By Eliga Gould and Rosemarie Zagarri Eliga Gould and Rosemarie Zagarri convened the forum “Situating the United States in Vast Early America” in the April 2021 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. When Martha Howard invited us to write a piece about our recent forum, “Situating the United States in Vast Early America,” saying yes was easy. Deciding… Read More
By Gordon M. Sayre, author of “Jefferson Takes on Buffon: The Polemic on American Animals in Notes on the State of Virginia” in the January 2021 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia has intrigued me for my entire career. In my dissertation research I read… Read More
By Whitney Barlow Robles If given the option to expand my already-lengthy article, “The Rattlesnake and the Hibernaculum,” which appeared in the January 2021 William & Mary Quarterly—well, I would probably decline for fear of losing my reader in its serpentine folds. If forced to expand my essay, on the other hand, I would have… Read More
By Joshua Piker, Editor It will likely come as no surprise to learn that I spend way too much time worrying about authorial voice. For an editor, that’s very on-brand. I only raise the issue because I’ve been worrying, in particular, about my authorial voice on this blog. I’ve got two go-to voices for blog posts, neither of which… Read More
By Hannah Farber When I help graduate students prepare applications for fellowships and jobs, we sometimes talk about the phrase “my project.” What does this phrase actually mean? Ph. D. students usually use it, reflexively, to mean “my dissertation.” Book writers often use it to mean “my book.” I prefer to think about a “project” as a bundle of… Read More
By Asheesh Siddique In 2013, while I was a PhD candidate making my first foray into research on a dissertation about administrative knowledge practices in the early modern British empire, I stumbled across a curious and cryptic set of notes in an obscure file at the UK National Archives at Kew Gardens. The file, TNA, CO 318/2, is ambiguously… Read More
by M. Scott Heerman In this post, WMQ author M. Scott Heerman discusses what he would have done with a larger word limit for his article, “Abolishing Slavery in Motion: Foreign Captivity and International Abolitionism in the Early United States,” in the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI… Read More
In this post, WMQ author Jenny Shaw recounts how she came to research and write the story of Susannah Mingo for the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI Reader. We will close the beta period of the OI Reader on October 1. After that, all… Read More
In this post, WMQ author Tamara Plakins Thornton recounts how she came to understand eighteenth-century globes and how that changed the way she needed them illustrated for her article in the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI Reader. We will close the beta period of the OI Reader… Read More
By Gautham Rao This article was the result of a moment of enormous luck. I can remember exactly where I was when it happened: Saturday, April 11, 2015, in the lobby of the Massachusetts Historical Society, somewhere between 10:30 and 10:45 in the morning, in between sessions at the wonderful… Read More