Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Uncommon Sense—the blog

Emerging Scholars at ASWAD 2023

· July 26th, 2023 · No Comments

The OI is pleased to support the attendance of these emerging scholars at the Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) & the Convening of the International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies (ICAADS), August 2-5, 2023, at the University of Ghana–Legon, Accra, Ghana. The OI is… Read More »

2026 and Black Americans: A Conversation about Benjamin Quarles

· June 28th, 2023 · No Comments

At the For 2026: Revolutionary Legacies conference in October 2022, four scholars gathered to discuss the long-term impact of Benjamin Quarles’s scholarship: Adam X. McNeil (Rutgers University), Rebecca Brannon (James Madison University), Derrick Spires (Cornell University), and Michael Dickinson (Virginia Commonwealth University). They shared stories about their first encounters with The Negro in the American… Read More »

Family Matters

· April 4th, 2023 · No Comments

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 »

A Record of Colonialism’s Paradoxes

· February 28th, 2023 · No Comments

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 »

2026 and Insurance: A Conversation with Hannah Farber

· December 12th, 2022 · No Comments

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 »