Uncommon Sense
Figuring Out Who Was in the Room Where it Happened; Or, Doing African American History with Quaker Sources
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
Connecting Peer Review and Pedagogy in the Classroom
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
A fresh look at early Quaker history
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
Homesick for the Quarterly
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
Virginia Consortium of Early Americanists
The third annual conference of the Virginia Consortium of Early Americanists meets this coming Saturday, January 28, at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. All are welcome. Founded in 2014 in order to provide a forum for the wealth of scholarship focused on early American history in Virginia, the group meets at least once a year. Graduate students… Read More
The OI Guides to #VastEarlyAmerica
Over the life of the Omohundro Institute, the staff here in Williamsburg produced resources with the aim of helping scholars to navigate the early American field. Like the Carnegie Guides I discussed in a previous post, these inevitably reflected a contemporary understanding of “the field” as well as the communication capacity and technology of… Read More
OI colloq series begins February 7
The Omohundro Institute’s colloquium series resumes February 7 with a presentation by Greta LaFleur (Yale University) entitled “The Complexion of Sodomy.” The OI’s colloquium series convenes up to six times per semester to discuss projects in progress. Papers are pre-circulated and available by request. Although only postdoctoral work is presented, graduate students at all levels are warmly encouraged… Read More
Finding Calm amidst Chaos, or, Zen and the Art of Conference Attendance
With the 2017 meeting of the American Historical Association convening this week in Denver, Associate Editor of Books Nadine Zimmerli and Senior Project Editor Kathy Burdette share their thoughts on the experience of the fabled exhibit hall from the perspective of the exhibitors. NADINE: Ask anyone in our profession about attending AHA, and your query will… Read More
Report from #VastEarlyAmerica, 2017
Welcome to 2017, where the past is always urgent. There are times when the present and future seem like all we can handle, but to paraphrase Santayana repeating the past is not the real danger of neglecting history. It is that our understanding or misunderstanding of history is always, explicitly or implicitly, even when it’s out of our direct… Read More
Clarifying the purposely obscure
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