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Uncommon Sense

Lemon Symposium “Black Revolutionary Thought from Gabriel to Black Lives Matter”

The Omohundro Institute is proud to support the Lemon Project at William & Mary. Lemon Project Fellow Sarah Thomas, Ph.D. candidate in History at William & Mary, brings us this account of the seventh annual Lemon Project symposium. Read More

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That New Book Smell: Early 2017 Edition

Associate Editor Nadine Zimmerli lays bare a usually private OI ritual, in the process asking what's the thing about things? Read More

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Pocahontas and After

The OI is proud to support the upcoming Pocahontas and After: Historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617 – 2017 conference which convenes March 16–19, 2017, in London.  Read More

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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

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Finding Elizabeth Hooton's story

Today's post is by Adrian Chastain Weimer, author of “Elizabeth Hooton and the Lived Politics of Toleration in Massachusetts Bay” in the January 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly. Read More

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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