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 Katie Moore, Winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Cromwell Article Prize

EAS Miscellany sat down recently to talk with Katie Moore about the research for her Spring 2023 EAS article, “To Counterfeit Is Death? Money, Print, and Punishment in the Early American Public Sphere,” which recently won the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article Prize from the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). Congratulations Katie! Why did you choose to research paper money, counterfeiting, and colonial politics? What interested you about the…

“And well improve each moment as it flies”: Spiritual Utility and Quaker Art – Janet Moore Lindman, Rowan University

In 1670, George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, rebuked fellow Quakers to “pluck down your images” lest they be imitating “the Creator.” Fox’s admonition against the display of fine art established a prohibition that lasted for over a century. Friends believed that painting was of little merit to one’s spiritual enhancement. They valued a “useful education” that taught children religious principles coupled with practical skills. Not…

Interview with Viviana Díaz Balsera, Author of the Fall 2024 Free Access EAS Article

EAS Miscellany sat down recently with Fall 2024 author Viviana Díaz Balsera to talk about her article, “Light of Egypt Shining from Within: Fr. Gregorio de Movilla and the Tercero Cathecismo for the Timucua (1625).” For a limited time, it’s freely available on Project MUSE. Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? Good luck and a number of coincidences led me to the…