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By oieahc February 13, 2019

Digital Collection Fellowship updates

2019 marks the third year of the Lapidus Initiative for Digital Collections Fellowships. The recent awards to Benjamin Bankhurst and Kyle Roberts for “The Maryland Loyalist Project,” Julia Gaffield, Jennifer Palmer, and Patrick Tardieu for “Endangered Colonial Imprints in the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit: The Archives Décoloniales of the Age of Revolutions,” and to Daniel Webb for… Read More

digital projects 7 min read
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By Karin Wulf February 06, 2019

Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of the images used in the article are under copyright and appear only on the NEH’s site. by Karin Wulf American history courses usually begin with the peopling of the Americas, then move on to European colonization and the… Read More

#VastEarlyAmerica 37 min read
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By Peter Olsen-Harbich January 30, 2019

The Sandy Ground of Prince Edward: Profligacy and Royal Credit in the Empire of George III

Peter Olsen-Harbich spent the September of 2018 in the Royal Archives at Windsor as an Omohundro Institute–Georgian Papers Programme fellow and as the recipient of a William & Mary Dean’s Research Fund fellowship. The latter was jointly funded by the Omohundro Institute and the William & Mary Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences via the William &… Read More

Georgian Papers Programme 15 min read
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By Brooke Newman January 24, 2019

Uncovering Royal Perspectives on Slavery, Empire, and the Rights of Colonial Subjects

By Brooke Newman Dr. Newman is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was awarded an Omohundro Institute Georgian Papers Programme Fellowship in 2017. This post appears on the georgianpapersprogramme.com site as well.  In 2017 I spent a month in the Royal Archives tracing how the Georgian monarchs… Read More

Georgian Papers Programme 11 min read
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By Allison Bigelow January 09, 2019

Teaching Colonial Translations Through Archives

Today’s post is courtesy of Allison Bigelow (University of Virginia), 2012-2014 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow. It appears in issue 14 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. The post is based in part on work Professor Bigelow did while completing her fellowship at the Omohundro Institute and teaching at William & Mary. From “Teaching Colonial Translations Through… Read More

digital projects 3 min read
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By Tom Cutterham December 12, 2018

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

WMQ 6 min read
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By Holly White December 05, 2018

A Hamilton-Inspired Playlist from Ben Franklin's World

Since its Broadway premiere in 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical has taken the world by storm. For many who have seen Hamilton, the undeniable star of the show is not the young, scrappy, and hungry title character or his tempered frenemy Burr, but the resplendent George III. The sardonic king interjects at three different points in… Read More

Ben Franklin's Worlddigital projectsGeorgian Papers Programme 8 min read
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By Lauren Duval November 29, 2018

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

WMQ 7 min read
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By oieahc November 26, 2018

Doing History: The Power of Biography

Today’s post accompanies the Doing History 3 series on Ben Franklin's World. You can find supplementary materials for the series on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. Biographies serve as a gateway to history. They serve this role because, as all of our guest scholars in the Doing History: Biography series related, biographies humanize the past. At their core biographies are about people, and as people, we are naturally curious about how others lived, worked, and experienced life. Read More

Ben Franklin's WorldDoing History 11 min read
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By Emily Sneff November 20, 2018

A Thanksgiving playlist from Ben Franklin's World

by Emily Sneff In 1750, Ben Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson about an experiment with electricity. Not the famous one — rather, an experiment “to kill a Turkey by the Electrical Strokes.” The Ben Franklin’s World team does not recommend this cooking technique (even though Ben remarked that “the Birds kill’d in this Manner eat uncommonly tender). Read More

Ben Franklin's World 5 min read
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By Kevin Dawson November 19, 2018

How digital humanities can further our understanding of human experiences

by Kevin Dawson As a cultural historian of the African diaspora who employees the paradigms of Atlantic history to trace the cultural traditions of enslaved Africans who were forcibly uprooted and transplanted in the Americas, I was both impressed and inspired by the possibilities digital research offers for adding depth and breadth to our understandings early American history.  Scholars… Read More

digital projects 9 min read
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By Maeve Kane November 14, 2018

A "Digital Research in Early America" recap

by Maeve Kane In October 2018, I participated in the WMQ-UCI Digital Research in Early America workshop hosted by Sharon Block and Josh Piker at University of California-Irvine. This post aims to give those who weren’t able to attend an idea of the conversations and common themes of the new scholarship presented. Most broadly, the workshop was a productive… Read More

digital projects 11 min read
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