Today's post is by Nicholas P. Wood, author of “A ‘Class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies” in the January 2017 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. Read More
by Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of History at Providence College and author of “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond” in the January 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly Read More
Today’s post comes from Geoffrey Plank, professor of History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. His article “Quakers as Political Players in Early America” appears in the January 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly. I have been studying early Quaker history, with increasing intensity, for more than fifteen years now. When Joshua Piker asked… Read More
Publishing in this issue of the William and Mary Quarterly felt like a homecoming for me. When John Demos taught “The Social History of the American Revolution” during my junior year, he assigned Alfred F. Young’s award-winning 1981 article on the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes. Young included a few lines about Hewes’s apparent lack of civic engagement… Read More
Today’s post comes courtesy of Gabriel Cervantes, author of “Learning from Stephen Burroughs: Republication and the Making of a Literary Book in the Early United States” in the October 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. by Gabriel Cervantes When I first started working on Stephen Burroughs’s Memoirs, I realized that the narrative uses poetry in clever ways. Read More
Today’s post is from Josh Piker, Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. There are certain little things about the Quarterly that I will never be able to change. Some of those—like the journal’s cover—I wouldn’t change if I could. Of course, Karin Wulf has made it very clear that, forced to choose between the journal’s cover and its Editor,… Read More
Some Reflections on Vastness and the Word Count by Samuel Fisher, WMQ author (October 2016) I suppose it’s safe to say that the vastness of early America is a bit of a preoccupation in these parts. Big, expansive frameworks are the norm now; that much we know. The hard part comes when we try to actually put them to… Read More
I have been Editor for over two years, and I’ve yet to publish my first issue. I don’t like to rush into things. April 2016’s issue has been out for over five months now, but that wasn’t my first issue. For those of you in the northern hemisphere, July 2016’s issue arrived in your mailbox just as the heady… Read More
(Pictured left to right) Frances Bell, Emily Wells, Kaila Schwartz, Cody Nager, Holly Gruntner, Chris Slaby, Mitch Oxford, and Ravynn Stringfield. Not pictured: Rebecca Capobianco The OI partners with the College of William & Mary’s Lyon G. Tyler Department of History to administer the Editorial Apprenticeship Program. The decades-long program introduces entering graduate students to the practices… Read More
Next Tuesday, October 4, 2016, we begin a new tradition at the Omohundro Institute: the annual McGiffert Lecture. The lecture series honors the late Michael (Mike) McGiffert who served as editor of the William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) at the Omohundro Institute from 1972–1997 and also taught at William & Mary. Mike had an enormous influence on the journal, and on… Read More
In today’s post, WMQ author Michael D. Breidenbach (July 2016) reflects on the beginning and end of historical writing. by Michael D. Breidenbach An unavoidable task in historical writing is beginning and ending within particular time periods, dates, or moments. But while a published article denotes its end—the publication date—historical writing often does not admit of a beginning. The genesis of an… Read More