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By oieahc September 07, 2022

2026 and Religion: A Conversation with Katherine Carté

With this post, Uncommon Sense inaugurates a planned series of conversations with OI book authors about how their work relates to the American Revolution. It is one of the ways in which the OI is contributing to the Semiquincentennial, the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. In its eight decades, the… Read More

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By Catherine E. Kelly October 19, 2020

Not Your Typical Book Talks

by Catherine E. Kelly This week, we will launch the first of three online OI Author Conversations scheduled for the current academic year.  Featuring scholars whose books are forthcoming or recently published, this series will open up the research, writing, and thinking that go into making a polished product.  Unlike even the best book talks, which tend to summarize… Read More

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By Allison Bigelow June 25, 2020

To tell new stories

We asked OI author Allison Bigelow (Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World) if she wanted to write a post about her new book. Rather than talk… Read More

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By Lindsay Chervinsky March 26, 2020

Women Also Know Washington

“Life of George Washington — The Farmer,” painted by Junius Brutus Stearns ; lith. by Régnier, imp. Lemercier, Paris, 1853. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. By Lindsay Chervinsky In the preface to You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George… Read More

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By Andrew Newman February 20, 2019

Digital Sources, Analog Citations

Today’s post is by Andrew Newman, author of Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, published in January 2019 by the Omohundro Institute with our partners at the University of North Carolina Press. It is available in paperback. by Andrew Newman The image on the right is a copper engraving from a 1725 Amsterdam edition of François de… Read More

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By Julie Richter October 15, 2018

OI Books: A Transformative View of Race and Gender

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. By Julie Richter I was in the middle of my dissertation research when Mick Nicholls, then a Research Fellow at Colonial Williamsburg, introduced me to Kathy Brown. Mick encouraged us to talk about our research in county court records. Kathy was in Virginia so she could immerse herself in the court records for three Tidewater counties: Lancaster, Norfolk, and York. I also used the York County Court records in my dissertation and we quickly learned that we had a lot to discuss. During these conversations I realized how much I had missed thinking and talking about women as historical actors. While women appeared as minor figures in reading assignments during grad school, only one of the classes that I took as a Ph.D. student at William & Mary included a focus on women and this focus lasted just a week. I found that these readings were a disappointment as they were book chapters and articles published in the 1950s. Read More

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By Michael S. Hindus October 08, 2018

OI Books: The Book That Launched a Cross-Country Move

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. By Michael S. Hindus Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black was published on March 8, 1968. Over the course of the next six weeks, both the world and my life changed. I quickly devoured the book (at over 600 pages!) for my senior seminar on slavery at Columbia University. I was already determined to seek a Ph.D. in American History and assumed I would stay within the comfortable confines of the Ivy League. White Over Black was an eye-opener. I had not realized that writing history could be so far-reaching, so incredibly original, so interdisciplinary, and so elegant. Read More

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By Natalie Zacek October 01, 2018

OI Books: Our Changing Expectations of Scholarship

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. by Natalie Zacek When I arrived at Johns Hopkins University in September 1992 to begin my graduate studies in history, my first meeting with my supervisor, Jack Greene, concluded with his recommendation that I head for the campus bookstore and purchase a copy of Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves. As other members of the “Big Greene Team” will recall, Jack’s reading lists for his seminar and for comprehensive exams in colonial British American history were immensely long, and included both the most recent works of scholarship and those which had been classics when he had started his doctoral studies. But for me, coming into grad school with a strong interest in but remarkably little knowledge of the history and historiography of the English West Indies, it was Dunn’s monograph which he believed would be the ideal starting point. Read More

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By Abby Chandler September 24, 2018

Selling Empire and the 1760s Textile Debate

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. by Abby Chandler This particular story begins at the Newport Historical Society in the summer of 2005. I had just completed the first year of a doctoral program which would result in a dissertation on sexual misconduct trials in colonial New England and my first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England. I was in Rhode Island because I was interning at the NHS and my supervisor had asked me to create a first person interpretive program for a Loyalist named Martin Howard who had lived in their Wanton-Lyman-Hazard house. Among his multiple endeavors, in 1764 Howard helped found an organization known as the Newport Junto, whose members who supported the expansion of the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century by advocating for a wide range of political causes and interests. They believed the solution for Rhode Island’s bitter partisan politics was for Rhode Island to become a royal colony instead of a chartered colony. They supported the Sugar and Stamp Acts. They published a long series of letters signed by O.Z. in the Newport Mercury in 1764 and 1765 campaigning for home textile production in Rhode Island. Read More

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By Christy Pottroff September 10, 2018

OI Books: Roadtrip Reading: Eloquence is Power on the Hutchinson River Parkway

Hutchinson River Parkway, Pelham, NY. Via Wikimedia Commons 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. by Christy Pottroff If you ask me, the best way to drive from New York City to… Read More

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By Abigail Swingen September 04, 2018

OI Books: Shifting the Conversation on Slavery

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. by Abigail Swingen The pages of my copy of Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies are dog-eared thirty-one times. I referred to it repeatedly while I wrote my dissertation and my book. I first encountered the book in a class on colonial America in graduate school, but I did not really delve into it until I started to research my dissertation on unfree labor in the early English empire. I remember taking it with me practically everywhere I went on my first trip to the UK archives in the summer of 2002, reading it while on the Tube down to Kew, in coffee shops around London, and in the garden behind the dorm where I stayed at the University of Bristol. I’m sure many of the dog-ears date from that summer. In many ways the book remains indispensable to our understanding of the early English Caribbean colonies and how and why slavery played such an important role in their social and economic evolution. Read More

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