About The Panorama
The Panorama serves as an online hub for all who appreciate the past—academics, public historians, secondary educators, and other general-interest readers—to engage with approachable and exciting content relating to the history of the early American republic. Launched in 2017 to provide the Journal of the Early Republic with an online presence, The Panorama publishes work that reflects on the processes, problems, and opportunities of researching, interpreting, and teaching the early American republic.
We are interested in publishing pieces and roundtables that immerse readers in the history of this era. We believe that digital history publications afford the opportunity to reach a wider audience than traditional academic journals and simultaneously help democratize scholarly output. By framing topics of historical interest in thought-provoking ways, our authors (a diverse group including not just academic historians, but other historical practitioners) hope to engage a wider audience in important conversations about the past.
We also offer space for JER authors to explore everything from the pedagogical implications of their research to contemporary politics to compelling side-stories that didn’t make it into the original article. These “Compano” pieces invite readers to dig deeper into the story behind the stories they read in the JER and often shine a brighter light onto the significance of the early republic to contemporary life.
If you are interested in submitting a piece to The Panorama, please visit our “Write for Us” page.
A Note About Panoramas
Detail of Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley by John J. Egan, circa 1850. (Saint Louis Art Museum official site, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)
Panoramas were a nineteenth-century form of commercial popular entertainment in which an artist or team of artists painted massive, panoramic depictions of cities, battles, or historic or religious scenes to display to a paying public. They were common features of the emerging landscape of urban commercial entertainment, and they also toured with itinerant promoters to smaller cities, towns, and summer resorts. Large numbers of Americans paid their pennies to feel like they had traveled to exotic landscapes and important historical events that they couldn’t otherwise expect to experience.
The Panorama’s logo is inspired by an engraving of American artist John Banvard’s panorama that toured the nation and the world in the late 1840s, bringing the experience of riding a Mississippi River steamboat to thousands of people who would never otherwise walk down the levies of the wide American west.
John McCoy designed the logo, and the original image is courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.
Meet the Editorial Team
Emily J. Arendt, editor of The Panorama, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department History at Montana State University Billings. Her work focuses on gender, partisanship, and policy debates in the early American republic. Email her with any questions or inquiries at emily.arendt@msubillings.edu.
Nora Slonimsky, Social Media Editor, is the Gardiner Associate Professor of History at Iona University, where she also serves as director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies. Her research interests include political economy, legal history, communication, and book history in the eighteenth century anglophone world.
Elena Telles Ryan, Senior Editorial Assistant, is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. She is at work researching a dissertation on the legal order of the Great Lakes from the end of the Seven Years War to early nineteenth-century United States occupation.
Find out more about the Journal of the Early Republic and the full editorial team by visiting the Journal’s homepage.