Interview with Douglas Winiarski, 2024 Murrin Prize Winner

Douglas Winiarski’s article, “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn” EAS 22, No. 2 (Spring 2024), is the winner of the 2024 Murrin Prize. The Murrin Prize is named for John Murrin (1936-2020), Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University, who was a scholar of early American history and an active member of the McNeil Center community. The prize is awarded annually for the best…

Thomas Paine and the Haitian Revolution: The Transformation of an Anecdote – Anthony Rizzuto

In 1802, the political writer Henry Redhead Yorke went looking for Thomas Paine in Paris. Asking after the erstwhile celebrity revolutionary in a bookstore, he was upbraided by a chorus of four individuals cursing the English American radical. They had just heard troubling news out of the Caribbean: the French attempt to master the uprising of formerly enslaved Blacks in their colony of Saint-Domingue (soon to be a fully independent…

Holy and Rich: Selling Christianity in Early America – James Dupey

On September 28, 1808, Jane Campbell and her seven children boarded the ship Hibernia in Lough Foyle, Ireland, bound for Philadelphia to reunite with her husband, Thomas Campbell. They waited several days for favorable winds before setting sail. At first, a gentle breeze carried them north, but changing winds soon forced the captain to take in the sails and float. By morning, the ship had drifted nearly 30 miles off…

De-Silencing the Archive: The Benefits of Microhistory for Romani American History – Ann Ostendorf

When Jean Baptiste “La Chaume” Chevalier entered the New Orleans courtroom in July 1743 his puncture wound must still have been hurting. Few would have extended this soldier much sympathy since he had stabbed himself less than three weeks earlier. After months of laboring at the Natchez Post for an abusive commandant (a punishment he was serving for a prior desertion attempt), La Chaume had lashed out, was restrained, and…

Roundtable — A Tribute to Stephanie “Stevie” Grauman Wolf, 1931‒2024 – Sarah Barringer Gordan and Dan Richter

EAS Editors’ Note: We were saddened to learn of the recent death of Stephanie “Stevie” Grauman Wolf, a founding member of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies who served for many years on EAS’s editorial board. We offer this collection of tributes in her honor and to acknowledge the many contributions she made to early American studies. In Memoriam: Stephanie Grauman Wolf, 1931-2024 Stephanie Grauman Wolf, lynchpin of the…

A Stevie Wolf Testimonial – George W. Boudreau

I knew of Stephanie Grauman Wolf years before I knew her. When I started graduate school at Indiana University in 1987, I was fascinated by town studies and what they revealed about early American life and communities. I scooped up everything I could read in the field, going from New England town to town. But one day I came across a reference to a non-New England village: Germantown, Pennsylvania. I…

A Memory of Stevie Wolf – Michael Zuckerman

There are hundreds of Stevie stories. Let me tell you one. 1973 was not a good year to finish a doctoral dissertation in early American history. The market was dismal enough for the great majority of newly minted Ph.D.s, young men who’d gone straight from college to graduate school and were then in their later twenties and mobile enough to go wherever a job offered. It was much worse for…

Stevie Wolf, A Treasured Friend – Sandy Mackenzie Lloyd

As my second year of graduate school opened in the Winterthur Program for Early American Culture, we welcomed our new director – Dr. Stephanie G. Wolf, a graduate of Wellesley with a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. She greeted us in a seminar room and our journey together began as she masterfully guided us through our studies of early American history. As luck would have it, I was writing my…

Stevie Wolf’s Fine Legacy – Shan Holt

Lots of people will not know Stevie’s fine legacy as a scholar in her splendid community studies, as a teacher and mentor at Winterthur and elsewhere, and as an incisive, thoughtful contributor to McNeil Center discussions from the Center’s founding year. I remember and honor her also as a model of professional womanhood. Stevie let me know early that I was welcome in the intellectual community around the Center, even…