Today’s post accompanies “American Legal History and the Bill of Rights,” episode 259 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment. In 1965 a lawyer named Malcolm S. Mason wrote an article for the Journal of Legal Education with a simple problem: legal history was boring. For Mason, who… Read More
Bibliography for Doing History 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment Want to learn more about the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment? We’ve compiled a list of suggested books, articles, popular blog posts, and online resources that you might find helpful. We either used these works ourselves for production research or they were suggested by our guests. Read More
“Doing History 4 Legal Lexicon; or A Useful List of Terms You Might Not Know” We are pleased to announce the release of “Doing History, Season 4: Understanding the Fourth Amendment.” Law is all around us. This 4-part Doing History series explains the early American origins and importance of the fourth amendment. Although it doesn’t always make… Read More
By Joshua R. Greenberg, editor of Commonplace.online What is it like for a scholar to read the entire back catalog of a publication without a specific research or teaching agenda in mind? For me, it has been like assembling a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Let me explain. As of September 30th, Commonplace: the journal of early American… Read More
Karin Amundsen is the 2019-2021 OI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow. I am a historian of early modern Britain and the Atlantic World focusing on the influence of alchemy and metallurgy in the development of English colonization. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California with support from the Institute of Historical Research, the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies… Read More
Next week, The Omohundro Institute will host a group of scholars working in special collections, academia, and grant funding agencies to discuss the past, present, and future of the digitization of the vast early American record. Specifically, the group will focus on the Lapidus Initiative Digital Collections Fellowships, an effort the OI launched three years… Read More
Allan Greer reflects on his experience publishing his piece “Settler Colonialism and Empire in Early America” in the July 2019 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly. The July edition includes the forum “Settler Colonialism in Early American History,” edited by Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker. by Allan Greer, McGill University For authors, one of the great attractions… Read More
Starting later this month, the OI will convene a Working Group on Inclusive Practice. The OI’s Executive Board has charged me, together with the OI’s Council Chair, Jennifer Morgan, with bringing this group together to consider inclusivity throughout our programming, including our publications, meetings, fellowships, and more. All current and former members of the OI’s Board and Council have… Read More
Today’s post is courtesy of Nathan Braccio, an Omohundro Institute–Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation fellow. Nathan spent a month in Williamsburg at the OI and Jamestown this summer. During my month in Williamsburg I conducted research for my dissertation, “Parallel Landscapes: Algonquian and English Spatial Epistemologies 1500-1700.” While the bulk of my research focuses on how New England colonists and Algonquians… Read More
by Joshua Piker, editor of the William and Mary Quarterly Traditionally, of course, if there’s a season for cleaning, it is understood to be spring, not summer. But for a variety of reasons, spring here at stately Quarterly manor—aka, the basement of Swem Library—was devoted to the more elemental task of keeping my head above water amidst the rush of… Read More
by Joshua Piker, Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly Those of you who have read my blog posts over the last five years know that I believe wholeheartedly in transparency in the publication process. I’ve blogged about manuscript submission numbers, the seasonal fluctuation of those numbers, the time a manuscript spends in peer review, rejection rates, and the… Read More
Today’s post comes from Doug Winiarski, author of Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, published in 2017 by the Omohundro Institute with our partners at the University of North Carolina Press. Winner of the Bancroft Prize and several other awards, it is now available in paperback. Readers can learn more about Doug’s work at his personal website or contact him at … Read More