Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture

Uncommon Sense—the blog

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 »

Change and Continuity

· September 27th, 2022 · No Comments

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 »