Category: Roundtables

Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

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…

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Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

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…

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Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

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…

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Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

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…

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Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

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…

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Roundtables, Special Features, Tribute to Stevie Wolf

Stevie Wolf, A Lynchpin Indeed! – Wayne Bodle

The sad news of Stevie Wolf’s death could not have been conveyed or written any better, but I guess it can be annotated or e-mended. Stevie pulled me into the McNeil Center for Early American Studies orbit on a crisp October evening in 1985 at her house, or really manse, on West Hortter Street in Germantown, in her characteristically decisive way(s). (I think it was the night Vince Coleman got…

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Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Special Features

Roundtable — Facing the Archive from the Present: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work, Part II – Tara A. Bynum and Liz Polcha

EAS Editors’ Note: This is Part II of a guest-edited roundtable that was in response to “Facing the Future of Early American Studies,” the July 2023 conference where scholars reflected on the scholarship and mentorship of Daniel K. Richter, director emeritus of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Read Part I here. Facing the Archive from the Present: A Celebration of Dan Richter’s Work, Part II Links to Facing…

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Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

The Language of Symbols and the Unspoken – Sherri V. Cummings

While reading Bradley’s and Michael’s pieces, I began to realize that as historians of early America we are driven to examine the lives and experiences of our subjects on their own terms while navigating the silences and erasures of the colonial archive. By using nuanced methodologies, we are able to remove the lens of western discourse to shed new light on Native American and African American cultural practices and traditions.…

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Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

Letters Lost and Found: Silences in the Early American Archive – Bradley Dubos

What can we ever truly know about early American lives when their stories are entangled with, in Sherri Cummings’s words, an “apathetic, biased archive”? Researching the “quotidian lives” of African women and girls in the early Atlantic world, Sherri asks challenging questions about lived experience that go beyond the colonial archive’s ability to answer. Both Sherri and Michael Monescalchi also reflect on the necessity of reading “around” the subjects they…

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Facing the Archive from the Present, Roundtables, Special Features

“Looking Over Bet’s Shoulders: The Archive and the Albany Arson Plot” – Michael Monescalchi

In the prologue to Facing East from Indian Country, Dan Richter claims that it is nearly impossible for scholars who are interested in recovering disenfranchised persons’ perspectives “to see the world through [the] eyes” of those we study.1 Rather than despair over the archive’s limitations, however, he offers a solution to this problem, arguing that we must try to look over our subjects’ shoulders to “reconstruct something of the way in…

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