Today, WMQ author Zachary Dorner reflects upon some of the additional questions the process of writing his article raised for him. Zack writes: My article in the recent issue of the WMQ is an effort to chip away at a question that, I find, is as simple to ask as it is complex to answer: How does trade work? Such… Read More
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
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
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
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
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