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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. by John Balz 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 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. by Daniel Mandell 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

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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. by Rebecca Brannon 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

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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. by Christine DeLucia 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

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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. by Lynne Withey 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,… Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 17 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. by Anna Mae Duane 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 12 min read
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By Ann Little July 09, 2018

OI Books: Dreaming 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 Ann Little Most days I don’t think much about graduate school. This is probably all to the good, as my first year in grad school was… Read More

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By oieahc June 01, 2018

The OI Book That Made Me a Historian

I went to college with political journalism as a career goal. A Watergate kid, I wanted to be in Washington, and I wanted to put together important stories at the ragged edges of contemporary American democracy. Instead, I was captivated by the early modern period, by early American history in particular, and it was Gordon Wood’s Creation of the… Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 7 min read
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By Nadine Zimmerli May 03, 2018

Atomic Bonds

By Nadine Zimmerli, Associate Editor, Books My job continues to surprise and delight. The most unexpected and fascinating email I received last year contained the following attachment, courtesy of Cameron Strang, whose OI book Frontiers of Science comes out this summer: This card connects one Institute to another: issued by the library of the Institute for… Read More

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By oieahc March 15, 2018

Further Thoughts on Douglas Winiarski's Bancroft Prize-winning Book

This week we were thrilled to learn that Douglas L. Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (OI and UNCP, 2017) was one of three books awarded the 2018 Bancroft Prize. This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England is simultaneously magisterial in scope and carefully attuned… Read More

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By Daniel Livesay January 24, 2018

Meghan Markle and the Long History of American Brides of Color in Britain

This post, by OI author Daniel Livesay, comes to us courtesy of the UNC Press blog. Daniel Livesay is the author of Children of Uncertain Fortune:  Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833, published with our friends at the University of North Carolina Press. By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from… Read More

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By oieahc January 09, 2018

Welcome Catherine E. Kelly, Editor of Books.

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture is delighted to announce that Catherine E. Kelly begins this month as our Editor of Books. Her appointment brings the OI’s books program into an exciting new era. Its deep traditions and reputation for excellent scholarship are a vital foundation for the innovations we seek to foster and support. Read More

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