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By Sean P. Harvey October 31, 2018

OI History: Tales from Former Apprentices, Part 8

OI History: Tales from Former Apprentices, Part 8 As part of our seventy-fifth anniversary, we at the Omohundro Institute continue to reflect on what makes our institution such a special place. One of those things is our Apprenticeship in Historical Editing. Today’s guest post comes from former apprentice Sean P. Harvey who is… Read More

#VastEarlyAmericaapprenticesWMQ 9 min read
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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 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 oieahc June 11, 2018

Collaboration and Vast Early America

In the last month or so, your inbox or mailbox has brought you news of April’s issue of the WMQ.  This issue centers on the first half of a forum, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” that we are jointly publishing with Early American Literature. The forum’s second half will… 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 oieahc December 26, 2017

We’ve Been Doing History’s History

Today’s post accompanies “Freedom and the American Revolution,” episode 166 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. History is a primary context for every decision we make; our understanding of the past—our own as individuals and collectively—is background, framework, presumption, and rationale. It’s not always conscious, and it’s not always exact or even correct. But it is there, informing us. It isn’t the case, either, that history is inescapable, or the past makes any specific future inevitable. Individuals and communities large and small can make change happen suddenly or deliberately. But when we recognize change, it is because we know what came before. Read More

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By Nadine Zimmerli December 21, 2017

A Few Thoughts on Holidays in #VastEarlyAmerica

by Nadine Zimmerli, Associate Editor of Books "We had no ardent spirit of any kind among us" Member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, December 25, 1805 'Tis the season. I am daily reminded of this by cheerful notices in my inbox from my alma mater's bookstore and other retailers, which interrupt the steady flow of more relevant messages from OI authors and from colleagues at the University of North Carolina Press. The juxtaposition is a stark one, because the retail and the publishing messages structure my annual calendar in divergent, and conflicting, ways. Emails prompting me to buy gifts or to donate to charitable causes are centered on the upcoming holidays, culminating in celebratory gatherings with friends and family in late December. Work-related messages are focused on the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in early January (one of the most important conferences for editors) and a bi-annual marketing meeting at UNC Press the second week of January, when we'll discuss publication schedules and the best strategies for promoting Fall 2018 books. Even though academic life follows the well-known rhythms of the holidays, with the fall semester ending in mid-December, the festive season does not at all align with the rhythms of academic publishing. It even poses a bit of an unwelcome interruption right before two crucial meetings. Read More

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By oieahc October 11, 2017

Report on the 4th annual Southwest Seminar

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

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By Nathaniel Holly October 04, 2017

Vast in its Vastness

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

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By oieahc January 18, 2017

The OI Guides to #VastEarlyAmerica

by Karin Wulf Over the life of the Omohundro Institute, the staff here in Williamsburg produced resources with the aim of helping scholars to navigate the early American field. Like the Carnegie Guides I discussed in a previous post, these inevitably reflected a contemporary understanding of “the field” as well as the communication capacity… Read More

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By oieahc January 02, 2017

Report from #VastEarlyAmerica, 2017

Welcome to 2017, where the past is always urgent.  There are times when the present and future seem like all we can handle, but to paraphrase Santayana repeating the past is not the real danger of neglecting history.  It is that our understanding or misunderstanding of history is always, explicitly or implicitly, even when it’s out of our direct… Read More

#VastEarlyAmerica 4 min read
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