A fresh look at early Quaker history
Today’s post comes from Geoffrey Plank, professor of History at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. His article “Quakers as Political Players in Early America” appears in the January 2017 edition of the William and Mary Quarterly. I have been studying early Quaker history, with increasing intensity, for more than fifteen years now. When Joshua Piker asked… Read More
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
Meet OI Fellow Shauna Sweeney
Shauna Sweeney joined the Institute this summer as the 2016-2018 OI-NEH Fellow. Her research focuses on female-centered market networks in the Caribbean and their significance to the rise of Atlantic commerce and the transition from slavery to freedom during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Laurel Daen (William & Mary Ph.D. 2016), sat down recently with Shauna to discuss her work… Read More
What’s in a Name: Or, Who Put the Omohundro in the Institute of Early American History and Culture
by Alexandra Finley I originally encountered the name Omohundro during my first year of graduate school, when I was an editorial apprentice at the Institute. During our training, then-director Ron Hoffman met with the apprentices to tell us the history of the organization, including how it came to be the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Dr. Read More
What’s in the Name (Omohundro)?
by Karin Wulf Over the years people have wondered about the name “Omohundro.” Many have asked about the derivation of the name itself and about why the OI carries the name. But there are always questions, too, about how the Omohundro name might be connected to the early Virginia economy that was dependent on the exploitation of enslaved people. Read More
Who Lives, Who Dies, and Who Tells Your Story
ICYMI, we direct your attention to Scholarly Kitchen Chef and OI Director Karin Wulf ’s reflection on Hamilton, the lyrics that ask one of the fundamental questions facing historians, and the real work of writing history in today's Scholarly Kitchen. Read More
French Atlantic? Why now and why Williamsburg
Today’s post is courtesy of Chris Hodson, co-organizer of the “Emerging Histories of the Early Modern French Atlantic” conference. Yes, Virginia, there was a French Atlantic… …and from October 16-18, over 30 distinguished presenters and commentators will descend on the Omohundro Institute to prove it. Featuring scholars from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, “Emerging… Read More
From Port to Plantation
In today’s post, WMQ author Nick Radburn writes about the process he used to trace the journeys of several enslaved Africans in the Americas using the papers of slave traders. Nick writes: I ended my recent WMQ piece on slave trader John Tailyour with the stories of Simon, John and Taylor, three of the 17,295 Africans who Tailyour sold into Jamaican… Read More
Balancing the Empirical and the Humane in Slave Trade Studies
Gregory E. O’Malley, author of Final Passages contributes the following post. In recent years, something of a divide has emerged in slave trade studies. In one camp, for decades after Philip Curtin published his pioneering The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census in 1969, historians of the slave trade focused on quantitative analysis. Study after study refined our understanding of just how… Read More