Our interest in commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence involves a significant look backwards at the American past—and at some of the classics that the OI has published on Revolutionary America. This month, we feature Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, which first appeared in 1980. One of… Read More »
By Michael Borsk Michael Borsk is the author of “Conveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763–1822” in the January 2023 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is a PhD candidate in History at Queen’s University, Canada. It seems that every town in North America has at least one… Read More »
by Erin Kramer (Trinity University) Erin Kramer is the author of “Coraler’s House: Diplomatic Spaces, Lineages, and Memory in the New York Borderlands” (William and Mary Quarterly, October 2022) In the acknowledgements to my recent WMQ article, I thanked a long list of scholars who were kind enough to read drafts of my essay as… Read More »
by Blake Grindon (Princeton University) Blake Grindon is the author of “Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Mis Mac Rea: A Story of the American Revolution in the French Atlantic” (William and Mary Quarterly, October 2022). Many years ago, when I first became intrigued by Jane McCrea—the subject of my dissertation and of my recent WMQ article—I searched her… Read More »
In this installment of interviews with OI Book authors about the Semiquincentennial, Hannah Farber discusses marine insurance—a topic that seems below the surface but that nonetheless had a significant impact on the Revolution and American independence. Her 2021 book, Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding, navigates a cast of financial… Read More »
by Catherine E. Kelly Historians are notorious for sussing out the relationship between change and continuity, trying to gauge which is predominant at any given moment. In fact, both are typically in play. Certainly, that’s the case with new transitions for the OI’s staff. From one perspective, we have change, and an awful lot of… Read More »
With this post, Uncommon Sense inaugurates a planned series of conversations with OI book authors about how their work relates to the American Revolution. It is one of the ways in which the OI is contributing to the Semiquincentennial, the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. In its eight… Read More »