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…

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…

Interview with Zachary M. Bennett, 2023 Murrin Prize Winner

Zachary M. Bennett’s article, “‘Canoes of Great Swiftness’: Rivercraft and War in the Northeast” EAS 21, No. 2 (Spring 2023), won the 2023 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 article in EAS. The prize…

Teaching EAS: An Introduction – Carina Seagrave

EAS Miscellany’s series “Teaching EAS” highlights the many ways we can teach early American studies in our classes. Whether this consists of using an EAS article or how we discuss a particular topic in our classrooms, Teaching EAS aims to provide guidance to high school, college, and university educators in their lesson planning. We invite you to use our lesson plan template to demonstrate how you approach different topics in…

Interview with Ilka Brasch, Author of the Fall 2023 Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I initially read Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s political satire Modern Chivalry because I am fascinated by literature that is somewhat puzzling, written in a fragmented or meandering style, that is self-reflexive and offers narratives or opinions that need historical contextualization to be understood. I was also drawn to texts of the Early Republic that have a unique…

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…