early American history

• 
• 2/7/2021
  

  Who Can Claim to be the United States’ First University?

  by Tom McSweeney, Katharine Ello and Elsbeth O'Brien

  New documentary evidence shows that the College of William and Mary was chartered as a university in 1693, making it the first university in the colonies. The story reflects how the sectarian strife of England in the seventeenth century helped Anglican W&M and harmed Puritan Harvard. 

• 
• SOURCE: Age of Revolutions
  8/18/2020
  

  How Not to Read Bernard Bailyn

  by Asheesh Kapur Siddique

  Conservatives lionizing Bernard Bailyn for supporting libertarian interpretations of the nation's founding and valorizing the founders "aligns perfectly with the reactionary effort to cancel critically engaged understandings of the American past, but poorly with Bailyn’s own far more nuanced vision of historical practice."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/7/2020
  

  Eminent Scholar of Early U.S., Bernard Bailyn, Dies at 97

  An acknowledged landmark in scholarship, Bernard Bailyn's “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” won the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize in 1968. 

• 
• SOURCE: Zip06.com
  5/26/2020
  

  Old Saybrook Historical Society Wins Prestigious History Award, Publishes New Book

  The winner of a 2020 Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History's new book focuses on the Battles of Saybrook Fort during the Pequot War.

• 
• SOURCE: The Way of Improvement Leads Home
  5/3/2020
  

  Remembering John Murrin

  The early American historian passed away on May 2 after contracting coronavirus.

• 
• SOURCE: Uncommon Sense
  3/26/2020
  

  Women Also Know Washington

  by Lindsay Chervinsky

  The last decade has witnessed a noticeable uptick of works on Washington authored by women, with more to come in the pipeline.

• 
• 3/4/2020
  

  Omohundro Institute and NYT to Live Stream Discussion of 1619 Project on March 6

  "Slavery and the American Revolution: A Historical Dialogue" will continue some of the vigorous discussion surrounding "The 1619 Project."

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian Mag
  2/4/20
  

  Karin Wulf Interviews Alexis Coe About Her Cheeky New George Washington Biography

  by Karin Wulf

  Alexis Coe’s cheeky biography of the first president pulls no punches

• 
• 1/5/20
  

  Reexamining the Mayflower 400 Years Later

  by Stephen Tomkins

  The colonists seemed to have difficulty articulating exactly what compelled them to leave the Netherlands for America.

• 
• 11/24/19
  

  Fake News and the Founders: Get Used to It!

  by Harlow Giles Unger

  Fake news did not diminish as the nation matured. Indeed, it became entwined in the nation’s literary fabric.

• 
• 11/10/19
  

  The Electoral College: How the Founders Cheated You of Your Vote

  by Harlow Giles Unger

  Weeks of debate by America’s Founders failed to set any rules at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia—a failure that led to “cheating” at the Electoral College ever since.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/29/19
  

  What we get wrong about Ben Franklin’s ‘a republic, if you can keep it’

  by Zara Anishanslin

  Erasing the women of the founding era makes it harder to see women as leaders today.

• 
• SOURCE: Tablet
  8/14/19
  

  Is the U.S. Constitution Pro-Slavery?

  A review of Sean Wilentz's No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. 

• 
• 5/19/19
  

  Thomas Harriot and the lost North Carolina Algonquian Language

  by Robyn Arianrhod

  In this UN International Year of Indigenous Languages, here is the story of a pioneering linguist and ethnographer. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/27/19
  

  What Catholic Church records tell us about America’s earliest black history

  by Jane Landers

  These records date back to the 1590s and document some of the earliest black history of the U.S.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  2/19/19
  

  What we get wrong about the roots of slavery in America

  by Eric Herschthal

  How we remember the past shapes the fight for racial justice today

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  2/19/19
  

  Winthrop's "City" Was Exceptional, Not Exceptionalist

  by Jim Sleeper

  There are compelling anthropological reasons why almost every society in history has invented “special covenant” and “origin” myths, or “constitutive fictions.” 

• 
• 1/27/19
  

  Trump, Benjamin Franklin, and the Long History of Calling Immigrants "Snakes"

  by Geoffrey Sill

  Trump’s unsupported allegations that immigrants are “animals, not people” may find a popular reception among many Americans because the association between immigrants, criminality, and reptility goes back to a period well before the founding of the nation.