Refugees of the American Revolution … and George Orwell

By Matthew Dziennik “New York’s Refugees and Political Authority in Revolutionary America,” WMQ (Jan. 2020) began with an intellectual humbling.  It came at a brown bag at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where I was presenting on… Read More

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New and Improved

...The new version of the OI Reader will be accessible via your desktop computer as well as other devices and will allow us to create digital content more easily than before. It will also have a feature of particular use to all the Very Odd Ducks of #VastEarlyAmerica: accurate (and stable) citation information readily available for every word. Read More

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The benefits of publishing as part of a forum

Allan Greer reflects on his experience publishing his piece “Settler Colonialism and Empire in Early America” in the July 2019 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly. The July edition includes the forum “Settler Colonialism in Early American History,” edited by Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker. by Allan Greer, McGill University For authors, one of the great attractions… Read More

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Summer Cleaning

by Joshua Piker, editor of the William and Mary Quarterly Traditionally, of course, if there’s a season for cleaning, it is understood to be spring, not summer.  But for a variety of reasons, spring here at stately Quarterly manor—aka, the basement of Swem Library—was devoted to the more elemental task of keeping my head above water amidst the rush of… Read More

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Transparency

by Joshua Piker, Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly Those of you who have read my blog posts over the last five years know that I believe wholeheartedly in transparency in the publication process.  I’ve blogged about manuscript submission numbers, the seasonal fluctuation of those numbers, the time a manuscript spends in peer review, rejection rates, and the… Read More

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Co-authoring Atlantic History in the Digital Age

by Nicholas Radburn and Justin Roberts, co-authors of “Gold Versus Life: Jobbing Gangs and British Caribbean Slavery” in the April 2019 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly A question that we were frequently asked while writing our WMQ essay on jobbing gangs was “what is co-authorship like?” That we were asked this question so often highlights… Read More

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Origins of a collaboration

by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Ahmed Idrissi Alami The authors of “Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu’s Arabic Address on the Occasion of Emancipation in Jamaica” (William and Mary Quarterly, April 2019) discuss how they came to collaborate on the piece. Beth: Our collaborative journey began with an unexpected find. I’d traveled to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast to read Sir… Read More

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“Joshua Piker” Is a Problem:  The Cost of Our Invisible Labors

The “Joshua Piker” that Joshua Piker’s title is referring to here is not the Editor, author, and noted clothes horse, but rather the one who occasionally appears in the acknowledgments of articles and essays. Often these acknowledgments are for Joshua Piker’s work on essays that were submitted to the William and Mary Quarterly but not published there. Some of… Read More

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Capital, Deception, and the Heirs of Daniel Parker

WMQ author Tom Cutterham (October 2018) offers further thoughts on his piece, “‘A Very Promising Appearance’: Credit, Honor, and Deception in the Emerging Market for American Debt, 1784—92” (William and Mary Quarterly, volume 75, no. 4). by Tom Cutterham Where is the line between entrepreneur and con-artist? That’s the question that animates Jane Kamensky’s account of early nineteenth-century Boston financier Andrew… Read More

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Daily Life and Wartime Disruption

Today’s post is by October 2018 WMQ author Lauren Duval. by Lauren Duval The American Revolution, Mary Beth Norton asserted in her classic study, Liberty’s Daughters, had “profound consequences for the entire population” and unsettled “normal patterns of life.”[1] I found this notion particularly intriguing and I was eager to explore it further as I delved into my dissertation… Read More

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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

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From "Eureka!" to footnotes

This post comes to us from Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania), author of “‘Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws’: Certificates of Freedom and the Multiple Fates of Black Citizenship in the Early Republic” in the July 2018 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. She responds to the question How does your essay in the WMQ relate to your larger… Read More

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