How digital humanities can further our understanding of human experiences

by Kevin Dawson As a cultural historian of the African diaspora who employees the paradigms of Atlantic history to trace the cultural traditions of enslaved Africans who were forcibly uprooted and transplanted in the Americas, I was both impressed and inspired by the possibilities digital research offers for adding depth and breadth to our understandings early American history.  Scholars… Read More

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Short answer: what to do with 5,000 more words

Today’s post, by July 2018 WMQ authors Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz, authors of “Nature’s Battalions,” comes in response to the following question: “WMQ articles are capped at 10,000 words (plus notes). If you had 5,000 more words to play with, how would the article be different?” by Matthew Mulcahy and Stuart Schwartz Our article “Nature’s Battalions” was born out of our… Read More

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What if They Gave an Environmental History Workshop and no Environmental Historians Came?

Today's post is by James Rice, Tufts University, Convener of the most recent William and Mary Quarterly—Early Modern Studies Institute (WMQ-EMSI) workshop, “Early American Environmental Histories,” which took place at The Huntington Library, May 19–20. A list of participants and their papers follows his post. Read More

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An old topic made new--iron in America

In this week’s post, Keith Pluymers (July 2016) describes the shifts in perspective that led him to reconsider a well-worn topic and ultimately to publish his first piece in the William and Mary Quarterly.  by Keith Pluymers In 2013 while on a Mellon Research Fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society, a combination of archival discovery and a fortuitous meeting with a… Read More

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The politics of climate history

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

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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

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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

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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

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