This is for all the marbles, folks. I’d like to thank everyone who has voted (nearly 250 unique IP addresses!), shared this on twitter or facebook, and participated in the comments. We at the Junto have had a lot of fun, and we hope to make some version of this tournament a yearly tradition. (We’ll of course mix up the topics, periods, etc.) As always, this is acknowledge to be an extremely silly and subjective game, with a primary purpose of promoting discussion.
We have had enough chatter over the last two weeks so, after a brief reminder of how we got here, let’s get to the voting. We can only hope this matchup will be as riveting as the Lousiville/Michigan game.
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LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Edumund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
vs.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
The Junto 
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Thanks to all involved. This has been fun.
My proverbial money is on Morgan winning the championship, which, I think, confirms the staying power of Edmund Morgan’s American Freedom, American Slavery. I first encountered the book’s argument–as I imagine many of us did–as an undergraduate when it formed the basis of the professor’s lecture in the U.S. Survey on the emergence of race and slavery in British North America. I’ve since used it to frame my own lectures on the same subject. The difference between my professor’s lecture (as I remember it) and my own likely reflects the intervening scholarship in the last couple of decades: Taking a cue from Kathleen Brown, I emphasize the importance of gender to that process, and when I teach the survey again, I plan on incorporating Rebecca Goetz’s important arguments about religion’s importance to it, as well. But Morgan’s book still provides the general outline I follow. And I imagine the fact that so many historians use it in the classroom–both in their lectures to undergraduates and as an assigned text in their grad seminars–is a major reason why it has received so many votes in this tournament.