By Hannah Farber When I help graduate students prepare applications for fellowships and jobs, we sometimes talk about the phrase “my project.” What does this phrase actually mean? Ph. D. students usually use it, reflexively, to mean “my dissertation.” Book writers often use it to mean “my book.” I prefer to think about a “project”… Read More »
By Asheesh Siddique In 2013, while I was a PhD candidate making my first foray into research on a dissertation about administrative knowledge practices in the early modern British empire, I stumbled across a curious and cryptic set of notes in an obscure file at the UK National Archives at Kew Gardens. The file, TNA,… Read More »
by M. Scott Heerman In this post, WMQ author M. Scott Heerman discusses what he would have done with a larger word limit for his article, “Abolishing Slavery in Motion: Foreign Captivity and International Abolitionism in the Early United States,” in the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free… Read More »
In this post, WMQ author Jenny Shaw recounts how she came to research and write the story of Susannah Mingo for the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI Reader. We will close the beta period of the OI Reader on October 1. After that, all… Read More »
In this post, WMQ author Tamara Plakins Thornton recounts how she came to understand eighteenth-century globes and how that changed the way she needed them illustrated for her article in the April 2020 issue. Through September 30, you can read this article for free on the OI Reader. We will close the beta period of… Read More »
By Gautham Rao This article was the result of a moment of enormous luck. I can remember exactly where I was when it happened: Saturday, April 11, 2015, in the lobby of the Massachusetts Historical Society, somewhere between 10:30 and 10:45 in the morning, in between sessions at the wonderful conference, “‘So Sudden an Alteration’: The Causes,… Read More »
By Matthew Dziennik “New York’s Refugees and Political Authority in Revolutionary America,” WMQ (Jan. 2020) began with an intellectual humbling. It came at a brown bag at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation where I was presenting on my research. I laid out my argument in the clearest terms – the revolutionary committees of safety were fundamental to American independence but they were also oppressive organizations that limited the creation of free and open society. They… Read More »