The Possibilities and Perils of Slavery’s Digital Archive
Robert Colby used digital tools to unearth an enslaved family in Richmond, but was forced to confront their limitations.
Wrestling with the Titan; Or, Interpreting That One Really Weird Piece of Evidence
While writing his recent JER piece, Will B. Mackintosh struggled to interpret an anomalous piece of evidence.
Go Figure: Why the Female Arithmetic Whizzes Were Invisible
Tamara Plakins Thornton meditates on why female math geniuses attracted so little gender commentary in the nineteenth century.
Lesson Plan: Primary Documents as Material Culture: Encouraging Students to See a Source from All Sides
Elizabeth Kelly Gray engages her students with interpretive questions that arise from the materiality of a unique source.
The Trauma of Writing about Black Children’s Death and Criminalization
Crystal Lynn Webster tries to recapture the lived childhood of a young Black girl caught up in a merciless system of criminal punishment.
Historical Concepts and Biographical Research
Ben Lyons’s recent JER article emerged out of questions that nestled at the nexus of two different scholarly fields.
Unity in Diversity?: Babylon in Early America
Kristofer Stinson’s recent JER article was rooted in a family argument about the religious origins of the nation-state.
A Sea of “Savage Islands”: How Antebellum Americans at Home Imagined the Pacific World
Michael A. Verney plumbs the “Ex Ex” exhibits at the National Gallery in DC to reveal how the Pacific was portrayed at home.
