OI Author Conversation with Sara E. Johnson and Ada Ferrer

Join OI author Sara E. Johnson in conversation with Ada Ferrer ONLINE as they discuss Johnson’s new book, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Johnson and Ferrer will discuss experimental writing methods in historiography, the idea of communal biography, and stories about the enslaved and free… Read More

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Introducing Commonplace.online

By Joshua R. Greenberg, editor of Commonplace.online What is it like for a scholar to read the entire back catalog of a publication without a specific research or teaching agenda in mind? For me, it has been like assembling a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Let me explain. As of September 30th, Commonplace: the journal of early American life has… Read More

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A symposium on digitizing #VastEarlyAmerica

by Molly O’Hagan Hardy Next week, The Omohundro Institute will host a group of scholars working in special collections, academia, and grant funding agencies to discuss the past, present, and future of the digitization of the vast early American record. Specifically, the group will focus on the  Lapidus Initiative Digital Collections Fellowships, an effort the… Read More

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County Plats: Evidence of a 17th-Century Virginian Cartographic Culture

by Nathan Braccio Today’s post is courtesy of Nathan Braccio, an Omohundro Institute–Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation fellow. Nathan spent a month in Williamsburg at the OI and Jamestown this summer. During my month in Williamsburg I conducted research for my dissertation, “Parallel Landscapes: Algonquian and English Spatial Epistemologies 1500-1700.” While the bulk of my research focuses on how New England… Read More

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Data Management for #VastEarlyAmerica

Join Jessica M. Parr for the 2019 THis Camp, “Digital Management for Historians: a system for keeping track of data including syllabi, projects, and research” on Thursday, June 13, 2:00 pm, at the 25th annual OI conference at the University of Pittsburgh.  by Jessica M. Parr, Simmons University Like so many things these… Read More

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Origins of a collaboration

by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Ahmed Idrissi Alami 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… Read More

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Must Early America Be Vast?

by Karin Wulf 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… Read More

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Accessing the Past: Why Paleography Skills Still Matter

Learn more about paleography at our first Transcribathon on Saturday, March 23, 2019, in the Ford Classroom, ground floor of Swem Library, on the campus of William & Mary. We will begin at 11:00 a.m. and continue until 4:00 p.m. Participants are welcome to drop in for an hour or to stay all afternoon. Lunch and snacks will be available. Julie Fisher will lead… Read More

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Digital Sources, Analog Citations

Today’s post is by Andrew Newman, author of Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, published in January 2019 by the Omohundro Institute with our partners at the University of North Carolina Press. It is available in paperback. by Andrew Newman The image on the right is a copper engraving from a 1725 Amsterdam edition of François de… Read More

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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

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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

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The Sandy Ground of Prince Edward: Profligacy and Royal Credit in the Empire of George III

Peter Olsen-Harbich spent the September of 2018 in the Royal Archives at Windsor as an Omohundro Institute–Georgian Papers Programme fellow and as the recipient of a William & Mary Dean’s Research Fund fellowship. The latter was jointly funded by the Omohundro Institute and the William & Mary Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences via the William &… Read More

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