Upsets ahoy! It was another bad day for top seeds in Junto March Madness, three out of the four more highly-seeded books losing out at the Elite Eight stage. Find out who’s still standing after the jump!
Author Archives: Rachel Herrmann
Junto March Madness 2014: Elite Eight
Today we present the last eight books standing. Your votes will decide which ones make it into the Junto Final Four.
Junto March Madness 2014: Round Two Results
Round Two voting has opened and closed, and although some of the favorites won their round decisively, others lost in surprising upsets. Continue reading
Junto March Madness 2014: Round 2, Brackets 1 and 2
You’ve had a day to contemplate Round 1 results, mourn or celebrate the state of your brackets, and think about your next choices. And now it’s time for Round 2. Continue reading
Junto March Madness 2014: Round One Results
The first round of Junto March Madness has now concluded, with most of the favorites progressing through to the next round. You can find full results below the jump… Continue reading
The History Carousel, Episode 2: Historical Fathers and Junto Dads
Today’s episode, “Historical Fathers and Junto Dads,” features Joseph Adelman, Christopher Jones, Ben Park, and Rachel Herrmann discussing historical ideas about fatherhood in early America, and the challenges of being dads in academia. Continue reading
Junto March Madness 2014: Round 1, Brackets 3 and 4
Welcome to day two of voting! Your votes will decide who gets another shot at Junto glory. Continue reading
The Week in Early American History
O March! You herald spring and blooms and sun!
But lest you fear a change too swift to speak,
I now present our tidings of the week. Continue reading
The Great Writing and Editing Extravaganza of 2013
That moment in the semester had arrived. You know the one: the point at which, having received their grades from the first assignment of the term, students were beginning to panic about their final writing tasks. Even though I, as a historian, write quite a bit, I sometimes find it hard to teach writing because it’s difficult to articulate the rules I inherently know. I also think that it can be tricky to teach in an engaging way. Because I can be a competitive person, I decided to teach my first-year students about writing through a contest of sorts. Continue reading
These Aren’t the Docs You’re Looking For
Rachel Herrmann concludes our roundtable on James Merrell’s article, “‘Exactly as they appear’: Another Look at the Notes of a 1766 Treason Trial in Poughkeepsie, New York, with Some Musings on the Documentary Foundations of Early American History” from the most recent issue of Early American Studies.
You know the feeling: that moment when, in the midst of crafting a sentence, you realize that the notes you made in the archive are…incomplete. I’m a transcriber, and not one to take digital photographs. I just know myself well enough to recognize the fact that transcribed words are more useful for my writing than image after image of manuscript pages that I will procrastinate from analyzing. This preference, however, means that I’ve encountered more than a few errors in my transcriptions of manuscript sources and secondary works alike. I catch my mistakes from the latter when I’m proofing a piece of writing before I submit it; I’ll go back to the book or article, read it and my quotes side by side, and discover that I’ve left out a “the,” or transposed two words, or typed part of the same sentence twice. Preventing all of my blunders on manuscript transcriptions is another matter entirely, and it is to manuscript research that I’d like to turn in my response to James Merrell’s article in Early American Studies. Continue reading
The Junto 