Today The Junto welcomes a guest post from Kathryn Snyder who is currently a PhD Candidate at the College of William and Mary. Before starting on her PhD studies, Snyder obtained an MA in history at Texas Tech University where she studied with Ethan Schmidt.
As a 20 year-old junior at Texas Tech, I had no plans to pursue a postgraduate degree in history. A single semester in Dr. Ethan Schmidt’s class on the Atlantic World changed that. He had an enthusiasm and dramatic flair during lecture that came from his love of colonial history and a background in a musical theater troupe he joined during his childhood in small-town Peabody, Kansas. After beginning every class with eighteenth-century folk music and drinking songs, he launched into topics ranging from the lives of women in Virginia to the epic clash of empires on the high seas, making them all equally compelling and important. He convinced me to apply to Tech’s graduate program, helped me win a fellowship, and remained a steadfast, involved advisor for the next two and a half years. One of his greatest talents lay in making his students feel more like equals. For Ethan, everyone who took his classes was an historian. So, it is with pain that I write this tribute, knowing it should be another recommendation for a teaching award. Continue reading
Yesterday, Jessica Parr 
The annual British Group of Early Americanists Conference was held from September 3-6 at the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England and drew a wide variety of scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States and France. In keeping with BGEAH traditions, there were many excellent papers, a key note address on Thursday night, a book club discussion on Friday and a conference dinner on Saturday, while newer traditions were started with some panels providing pre-circulated papers.
Data. Before postmodernism, or environmental history, or the cultural turn, or the geographic turn, and even before the character on the old Star Trek series, historians began to gather and analyze quantitative evidence to understand the past. As computers became common during the 1970s and 1980s, scholars responded by painstakingly compiling and analyzing datasets, using that evidence to propose powerful new historical interpretations. Today, much of that information (as well as data compiled since) is in danger of disappearing. For that and other reasons, we have developed a website designed to preserve and share the datasets permanently (or at least until aliens destroy our planet). We appeal to all early American historians (not only the mature ones from earlier decades) to take the time both to preserve and to share their statistical evidence with present and future scholars. It will not only be a legacy to the profession but also will encourage historians to share their data more openly and to provide a foundation on which scholars can build. 
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