Reading for Teaching–POSTPONED

How do we incorporate scholarship on early America, both old and new, into our teaching–whether that teaching happens in a K-12 classroom, on a university campus, or at a museum? In this every-other-monthly reading group, teachers come together to think collaboratively about how to engage with audiences from a broad spectrum and in a wide variety of contexts.

“Reading for Teaching” explores a wide variety of scholarly texts as possible frameworks for lectures, discussions, and other methods of approaching Vast Early America with different audiences. Each meeting focuses on a single book to be read by all and participants will be encouraged to share their expertise and experience communicating history in different venues.

Hosted by Melissa Johnson, each session includes a guest who brings expertise in the subject area.

The next meeting has been POSTPONED is scheduled for April 21, 2022, 5:00 pm ET,.

We will schedule a new date as soon as possible to explore All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Penguin Random House) by Tiya Miles (Harvard University) with guest Morgan McCullough (Omohundro Institute).

Morgan McCullough is a PhD candidate in History at William & Mary and the Material Culture Fellow at the Omohundro Institute.

Melissa Ann Johnson is a historian of women, religion, and communication in early America. Her first book project focuses on watchfulness and women’s gossip in seventeenth-century New England. She is also working on two other projects, one on domestic servitude in colonial New England and another on deception and imposters in the Atlantic world. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2019 and currently teaches history courses at community colleges in Oregon and in Washington state.

Reading for Teaching: A Vast Early America Book Club

How do we incorporate scholarship on early America, both old and new, into our teaching–whether that teaching happens in a K-12 classroom, on a university campus, or at a museum? In this every-other-monthly reading group, we will come together to think collaboratively about how to engage with audiences from a broad spectrum and in a wide variety of contexts.

“Reading for Teaching” will explore a wide variety of scholarly texts as possible frameworks for lectures, discussions, and other methods of approaching Vast Early America with different audiences. Each meeting will focus on a single book to be read by all and participants will be encouraged to share their expertise and experience communicating history in different venues.

The group will meet on the last Thursday of every other month.  Hosted by Melissa Johnson, each session will include a guest who brings expertise in the subject area.

To APPLY: email an abbreviated c.v. to oievents@wm.edu by June 15, 2021.

Our first meeting is scheduled for July 23, 5:00 pm EDT, and will explore Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith (published by the Omohundro Institute with partner the University of North Carolina Press in 2018) with guest Michael Witgen (Columbia University).

Subsequent meetings will be scheduled every other month.

Michael Witgen is a professor in the Department of History at Columbia University as well as the Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race there. He is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. His publications include “An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and “American Indians in World History,” in the Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed., Fred Hoxie, (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, April 2016). His work explores the juxtaposition of Native and European experiences and responses to the process of mutual discovery that created the New World in North America, with a particular focus on the Great Lakes and Great Plains. His current research examines the intersection of race, national identity, and state making in the Old Northwest of the early republic, and includes the essay “Seeing Red: Race, Citizenship, and Indigeneity in the Old Northwest,” published in Journal of the Early Republic in 2018, and awarded the Ralph D. Gray prize for best original article by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He is also the author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America forthcoming with the press of the Omohundro Institute for the Study of Early American History & Culture.

 

Melissa Ann Johnson is a historian of women, religion, and communication in early America. Her first book project focuses on watchfulness and women’s gossip in seventeenth-century New England. She is also working on two other projects, one on domestic servitude in colonial New England and another on deception and imposters in the Atlantic world. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2019 and currently teaches history courses at community colleges in Oregon and in Washington state.

Focus on Documentary Editing: The Papers of John Marshall

It has been fifteen years since the publication of the 12th and final  volume of The Papers of John Marshall (published by the Omohundro Institute with partner the University of North Carolina Press). Revolutionary officer, congressman, and secretary of state before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Marshall served as the Court’s fourth Chief Justice. In this capacity, he helped define the role of the Court and elevate its status, as he interpreted the Constitution from the bench.

The Papers of John Marshall collects the Justice’s correspondence, papers, and legal documents–including selected judicial opinions. The work of many years and several editors, the twelve volumes include introductory material and notes, and shed light not only on Marshall’s life and thought but on the evolution of American jurisprudence as well.

But how did the editors decide what to include and what to leave out? How did they go about answering questions the archive posed to them in terms of both items found and items missing? The Papers of John Marshall is a prized example of documentary editing but what exactly do documentary editors do–and how do they do it? Join us for a conversation between OI editor emeritus Charles Hobson and Sara Georgini, series editor for The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This event is co-sponsored by the Omohundro Institute and the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History & Civics.

About the speakers

Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Sara Georgini earned her doctorate in history from Boston University in 2016. For over a decade, she has worked for the Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she is series editor for The Papers of John Adams. Committed to the preservation of and access to rare primary sources, Sara has worked on the selection, annotation, indexing, and team production of more than a dozen scholarly editions drawn from the Adams Papers (Harvard Univ. Press, 2009– ), covering the history of American political life in the era from the Declaration to disunion. As a historical editor, she publishes authoritative editions of the founders’ words; leads student and teacher workshops; curates manuscripts and artifacts in thematic exhibits; and brings Adams expertise (spanning three centuries) to the broad audiences of groups like National History Day. Thanks to the Historical Society’s trove of Adams and Jefferson manuscripts, she teaches frequently on constitutionalism, founding-era thought, and the course of Anglo-American empire. Sara is the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford Univ. Press, 2019), and she writes about early American history for Smithsonian.

