We remain committed to our central mission of supporting scholars and scholarship of early America. During the pandemic, we are pivoting to focus on and increase our digital offerings. Please stay in touch and let us know how we might serve you during this difficult time. —The Omohundro Institute… Read More
Exploring a Visual Archive with Students While we are all in quarantine mode, many of us adjusting to online teaching and turning to digital resources like never before, it is a good time to explore Colonial Virginia Portraits, especially if you haven’t already. If you’re looking for a digital resource to share with students, Colonial Virginia Portraits can… Read More
Around the world we are experiencing an extraordinary simultaneous crisis. COVID-19, the coronavirus that has caused a pandemic, is affecting people very differently across geography and individual circumstances but we are all in its grip. Here at the OI we are now working fully remotely, our home campus at William & Mary is closed and classes have moved online, and schools… Read More
“Life of George Washington — The Farmer,” painted by Junius Brutus Stearns ; lith. by Régnier, imp. Lemercier, Paris, 1853. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. In the preface to You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, Alexis Coe… Read More
The following is a loosely (and necessarily imperfectly) organized set of online resources for researching and teaching about VastEarlyAmerica. We invite you to add suggestions to the list by leaving your comments via the form below or by contacting martha.howard@wm.edu directly. Resources Slavery Studies Freedom on the Move A database of… Read More
The 1619 Project continues to attract a lot of readers and responses. On March 6 the editor of the New York Times Magazine, Jake Silverstein, and the principal author of the New York Times 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, convened scholars at the Times Center for a conversation centered on one of the issues that has been most provocative: slavery and American Revolution. I moderated this session,… Read More
Professor of Art History and Culinary HistoryTowson University Queen Charlotte frying sprats, George III toasting muffins or placing a fleet of ships in an oven about to be baked like gingerbread, the Prince of Wales gorging himself on the fortunes of Empire, William Pitt carving plum pudding with Napoleon, the American colonies represented as a kettle of fish,… Read More
This article was the result of a moment of enormous luck. I can remember exactly where I was when it happened: Saturday, April 11, 2015, in the lobby of the Massachusetts Historical Society, somewhere between 10:30 and 10:45 in the morning, in between sessions at the wonderful conference, “‘So… Read More
“New York’s Refugees and Political Authority in Revolutionary America,” WMQ (Jan. 2020) began with an intellectual humbling. It came at a brown bag at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where I was presenting on my research. I laid… Read More
Last month I took a day out of my research trip to visit George IV: Art & Spectacle, currently on display at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (Nov 15, 2019 – May 3, 2020). In a sense this exhibition seeks to rehabilitate our long-standing conception of George as a bad son, bad father, bad husband, and bad… Read More
...The new version of the OI Reader will be accessible via your desktop computer as well as other devices and will allow us to create digital content more easily than before. It will also have a feature of particular use to all the Very Odd Ducks of #VastEarlyAmerica: accurate (and stable) citation information readily available for every word. Read More