Jack Custis, Race, and the Unseen in Colonial Virginia Portraits
by Janine Yorimoto Boldt One painfully obvious fact as one scrolls through Colonial Virginia Portraits is that the faces are overwhelmingly white. Colonial Virginia Portraits includes more than 500 recorded portraits of which approximately 95 are documented but no longer extant. Only four of the total represent a non-white person. Three of these feature unnamed individuals who are… Read More
Using Colonial Virginia Portraits
Exploring a Visual Archive with Students by Janine Yorimoto Boldt While we are all in quarantine mode, many of us adjusting to online teaching and turning to digital resources like never before, it is a good time to explore Colonial Virginia Portraits, especially if you haven’t already. If you’re looking for a digital resource to share with students,… Read More
Researching and Teaching VastEarlyAmerica
The following is a loosely (and necessarily imperfectly) organized set of online resources for researching and teaching about VastEarlyAmerica. We invite you to add suggestions to the list by leaving your comments via the form below or by contacting martha.howard@wm.edu directly. Resources Slavery Studies Freedom on the Move A database of… Read More
Reflections on “Archives-Based Digital Projects in Early America”
by Molly O’Hagan Hardy Molly O’Hagan Hardy’s article “Archives-Based Digital Projects in Early America” appeared in the July 2019 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. If this article succeeds, it is because the composition of it, like the projects it describes, are the result of back and forth, give and take, what we often call “collaborative” production but… Read More
A symposium on digitizing #VastEarlyAmerica
by Molly O’Hagan Hardy Next week, The Omohundro Institute will host a group of scholars working in special collections, academia, and grant funding agencies to discuss the past, present, and future of the digitization of the vast early American record. Specifically, the group will focus on the Lapidus Initiative Digital Collections Fellowships, an effort the… Read More
Digital Collection Fellowship updates
2019 marks the third year of the Lapidus Initiative for Digital Collections Fellowships. The recent awards to Benjamin Bankhurst and Kyle Roberts for “The Maryland Loyalist Project,” Julia Gaffield, Jennifer Palmer, and Patrick Tardieu for “Endangered Colonial Imprints in the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit: The Archives Décoloniales of the Age of Revolutions,” and to Daniel Webb for… Read More
Teaching Colonial Translations Through Archives
Today’s post is courtesy of Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia), 2012-2014 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow. It appears in issue 14 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. The post is based in part on work Professor Bigelow did while completing her fellowship at the Omohundro Institute and teaching at William & Mary. From “Teaching Colonial Translations Through… Read More
A Hamilton-Inspired Playlist from Ben Franklin's World
Since its Broadway premiere in 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical has taken the world by storm. For many who have seen Hamilton, the undeniable star of the show is not the young, scrappy, and hungry title character or his tempered frenemy Burr, but the resplendent George III. The sardonic king interjects at three different points in… Read More
How digital humanities can further our understanding of human experiences
by Kevin Dawson As a cultural historian of the African diaspora who employees the paradigms of Atlantic history to trace the cultural traditions of enslaved Africans who were forcibly uprooted and transplanted in the Americas, I was both impressed and inspired by the possibilities digital research offers for adding depth and breadth to our understandings early American history. Scholars… Read More
A "Digital Research in Early America" recap
by Maeve Kane In October 2018, I participated in the WMQ-UCI Digital Research in Early America workshop hosted by Sharon Block and Josh Piker at University of California-Irvine. This post aims to give those who weren’t able to attend an idea of the conversations and common themes of the new scholarship presented. Most broadly, the workshop was a productive… Read More
Doing History Season 3- Biography
Doing History Season 3: Biography If biographies tell us about the past, why do bookstores and libraries always shelve them separately from history books? When historians write biographies, do they approach things differently? And if so how? These questions got us thinking and so we decided to dedicate season three of Doing History to them. The… Read More