Category: Special Features

Contemporary Connections, Special Features

Not a Witch: Public History in a Maine Graveyard – Daniel Bottino and Hannah Peterson

The most famous gravestone in the “old burial ground” of York, Maine is not that of a politician, soldier, or notable author. Rather, it is the gravestone of an ordinary eighteenth-century housewife and mother that draws a constant stream of visitors from across the United States. Standing in an area of the graveyard relatively empty of stones, the finely carved slate marker has endured over two hundred years and remains…

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Source Highlights, Special Features

Implementing the Louisiana Purchase – Jacob F. Lee

Being surprised is one of the great pleasures of historical research. As little as a passing reference in a single document can spark new understandings of a person, event, or era. In 2019, I began research on a book project about the long aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase and the United States’ century-long project of colonizing the vast lands it had ostensibly acquired from France in 1803. Early on, I…

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Special Features, Teach EAS

Teaching EAS: Amy Dunagin’s “‘Liberty or Death’: Patrick Henry, Theatrical Song, and Transatlantic Patriot Politics”

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: “‘Liberty or Death’: Patrick Henry,…

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Special Features, Teach EAS

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…

EAS
Contemporary Connections, 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…

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Source Highlights, 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…

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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…

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Special Features, Teach 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”…

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Roundtable Introductions, Roundtables, Teach EAS, 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…

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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…

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