Being surprised is one of the great pleasures of historical research. As little as a passing reference in a single document can spark new understandings of a person, event, or era. In 2019, I began research on a book project about the long aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase and the United States’ century-long project of colonizing the vast lands it had ostensibly acquired from France in 1803. Early on, I…
The Summer 2023 issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is out now and available on Project MUSE.
The most famous gravestone in the “old burial ground” of York, Maine is not that of a politician, soldier, or notable author. Rather, it is the gravestone of an ordinary eighteenth-century housewife and mother that draws a constant stream of visitors from across the United States. Standing in an area of the graveyard relatively empty of stones, the finely carved slate marker has endured over two hundred years and remains…
