Native AmericansPage 2
By Julie Richter October 15, 2018

OI Books: A Transformative View of Race and Gender

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. By Julie Richter I was in the middle of my dissertation research when Mick Nicholls, then a Research Fellow at Colonial Williamsburg, introduced me to Kathy Brown. Mick encouraged us to talk about our research in county court records. Kathy was in Virginia so she could immerse herself in the court records for three Tidewater counties: Lancaster, Norfolk, and York. I also used the York County Court records in my dissertation and we quickly learned that we had a lot to discuss. During these conversations I realized how much I had missed thinking and talking about women as historical actors. While women appeared as minor figures in reading assignments during grad school, only one of the classes that I took as a Ph.D. student at William & Mary included a focus on women and this focus lasted just a week. I found that these readings were a disappointment as they were book chapters and articles published in the 1950s. Read More

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By Daniel Mandell August 20, 2018

OI Books: The Invasion of America and Me

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. by Daniel Mandell I first encountered Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America early in graduate studies at the University of Virginia. Unlike Christine DeLucia, I cannot remember that precise date (sometime in mid-1981), nor why I picked it up, but there is no forgetting its effect. In the first half of the book, Jennings broadly examined how first European rulers and then American intellectuals created a deceitful and destructive depiction of Native Americans, and then used that false construction to justify their subordination, dispossession, and near-extermination. In the second half, he applied those lessons in a slashing, no-holds-barred reexamination of New England’s origins from first English settlement to King Philip’s War, including a scorching scornful takedown of puritan saint John Eliot. In college I had been involved in Native American studies, and at Virginia had become interested in colonial social history and the newish New England town studies. It was not surprising that I was captivated by Jennings’s passionate, revisionist view, and went on to other recent works on early New England encounters. It now seems strange that there were so few: a handful of articles, Alden Vaughan’s New England Frontier (1965), and James Axtell’s The European and the Indian (1981). Read More

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By Christine DeLucia July 30, 2018

OI Books: Telling Histories of Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistances

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. by Christine DeLucia I first encountered Francis Jennings’ scathing The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) on September 19, 2008. I know this date not because I have a frighteningly good memory for events a decade past, but because I recently unearthed the syllabus and notes for “Readings in American Indian History” in the sweaty process of relocating my home and office. It was in this graduate seminar in American Studies at Yale University—in the heart of the very New England at which Jennings trained his critique—that I began to think in more concerted ways about the mechanisms of settler colonialism, alternative approaches to Indigenous and early American studies, and the ideological stakes of “doing history.” Read More

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By Lynne Withey July 23, 2018

OI Books: Borderlands in View

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. by Lynne Withey As a historian-turned-publisher, I love the idea of celebrating the Omohundro Institute’s 75th anniversary by celebrating its books. When I was a graduate student,… Read More

#VastEarlyAmericabooks 17 min read
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By Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup June 15, 2018

Collaboration can't be rushed

Today’s post comes courtesy of authors from the William and Mary Quarterly April 2018 Forum “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn.” by Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup The forum is the result of a multi-year collaboration between three editors, not all of whom had worked together before or even met in person. Read More

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By Christine DeLucia March 22, 2018

On "slow history": Decolonizing methodologies and the importance of responsive editorial processes

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

WMQ 14 min read
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By Rachel B. Herrmann December 05, 2017

Histories of Hunger in the American Revolution

Today’s post accompanies “The American Revolution in North America,” episode 163 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Rachel B. Herrmann Poor Joseph Plumb Martin. The Connecticut private had been at it again—eating something a bit iffy to deal with his hunger. This time, it was “an old ox’s liver” that Martin had procured from camp butchers before chucking it into his kettle. The more he boiled it, “the harder it grew,” he recalled, but he ate it anyway. The next morning, Martin’s stomachache drove him to the doctor, who gave him “a large dose of tartar emetic.” After taking the medicine and exercising to encourage it to do its work, Martin promptly “discharged the hard junks of liver like grapeshot from a fieldpiece.”[1] Martin ate a fair amount of offal throughout his service. He sampled “A sheep’s head which” he “begged of the butchers,” and an ox’s milt, or spleen—which also made him vomit.[2] Not all soldiers shared Martin’s predilection for what chefs today refer to fondly as “the nasty bits,” but during the Revolutionary War, British and American soldiers suffered from the curse of bad army food. Read More

Doing History 14 min read
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By oieahc October 11, 2017

Report on the 4th annual Southwest Seminar

Today’s post is a special report from Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez of Texas State University on the Southwest Seminar, one of several conferences on #VastEarlyAmerica the OI is proud to support this year. From October 5 to 7, 2017, the University of California – San Diego hosted the fourth annual meeting of the Southwest Seminar Consortium on Colonial Latin America. The Southwest… Read More

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By Nathaniel Holly October 04, 2017

Vast in its Vastness

Today’s post is by Nathaniel Holly, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at William & Mary. He attended Robert Morrissey’s VastEarlyAmerica lecture at W&M, an annual event that the OI sponsors in conjunction with various departments on campus, on Monday, October 2. Vast in its Vastness: Borderlands Hide Paintings and the Historical Processes of Early America by Nathaniel… Read More

#VastEarlyAmerica 8 min read
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By Eliga Gould July 04, 2017

When Did America Really Become Independent?

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the author most recently of Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. When I teach the American Revolution, I often ask my students, when did the United States become independent? The conventional… Read More

Doing History 9 min read
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By Francesca Fuentes March 08, 2017

Pocahontas and After

The OI is proud to support the upcoming Pocahontas and After: Historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617 – 2017 conference which convenes March 16–19, 2017, in London.  Read More

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By Martha Howard October 12, 2016

Summing up 3 days of discussion on slavery

The “Region and Nation in American Histories of Race and Slavery” conference took place at Mount Vernon, Virginia, this past weekend (October 6-9, 2016) before a crowd of over 125 people. With over three days of panels and papers as stimulation, the discussions were intense, long, and fruitful. Here a tiny smattering of the 1000+ tweets (#SlaveryMV) tells the… Read More

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