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
by Karin Wulf Spoiler: I think yes. But it’s complicated. You may have seen this meme about historians, with “it’s complicated” mocked as the weak battle cry of our profession. I would argue that there is ample demonstration, from contemporary politics to technology, that an appreciation of complexity is newly resurgent. And so it is with vigor, rather than… Read More
The “Joshua Piker” that Joshua Piker’s title is referring to here is not the Editor, author, and noted clothes horse, but rather the one who occasionally appears in the acknowledgments of articles and essays. Often these acknowledgments are for Joshua Piker’s work on essays that were submitted to the William and Mary Quarterly but not published there. Some of… Read More
Today’s post is by October 2018 WMQ author Lauren Duval. by Lauren Duval The American Revolution, Mary Beth Norton asserted in her classic study, Liberty’s Daughters, had “profound consequences for the entire population” and unsettled “normal patterns of life.”[1] I found this notion particularly intriguing and I was eager to explore it further as I delved into my dissertation… Read More
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
by Maeve Kane In October 2018, I participated in the WMQ-UCI Digital Research in Early America workshop hosted by Sharon Block and Josh Piker at University of California-Irvine. This post aims to give those who weren’t able to attend an idea of the conversations and common themes of the new scholarship presented. Most broadly, the workshop was a productive… Read More
This post comes to us from Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania), author of “‘Expressly Recognized by Our Election Laws’: Certificates of Freedom and the Multiple Fates of Black Citizenship in the Early Republic” in the July 2018 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. She responds to the question How does your essay in the WMQ relate to your larger… Read More
This post comes to us from James Rice (Tufts University), author of “Early American Environmental Histories” in the July 2018 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. by James Rice In a recent series of Uncommon Sense posts, Karin Wulf, Ann Little, Anna Mae Duane, and Lynne Withey celebrated the 75th anniversary year of the Omohundro Institute by… Read More
Christine DeLucia, author of “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles’s Yale Museum” in the January 2018 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly reflects on the broader implications of making a “simple” change to her recent article. by Christine DeLucia It wasn’t quite a “stop the presses!”… Read More
by Joshua Piker, Editor, William and Mary Quarterly October’s issue of the Quarterly went into the mail about two weeks ago and up on the OI Reader, Muse, and JSTOR soon thereafter. When you open your preferred format, you’ll see that we’ve published a joint issue with the Journal of the Early Republic around the theme of “Writing To and… Read More
In today’s post, Jeffrey Glover, author of “Witnessing African War: Slavery, the Laws of War, and Anglo-American Abolitionism” in the July 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly, reflects on what it means to frame an article. By Jeffrey Glover I was surprised by the readers’ and editor’s reports on my submission to William and Mary Quarterly. I was not… Read More