“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…

Interview with Douglas Winiarski, Author of the Spring 2024 Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? My article, “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet,” began as a COVID project. I was already familiar with the journal of Quaker philanthropist William Allinson, in which he described his dinner conversation with Hendrick Aupaumut, and I was intrigued by the idea that Laloeshiga/Tenskwatawa started receiving visions several years earlier than historians had previously thought. With special collections…

Interview with Tom Arne Midtrød, Author of the Summer 2023, Free Access EAS Article

Why did you choose to research your topic? What interested you about the topic? I came to this research topic while teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on war and violence in early North America. In the class, we spent some time reading a series of articles on the question of whether—or to what extent—Native Americans were subjected to genocide (or a series of genocides) during the period of European and…