Charles F. Hobson is a retired historian and documentary editor, affiliated for many years with the Omohundro Institute at William & Mary. He also served as resident scholar at the William & Mary School of Law. From 1979 to 2006, he was principal editor of The Papers of John Marshall, a twelve-volume edition of Marshall’s correspondence, papers, and selected judicial opinions. His one-volume edition, John Marshall: Writings, was published by the Library of America in 2010. After the Marshall project, he prepared an annotated edition of St. George Tucker’s Law Reports, published by the OI (with partner University of North Carolina Press) in 2013. Hobson is the author of The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (1996) and The Great Yazoo Lands Sale: The Case of Fletcher v. Peck (2016).  

 

 

 

The portrait of John Marshall was painted by Henry Inman in 1832.

Schoolhouse Rock for a New Generation

The animated children’s television series Schoolhouse Rock has been teaching children about math, grammar, science, and history since the 1970s. Middle-aged women and men can still quote the program’s lyrics about conjunctions (“Conjunction junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses”), the nervous system (“there’s a telegraph line, you got yours and I got mine, It’s called the nervous system”), and the Preamble to the United States Constitution (“we the people, in order to form a more perfect union”). Unlike their math and grammar counterparts, though, many of the America Rock history episodes of the series have not aged well. Songs like “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” and “Elbow Room” celebrate rather than investigate the national past, and overlook and oversimplify the experiences of most Americans. In this time of heightened disinformation and struggles for racial justice, the looming fiftieth anniversary of Schoolhouse and the 250th birthday of the United States offer the opportunity to celebrate with a new generation of programming that teaches children how to engage with difficult subjects like slavery, immigration, and racial segregation. In this talk, Dr. Ringel will examine the history presented by Schoolhouse Rock during the 1970s, and then consider subsequent strategies for teaching history to children that can serve as models for the new type of programming he hopes to introduce through this project.

Paul Ringel is an associate professor of history at High Point University. He is the author of Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918 (2015) and numerous articles about children’s literature and American children’s consumer cultures. His current work includes The William Penn Project, a public history project on a segregated black high school in High Point, North Carolina.

“From New Cultures to a New Regime: Washington and Cuzco in the 1810s”

OI Colloquium with Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

This paper comes from a chapter of a book-in-progress, a wide-angle cultural history of the age of revolutions, ca. 1760-1825. Interweaving the stories of cities in North and South America, it argues that a synchronous and inter-related set of cultural changes took place in multiple Atlantic regions around 1800–spanning sociability, urban space, and family life–which created strikingly similar cultural foundations for the “second wave” of Atlantic revolutions post-1808.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a faculty fellow at the University of Southern California and a historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with a strong interest in law and empire. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and revolutionary organizing, and then in 2015 published a first book on a different topic: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard). His current book project is a cultural history of the Atlantic age of revolutions, from the 1760s through the 1820s, which aims to rethink the era’s putative role in creating modern democratic politics.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues.  Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated  paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.

When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

“The Evolution of Freedom: Free People of Color in the Revolutionary South”

OI Colloquium with Warren Milteer

This paper explores the changes in the social and political situation of free people of color in the U.S. South as well as the colonies of Louisiana and Florida during the age of Revolutions. It investigates the explosion in manumissions across the U.S. South as well as the backlash to the growing numbers of free people of color in the region.

Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. is an assistant professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and is the author of North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). He is currently working on a broader study of free people of color in the U.S. South, which is currently under contract. His publications include articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. He was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues.  Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated  paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.

When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.

 

“Preemptive Property: Native Power, Unceded Land, and Speculation in the Early Republic.”

OI Colloquium with Michael Blaakman

U.S. governments began selling future rights to huge swaths of unceded and unconquered Indian country in the 1780s and 90s, creating a form of property claim that shaped the land business. Situating public finance, land policy, and speculation within transnational debates about sovereignty and territoriality, Professor Blaakman will trace how white Americans of the early national era sought to circumvent Native power and persistence by forging an abstract property regime in real estate that did not yet exist—except in the teleology of settler colonialism.

Michael Blaakman is an assistant professor of History at Princeton University. A historian of revolutionary and early national America, his scholarship focuses on politics, empires, and North American borderlands, and his interests extend to include gender history, the history of capitalism, and microhistory.

Professor Blaakman’s first book project, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, investigates the political and financial culture of a frenzied land rush that swept the new republic in its first quarter-century. The project received the 2017 Manuscript Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. With Emily Conroy-Krutz, he is editing a collection of essays that explore the imperial dimensions of the early American republic.

ABOUT OI COLLOQUIA

The OI’s Colloquium Series is an ongoing seminar for scholars to present their work in progress for graduate students and colleagues.  Advanced registration is required. All participants read the pre-circulated  paper and prepare to engage in generous and generative feedback.

When we meet in person we are limited by the size of the OI’s conference room; online we limit registration to 40 (a typical size for the colloquium). No recordings are made of the discussions and no tweeting or posting on other social media platforms during the event is permitted in order to encourage this intellectual community of trusted exchange.

COPIES OF THE COLLOQUIUM PAPER ARE AVAILABLE ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE.

Contact Beverly Smith to receive your copy.