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Uncommon Sense

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By Joyce E. Chaplin February 18, 2015

Climate History is “The Room of Requirement”

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

WMQ 7 min read
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By Fredrik Albritton Jonsson February 11, 2015

What Pehr Kalm saw

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

WMQ 8 min read
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By Thomas Wickman February 04, 2015

Light Blue Books: Reading about Winter Ecology and Climate History

In this post, Thomas Wickman meditates further on his piece in the most recent issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. You can read a preview of the article—as well as download the whole issue—on your iPad by visiting the Apple App Store and downloading the OI Reader. Thomas Wickman writes When I began my current project about winters and… Read More

WMQ 15 min read
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By Martha Howard January 28, 2015

A conversation with OI Fellow Paul Polgar

We sat down with Paul Polgar, Omohundro Institute-NEH Fellow 2013-2015, earlier this month for a quick interview.  What are you working on now?  I spent a lot of fall semester compiling a database of New York and Philadelphia’s abolition societies’ cases and now I am working with that material. These are cases brought to the societies by individual African… Read More

fellowships 7 min read
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By Josh Piker January 21, 2015

Useful Peer Reviews

Two weeks ago, I challenged all of us to speed up the editorial process at the William and Mary Quarterly.  I noted my own efforts in this regard, and laid part of the problem at the feet of our readers —tireless volunteers that they are— and their understandable but deleterious habits of, first, not responding quickly to editors’ queries… Read More

WMQ 4 min read
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By Gregory E. O'Malley January 14, 2015

Balancing the Empirical and the Humane in Slave Trade Studies

Gregory E. O’Malley, author of Final Passages contributes the following post. In recent years, something of a divide has emerged in slave trade studies. In one camp, for decades after Philip Curtin published his pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census in 1969, historians of the slave trade focused on quantitative analysis. Study after study refined our understanding of just how… Read More

digital projects 11 min read
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By Josh Piker January 07, 2015

The Pot and the Kettle

The Pot and the Kettle, or, What We Can All Do to Speed Up the Review Process by Josh Piker, Editor, WMQ One of my goals as Editor is to make the review process as smooth and speedy as possible.  The process isn’t always as smooth or speedy as any of us would like, and here’s a bit about… Read More

WMQ 7 min read
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By Karin Wulf December 24, 2014

2014 Highlights

Congratulations to Martha Howard and Joseph Adelman on the launch of Uncommon Sense—the blog and The Octo, the OI’s new online features.   Partnerships of all kinds, with EMSI on the WMQ-EMSI annual workshops, the BGEAH to support their conferences, with the SEA to produce the… Read More

digital projects 4 min read
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By Martha Howard and Joseph M. Adelman December 11, 2014

Welcome to Uncommon Sense—the blog

As those familiar with the OIEAHC know, last April, in recognition of readers’ evolving habits, and environmental and cost sensitivities, the publication of Uncommon Sense moved completely online. Reports from the Director, Editor of the WMQ (Quarterly Notes) and Books Editor (Ad Libros) as well as features and reprints of favorite articles from the archives under the category of… Read More

The Octo 3 min read
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