Teaching EAS: Rachel Herrmann’s “Consider the Source: An 1800 Maroon Treaty”

EAS Miscellany encourages educators to integrate articles from our journal into the classroom. As a part of our new series “Teaching EAS,” we invite you to use this lesson plan as a model for designing your curriculum and teaching Early American Studies articles. If you would like to create other lesson plans using EAS articles, please download our template here and share your plan with us. Teaching EAS: “Consider the Source: An 1800…

Interview with Jordan B. Smith, Wayne D. Rasmussen Award Recipient

Why did you choose to research the making of rum in Barbados? What led you to explore the role of Indigenous people and enslaved Africans in the creation of rum? This article is part of a larger project examining the invention of rum and its emergence as a quintessentially Atlantic commodity in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The project has several inspirations. One was an undergraduate thesis that I…

Interview with Tom Arne Midtrød, Author of the Summer 2023, Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I came to this research topic while teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on war and violence in early North America. In the class, we spent some time reading a series of articles on the question of whether—or to what extent—Native Americans were subjected to genocide (or a series of genocides) during the period of European and…

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…

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…

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…

Teaching EAS: 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”…