Brett Rushforth is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, where he teaches courses on the history of early America, American Indians, and comparative race and slavery. He is the co-editor, with Paul Mapp, of Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A History in Documents (Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2008), and he currently serves as Book Review Editor for the William and Mary Quarterly. His first monograph, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France was published by University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in 2012, and has won several awards, including the 2013 Merle Curti Award in Social History (Organization of American Historians), 2013 FEEGI Biennial Book Prize (Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction), and 2013 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Prize (French Colonial Historical Society). It was also recently named a finalist for the 2013 Frederick Douglass Book Prize (Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition). Dr. Rushforth is currently at work, with Christopher Hodson, on a general history of the early modern French Atlantic. Under contract with Basic Books, its working title is Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution. Continue reading
Author Archives: Christopher Jones
The Week in Early American History
We’ll start the roundup this week by pointing readers to the recently revamped Teaching United States History blog, which featured a slew of posts over the last seven days. Be sure and check out Ben Wright’s post on teaching students the differences between academic, public and popular history and Blake Ellis’s thoughts on teaching US history in a diverse classroom. Of particular interest to (at least some) readers of The Junto will be Drew Bledsoe’s taxonomy of Civil War history students. Continue reading
The Week in Early American History
There’s a lot to get through this week, so let’s jump right into it. Continue reading
The Week in Early American History
Happy Summer to all of our readers. Another week has come and gone, and we’re back with the latest installment of This Week in Early American History. Feel free to weigh in on posted links or share any interesting stories and newsworthy items we might’ve missed. Let’s jump right into it:
Narrative History and the Collapsing of Historical Distance
Among the highlights of my Christmas was receiving Catherine Brekus’s recently-released volume, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America, a fascinating account of an eighteenth-century evangelical woman whose life experiences intersected with, and speak to, several importance events and themes from the period. At the time of writing, I’m about half-way through and can’t recommend it enough. At a future date, I’ll try and post a more formal review (or at least lengthier thoughts) of the book, but wanted to briefly reflect here on something Brekus briefly discusses in her preface. “Reading Sarah’s reflections on her life,” Brekus explains, “reminds us of how far away the past is—but also how close.” Solidly grounding her subject’s experiences in its eighteenth-century context, she continues: Continue reading
The Junto 