Origins of a collaboration

The authors of “Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu’s Arabic Address on the Occasion of Emancipation in Jamaica” (William and Mary Quarterly, April 2019) discuss how they came to collaborate on the piece. Beth: Our collaborative journey began with an unexpected find. I’d traveled to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast to read Sir Lionel Smith’s family papers. The archive included personal… Read More

Read More

Must Early America Be Vast?

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 chagrin that I… Read More

Read More

Digital Collection Fellowship updates

2019 marks the third year of the Lapidus Initiative for Digital Collections Fellowships. The recent awards to Benjamin Bankhurst and Kyle Roberts for “The Maryland Loyalist Project,” Julia Gaffield, Jennifer Palmer, and Patrick Tardieu for “Endangered Colonial Imprints in the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit: The Archives Décoloniales of the Age of Revolutions,” and to Daniel Webb for… Read More

Read More

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. American history courses usually begin with the peopling of the Americas, then move on to European colonization and the crisis of the… Read More

Read More

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

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 responded to contemporary… Read More

Read More

Daily Life and Wartime Disruption

Today’s post is by October 2018 WMQ author 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 research. Occupation seemed… Read More

Read More

Opposing Views: Do Humanists Need to Add "Digital" to Their Titles?

Today’s posts are courtesy of two Ph.D. candidates in the William & Mary Department of History, Alexandra Macdonald and Peter Olsen-Harbich. We asked them to address the place of digital humanities learning—in particular, tutorials in the tools required to create digital humanities projects—in their current work and education. Learning to Stretch the Digital Vellum: Digital Literacy and the Production of… Read More

Read More

Continuing the Conversation: "Poor Relief"

The following post is the result of questions raised during a panel (#33) at the OI’s 24th annual conference, June 14–17, 2018. If you have a conversation you would like to continue post-conference, or materials to share (such as a bibliography), please send them to the OI at oieahc@wm.edu. And be sure to join us for the 25th… Read More

Read More

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. 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, back in ancient… Read More

Read More

Digital Paxton expands

The following is a report from William Fenton (Fordham University), recipient of an Omohundro Institute Digital Collections Fellowship and founder of Digital Paxton, a digital archive of more than 1,650 open-source images related to the 1764 Paxton pamphlet war. The Digital Collections fellowship program is funded by the Lapidus Initiative. When I set out to create Digital Paxton… Read More

Read More

Why be a joiner?

Don’t make me pull out that de Tocqueville quote about the importance of voluntary associations in civil society. Besides, it’s not necessary to quote a tourist in early nineteenth-century America to observe a truism: organizations bring people and their talents together. The Omohundro Institute has a single mission: to support early American scholars and scholarship, and to share the… Read More

Read More

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. It wasn’t quite a “stop the presses!” moment.  But a… Read More

Read More

Recent Posts

June 29, 2025

Peer Review for the Born-Digital?


April 1, 2025

BJ Lillis


April 1, 2025

Patrick Barker

Subscribe to the Blog

[ninja_form id='48']