Hey, remember us?
A few months ago we decided it was time to take a break here at The Junto. Our first five years were far better than we ever expected—you can get a run-down of our achievements here—but we were a bit burned out, to be honest. Most of us have been blogging since the beginning, and we only have so many good ideas to blog about. We were also ready for the next phase of The Junto‘s history. Continue reading
Greetings, faithful readers.
As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet here during the last few months, but much work has been going on behind the scenes. In the coming weeks, we will be adding a number of exciting new blog members—from incoming grad students to junior faculty at a broad range of institutions. In addition, we will be unveiling a new look for the blog’s website. Please bear with us as we edit the site, and get new members’ profiles up and running. Of course, our back catalog of almost 1,000 posts dealing with all aspects of early American, digital, and public history is always available. Unfortunately, these changes do mean that we will be skipping our traditional Junto March Madness; we know some of you will be disappointed, and some of you thrilled, but we hope that our new regular content will more than make up for this omission.
We will be introducing new members and our new site in mid-April. We hope to see you back here then. In the meantime, we would like to remind all of our readers that we are always looking for guest posters to contribute to the blog. For more information about how you can contribute to The Junto, click here.
Five years ago, The Junto was born. The immediate context was parochial: as a PhD student studying early American history at the University of Cambridge, I was lonely for fellow scholars. But the niche the blog filled was much more broad: there was a need for a digital space to serve as a hub for early American scholarship. The reception we’ve since received, and the readership we still welcome, has been overwhelming. The blog’s success is indicative of our field’s vibrancy. Continue reading
Here at The Junto, a group blog of early American historians, we’re looking for new voices to expand our coverage of this exciting field. We are seeking new members to further diversify the content of the blog and join our community of like-minded friends and scholars. New members commit to posting at least six times a year, and to helping with the blog’s administration. All Juntoists create and edit their own posts, solicit guest posts, organize interviews, reviews, and roundtables, and shape the direction of the blog. While unpaid, joining the Junto is a terrific opportunity to develop your public profile as a scholar and engage in an online intellectual community. Continue reading
Calling all contributors!
December 12-16, 2016. The Junto will host an online roundtable on new scholarship and historical themes that enhance our understanding of slavery and the Black Atlantic, c. 1400-1860. We welcome posts that approach these topics through a focus including—but not limited to—recent scholarship, teaching, public history, or historical memory. Continue reading
Since the blog first launched in December 2012, we have published 794 posts. That is somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 words of original content on early American history posted on the blog in less than 4 years. And since new readers find the blog regularly and our longtime readers may often have missed posts for various reasons, I want to use today’s post to simply make our readers aware of our back catalog and highlight the resources the blog has for accessing and making better use of it. Continue reading
If you haven’t noticed, the blog has been a bit, well, quiet lately. We promise that wasn’t all a hiccup! Well, most of it, anyway. About halfway through the summer we realized our productivity was lagging so we decided to call it a summer sabbatical—we are academics, after all.
Anyway, I’m pleased to say that, as the Fall Semester is about to commence for many of us, The Junto is ready to kick off another great year. We have posts scheduled nearly every day for the foreseeable future, and I swear some of them will probably be good. We’re gonna attack the season like the 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors, though we hope our ending won’t be so anti-climactic.
We do have some exciting things in store as the blog transitions into its next phase. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, you can check out our new Contribute page to find out more about how to write a guest post for us.
As always, we appreciate any and all feedback. We truly appreciate all our faithful readers—we now have over four thousand subscribers to the blog, and even more casual visitors—and feel this is one of many digital centers for the early American history community. Or, ahem, #VastEarlyAmerica.
After nearly three-and-a-half years, we are preparing to move on to the next level. Continue reading
Thanks go to Michael Hattem for providing the statistics for this post. Michael not only produces The JuntoCast, but also manages much of the formatting, editing, and other technical details of The Junto.
Three years ago, founder Ben Park introduced The Junto. Today, we offer our annual “state of the blog” post.
The Junto has removed the post on Hamilton: An American Musical, published July 17, 2015, at the request of the show’s producers and creative team. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
The Junto 