Author: EAS

Interviews

Interview with Zachary M. Bennett, Author of the Open Access EAS Article, Spring 2023

EAS Miscellany is featuring an interview with author Zachary Bennett, whose Spring 2023 Early American Studies article, “‘Canoes of Great Swiftness’: Rivercraft and War in the Northeast,” is freely available for the next few month on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research canoes? What interested you about the topic? My initial interest was in river spaces. I grew up in New England, and after living in other parts…

EAS
Contemporary Connections, Special Features

From Fort to Casino: The Catawba Nation and the Opposite Carolinas – Stuart Marshall

North and South Carolina continue to be divided about most things, including how to prepare pulled pork. In North Carolina, the vinegar-based style reigns supreme, but mustard flows south of the border. Beyond barbecue, travelers might notice some striking differences on either side of the line—with North Carolina known for its rural beauty and mountain landscapes, and South Carolina for its southern charm, stately mansions, and palmetto trees. Any reader…

EAS
Special Features

“Native Copper”: Exhibiting Anishinaabe Wealth at the U.S. National Museum – Gustave Lester

How did a three-thousand-pound rock of “native copper”—meaning copper ore found in its pure form—end up in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution? In the early 1840s, the U.S. government facilitated the movement of the Ontonagon Boulder from deep within its resting place in Anishinaabewaki (the homeland of the Anishinaabeg) to well over a thousand miles away in Washington D.C. for public display. But how did this removal occur? And…

EAS
Special Features

What is an Early American Treaty? – Rachel B. Herrmann

In the summer of 2011, I was in the National Archives in Kew, London, to read papers in the Sierra Leone Original Correspondence collection. I was researching a dissertation that became a book about hunger and the American Revolution, when I did something that most historians have done.1 I read a document that was peripherally related to my research, recorded some initial observations, and moved on because I didn’t know…

EAS
Interviews

Interview with Emma Hart, Richard S. Dunn Director of MCEAS

Emma Hart: Leading the McNeil Center toward the Semiquincentennial and beyond  Emma Hart has an exuberance that is infectious. In her second year as the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS), Hart emanates a sense of enthusiasm, readiness, and gratitude regarding her place at the helm of the Center. She is honored to carry on the work that her predecessors began and is…

EAS
Special Features

One Day in the Classroom: The French Revolution in America and the Reinvention of Revolution – Anna Vincenzi

It was only in the early 1790s that Thomas Jefferson began trumpeting his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the late 1770s and the 1780s, Americans essentially forgot the Declaration, and no one seemed to remember who had written it. But in the 1790s they started attributing new meanings to the document, making it into a metaphysical, almost sacred text. Jefferson’s fellow Republicans started celebrating him as the “immortal”…

EAS
Pedagogy, Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Teaching with Games

Roundtable: Teaching with Games – Michael LaCombe, Guest Editor

Preliminary Reflections – Rose Beiler and Judy Ridner, Co-Editors, EAS Miscellany Jump to Guest Editor Introduction | Jump to Games Roundtable Posts To what extent are games an effective and even inspiring pedagogy for teaching early American studies? What challenges do instructors and students confront when using games to teach? More specifically, to what extent do immersive, role-playing games like Reacting to the Past encourage students to more actively engage…

EAS
Special Features

Richard Dunn’s Sugar and Slaves at Fifty Years – Trevor Burnard

Historians are surprisingly poor at honoring the works of the historians who went before them.  We are focused on the present, at least when we consider historiographical trends. We tend to relegate historical masterpieces to distant memory. Our amnesia about the great historians of the recent past has become even more pronounced as we have moved into the twenty-first century and as we have dropped from our reading lists many…

EAS