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By Karin Wulf February 06, 2019

Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of the images used in the article are under copyright and appear only on the NEH’s site. by Karin Wulf American history courses usually begin with the peopling of the Americas, then move on to European colonization and the… Read More

#VastEarlyAmerica 37 min read
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By Brooke Newman January 24, 2019

Uncovering Royal Perspectives on Slavery, Empire, and the Rights of Colonial Subjects

By Brooke Newman Dr. Newman is Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was awarded an Omohundro Institute Georgian Papers Programme Fellowship in 2017. This post appears on the georgianpapersprogramme.com site as well.  In 2017 I spent a month in the Royal Archives tracing how the Georgian monarchs… Read More

Georgian Papers Programme 11 min read
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By Kevin Dawson November 19, 2018

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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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 Michael S. Hindus October 08, 2018

OI Books: The Book That Launched a Cross-Country Move

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 Michael S. Hindus Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black was published on March 8, 1968. Over the course of the next six weeks, both the world and my life changed. I quickly devoured the book (at over 600 pages!) for my senior seminar on slavery at Columbia University. I was already determined to seek a Ph.D. in American History and assumed I would stay within the comfortable confines of the Ivy League. White Over Black was an eye-opener. I had not realized that writing history could be so far-reaching, so incredibly original, so interdisciplinary, and so elegant. Read More

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By Natalie Zacek October 01, 2018

OI Books: Our Changing Expectations of Scholarship

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 Natalie Zacek When I arrived at Johns Hopkins University in September 1992 to begin my graduate studies in history, my first meeting with my supervisor, Jack Greene, concluded with his recommendation that I head for the campus bookstore and purchase a copy of Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves. As other members of the “Big Greene Team” will recall, Jack’s reading lists for his seminar and for comprehensive exams in colonial British American history were immensely long, and included both the most recent works of scholarship and those which had been classics when he had started his doctoral studies. But for me, coming into grad school with a strong interest in but remarkably little knowledge of the history and historiography of the English West Indies, it was Dunn’s monograph which he believed would be the ideal starting point. Read More

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By Abigail Swingen September 04, 2018

OI Books: Shifting the Conversation on Slavery

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 Abigail Swingen The pages of my copy of Richard S. Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies are dog-eared thirty-one times. I referred to it repeatedly while I wrote my dissertation and my book. I first encountered the book in a class on colonial America in graduate school, but I did not really delve into it until I started to research my dissertation on unfree labor in the early English empire. I remember taking it with me practically everywhere I went on my first trip to the UK archives in the summer of 2002, reading it while on the Tube down to Kew, in coffee shops around London, and in the garden behind the dorm where I stayed at the University of Bristol. I’m sure many of the dog-ears date from that summer. In many ways the book remains indispensable to our understanding of the early English Caribbean colonies and how and why slavery played such an important role in their social and economic evolution. Read More

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By Sarah L. H. Gronningsater August 29, 2018

From "Eureka!" to footnotes

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

WMQ 8 min read
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By Vineeta Singh August 15, 2018

Meet Vineeta Singh, OI-W&M Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow

Vineeta Singh began a two-year term at the Omohundro Institute on July 1, 2018, as the OI-W&M Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow. The fellowship was created to study the history of institutions and economies of oppression with a preference for higher education and slavery in connection with the Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation at William & Mary. The fellowship… Read More

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By Ann Little July 09, 2018

OI Books: Dreaming of Scholarship

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 Ann Little Most days I don’t think much about graduate school. This is probably all to the good, as my first year in grad school was… Read More

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By oieahc June 14, 2018

The WMQ on the OI Reader

I’m delighted to announce that Simon Newman’s article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica,” has just been published on the OI Reader app. This essay represents the first born-digital article published on the OI Reader, and as such is a significant milestone for the Quarterly. The article will not appear in a… Read More

WMQ 8 min read
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By Ravynn Stringfield March 14, 2018

Building on the Legacy: Lemon Project Symposium March 16-17, 2018

Today’s post is courtesy of Ravynn Stringfield, graduate student in American Studies at William & Mary and Lemon Project Graduate Assistant. The Omohundro Institute applauds the work of the Lemon Project and has supported several past events. Most recently, the OI has joined forces with the Lemon Project to co-sponsor the OI-W&M Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellowship, a two-year… Read More

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