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 conference, “‘So… Read More
“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 my research. I laid… Read More
...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
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
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
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
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
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 Lionel Smith’s family papers. The archive included personal… Read More
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
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). 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 Dexter Jr. Read More
Today’s post is by October 2018 WMQ author 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 research. Occupation seemed… Read More
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