Dennis Todd is Professor Emeritus of English at Georgetown University. This interview is based on his new book, Patriarchy in Peril: William Byrd II and Slavery in Early Virginia (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write […]
colonial America
The Author’s Corner with Alejandra Dubcovsky
Alejandra Dubcovsky is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. This interview is based on her new book, Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale University Press, 2023). JF: What led you […]
The Author’s Corner with Adrian Chastain Weimer
Adrian Chastain Weimer is Professor of History at Providence College. This interview is based on her new book, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). JF: What […]
Historian Barbara Fields on the 1619 Project
Here is the Columbia University historian on how to think historically about 17th-century Virginia:
The Plymouth settlers were pilgrims, not patriots
The Pilgrims would not recognize themselves in the rhetoric of so-called Christian patriots. Here is a taste of Wheaton College historian Tracy McKenzie‘s piece at Religion News Service: Certainly, the English Christians we call the Pilgrims were searching for an […]
The Author’s Corner with Carla Cevasco
Carla Cevasco is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University. This interview is based on her new book, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (Yale University Press, 2022). JF: What led you to write Violent Appetites? CC: In grad […]
The Author’s Corner with Matthew Kruer
Matthew Kruer is Assistant Professor of Early North American History at the University of Chicago. This interview is based on his new book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2022). […]
The Wall Street Journal will run its traditional Thanksgiving editorials
Here is the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal: Since 1961 we’ve run a pair of editorials written by our former editor Vermont Royster. The first is a historical account about the Pilgrims in 1620 as related by William Bradford, a […]
Thomas Maule’s words were a stinging and prophetic critique of the Salem witch trials; they also landed him in jail for twelve months
I recently finished a lecture in my Colonial America class at Messiah University on the historiography of the Salem witch trials. We discussed all the major interpretations: Boyer and Nissenbaum, John Demos, Carol Karlson, Elizabeth Reis, Richard Godbeer, Mary Beth […]
The Author’s Corner with Jared Hardesty
Jared Hardesty is Assistant Professor of History at Western Washington University. This interview is based on his new book, Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate (NYU Press, 2021). JF: What led you to […]
The Author’s Corner with Jonathan Barth
Jonathan Barth is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University. This interview is based on his new book, The Currency of Empire: Money and Power in Seventeenth-Century English America (Cornell University Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write The […]
History Essentials: “Rethinking Colonial America”
Back in 2019, I spent a week traveling up and down the eastern seaboard with with a film crew from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History as part of the Institute’s “History Essentials” series, online lectures for the professional […]
Snakes and late colonial America
My first or second year at Messiah College, the student history club produced t-shirts with Ben Franklin’s famous “Join or Die” snake image (see above) on the front. It was partly an attempt to raise the club’s membership. Messiah is […]
Harvard’s Houghton Library digitizes its early American manuscripts
Here is Anne Buress at The Harvard Gazette: In a recent virtual curatorial discussion, Houghton librarian John Overholt took an item from the Colonial North America collections to share with his audience. Rather than highlighting a letter from John Hancock or a […]
The Author’s Corner with Kate Mulry
Kate Mulry is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Bakersfield. This interview is based on her new book, An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021). JF: What led you to write […]