In today’s post, WMQ author Nick Radburn writes about the process he used to trace the journeys of several enslaved Africans in the Americas using the papers of slave traders. Nick writes: I ended my recent WMQ piece on slave trader John Tailyour with the stories of Simon, John and Taylor, three of the 17,295 Africans who Tailyour sold into Jamaican… Read More
WMQ author Joseph Hall shares this post with us about the research that went into his article for the April 2015 edition. In many respects, I am sorry to be done with Gerónimo de la Cruz. I have never had so much fun piecing together a story. What started with puzzling over a curious document about a Spanish expedition in… Read More
In case you missed it….We are proud to announce that the OI has been asked to help organize the digitization of the George III archives—the papers and household documents of the King and his family. Of the massive collection—approximately a quarter of a million pages of material—only about 15% has been available to scholars up until now. Today, instead… Read More
Sally Gordon, Convener of the 2015 WMQ-EMSI Workshop As we prepare for the annual WMQ-EMSI workshop, dedicated this year to legal history, it is fitting to reflect on an earlier undertaking in the same field. Almost twenty years ago, the first conference on early American law, sponsored by OIEAHC, convened in Williamsburg. Together with Omohundro editor-par-excellence… Read More
Joshua Piker talks Open Access and Quarterly Subscription Rates Last fall, Karin Wulf, the OI’s Director, met in London with some of the key officials charged with designing and implementing Britain’s Open Access policies. In the course of that conversation, Karin pointed out that STEM journals and humanities and social science journals have very different subscription rates, and she instanced… Read More
One of the OI’s major goals for the next years is to articulate and share the scholarly values and practices that characterize the work of our community from conferences to publications. I talk with willing and unwilling audiences alike about the specific brand of intensive and collaborative editing practiced at the OI. I talk about our editors and our… Read More
Eric Herschthal, OI Regional Editor reports the following— Readers of The William and Mary Quarterly need no reminder of slavery’s centrality to colonial America. Yet a recent symposium of leading scholars on African slavery brought home just how much we still have to learn. Being a regional editor for the Omohundro Institute’s Map gave me the… Read More
OI author Cécile Fromont writes about images and writing for scholars outside the world of art history— As most art historians – at least in my experience – I start reading a book by hungrily flipping through the pages to catch a glimpse of the images. The closer the book to my area of research, the more excitedly I… Read More
by Anya Zilberstein— Like most anything to do with climate these days, climate history is the target of controversy and polemics. A particular community of earnest climate change skeptics sometimes appeals to the historical climatology of the Atlantic world to make their case that global climate change is a process of natural, cyclical variability far beyond humanity’s reach. The… Read More
Ryan Kashanipour is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on ethnicity, race, and gender in the cultural and social production of knowledge in colonial Latin America and the broader Atlantic world. While at the OI, he is working on his manuscript, “Between Magic and Medicine: Colonial Yucatec Healing and the Spanish Atlantic World,” which examines the history of cooperation… Read More
By Joyce E. Chaplin– Let the record show that I was asked to complain. The indulgent staff of the William and Mary Quarterly requested that I blog about what I thought the journal’s recent Forum on climate history, to which I contributed a piece called “Ogres and Omnivores,” might have included, given more time and space. What’s missing? Well, obviously,… Read More
In a further meditation on his recent piece in the January 2015 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson writes the following. I have long been interested in the place of the environment in economic thought. The growing threat of climate change drives home in a particularly powerful way the need to reconsider many fundamental assumptions about technology,… Read More