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…

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…

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”…