“Mistress, Housemaid, Daughter, Spy: Servants and the Management of Household
 Gossip in 17th Century New England"

OI Colloquium with Melissa Johnson In seventeenth-century New England, female servants’ presence in intimate settings, their mobility in towns and villages, and their associations with other households made them part of a complex set of relationships through which information flowed. Servant gossip had the potential to upend hierarchies and household governance by creating opportunities for lower status women and… Read More

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Julia Gaffield, "The Schism: Haitian Independence and the National Church"

OI Colloquium with Julia Gaffield Julia Gaffield is an associate professor of History at Georgia State University. She received her PhD from Duke University. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Read More

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2026 and Religion: A Conversation with Katherine Carté

With this post, Uncommon Sense inaugurates a planned series of conversations with OI book authors about how their work relates to the American Revolution. It is one of the ways in which the OI is contributing to the Semiquincentennial, the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. In its eight decades, the… Read More

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Further Thoughts on Douglas Winiarski's Bancroft Prize-winning Book

This week we were thrilled to learn that Douglas L. Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (OI and UNCP, 2017) was one of three books awarded the 2018 Bancroft Prize. This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England is simultaneously magisterial in scope and carefully attuned… Read More

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Figuring Out Who Was in the Room Where it Happened; Or, Doing African American History with Quaker Sources

Today's post is by Nicholas P. Wood, author of “A ‘Class of Citizens’: The Earliest Black Petitioners to Congress and Their Quaker Allies” in the January 2017 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. Read More

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Beginning and Ending with Footnotes

In today’s post, WMQ author Michael D. Breidenbach (July 2016) reflects on the beginning and end of historical writing. by Michael D. Breidenbach An unavoidable task in historical writing is beginning and ending within particular time periods, dates, or moments. But while a published article denotes its end—the publication date—historical writing often does not admit of a beginning. The genesis of an… Read More

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