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…
My first meeting with Richard Dunn was on the day after Labor Day 1967 when I reported to the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania to take up the four-year fellowship I had been awarded to sustain my study for a Ph.D. in history. My ambition was to write a dissertation that would position the plantations the English government promoted in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within…
I am profoundly grateful to Trevor Burnard and Alison Games, the organizers of this workshop, and to all of the participants, particularly to those who have submitted research papers for discussion. I have greatly enjoyed reading the sixteen papers, and wish that I knew fifty years ago what I have learned from this workshop. Having lived a long time, I am very conscious of the huge changes that have taken…
I am taking a wee break from celebrating the 50th anniversary release this month of Joni Mitchell’s fantastic Blue album to enjoy our commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Richard Dunn’s fantastic Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. Apparently, the early 1970s ‘twas a good time for seminal works! And I’m just delighted to be participating in this marvelous event with…
I was one of Richard’s graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. As someone from the Caribbean and from an undergraduate joint degree in History and Latin American Studies, it was only at the University of Pennsylvania–because graduate students are expected to look at the trajectories of historians’ work—that I learned about Richard’s first identity (or always in my mind his “other identity”) as a historian of early North America.…
As we mark the 50th anniversary of Richard S. Dunn’s path-breaking book Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, we wish to draw attention to the myriad ways Dunn’s work influenced subsequent scholars in the field, including many Early American Studies authors. Dunn’s pioneering social history on the English West Indies not only depicted the rise of a powerful white planter class,…
