Summertime Blues
by Josh Piker I’m frequently asked what it takes to publish in the William and Mary Quarterly, a subject that I’m happy to talk about, of course. I’m especially happy to do so with graduate students and junior scholars. But I find that I discuss strategies for having an article accepted in the Quarterly with the sense that I’m… Read More
Interpreting the Interpretation of “Sources and Interpretations”
By Josh Piker— So, I was reading Joyce Chaplin’s “The Other Revolution” in the most recent issue of Early American Studies when I got to Table 1 (p. 297), which breaks down WMQ “Articles by Subfield” for the volume years 1973, 1983, and 1993. At the bottom of the table, there’s the following caveat: “Note: These numbers do not… Read More
Further questions around How Trade Works
Today, WMQ author Zachary Dorner reflects upon some of the additional questions the process of writing his article raised for him. Zack writes: My article in the recent issue of the WMQ is an effort to chip away at a question that, I find, is as simple to ask as it is complex to answer: How does trade work? Such… 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
Why getting on a plane is sometimes best
WMQ author Joseph Hall shares this post with us about the research that went into his article for the April 2015 edition. In many respects, I am sorry to be done with Gerónimo de la Cruz. I have never had so much fun piecing together a story. What started with puzzling over a curious document about a Spanish expedition in… Read More
"Cheap as Chips"
Joshua Piker talks Open Access and Quarterly Subscription Rates Last fall, Karin Wulf, the OI’s Director, met in London with some of the key officials charged with designing and implementing Britain’s Open Access policies. In the course of that conversation, Karin pointed out that STEM journals and humanities and social science journals have very different subscription rates, and she instanced… Read More
What does it take? From Submission to Publication at the WMQ
One of the OI’s major goals for the next years is to articulate and share the scholarly values and practices that characterize the work of our community from conferences to publications. I talk with willing and unwilling audiences alike about the specific brand of intensive and collaborative editing practiced at the OI. I talk about our editors and our… Read More
The politics of climate history
by Anya Zilberstein— Like most anything to do with climate these days, climate history is the target of controversy and polemics. A particular community of earnest climate change skeptics sometimes appeals to the historical climatology of the Atlantic world to make their case that global climate change is a process of natural, cyclical variability far beyond humanity’s reach. The… Read More
Climate History is “The Room of Requirement”
By Joyce E. Chaplin– Let the record show that I was asked to complain. The indulgent staff of the William and Mary Quarterly requested that I blog about what I thought the journal’s recent Forum on climate history, to which I contributed a piece called “Ogres and Omnivores,” might have included, given more time and space. What’s missing? Well, obviously,… Read More
What Pehr Kalm saw
In a further meditation on his recent piece in the January 2015 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson writes the following. I have long been interested in the place of the environment in economic thought. The growing threat of climate change drives home in a particularly powerful way the need to reconsider many fundamental assumptions about technology,… Read More
Light Blue Books: Reading about Winter Ecology and Climate History
In this post, Thomas Wickman meditates further on his piece in the most recent issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. You can read a preview of the article—as well as download the whole issue—on your iPad by visiting the Apple App Store and downloading the OI Reader. Thomas Wickman writes When I began my current project about winters and… Read More