Category Archives: Current projects
Oral histories from the Rappahannock River
As a colonial historian, I never thought I’d be working on an oral history project, but a couple of years ago a student from my environmental history class, Woodie Walker, who is also a conservationist at Friends of the Rappahannock … Continue reading
Paleoclimatology and the environmental history of New Netherland/New York
Although I’ve been teaching US Environmental History at UMW the last few years (and a seminar on American Wilderness), and although I write about perceptions of landscapes in my research, I haven’t really done much scholarship I’d consider environmental history as … Continue reading
The trial of “an Indyan called Nangenutch or Will”
Although I haven’t posted about it here, I have been working on an essay that I think is about ready for some additional readers (one is already checking it out, another two are lined up and will see it probably … Continue reading
Teaching research methods
This semester I’m teaching a section of History 298: History Practicum, the second half of a two-course methods sequence for our majors. In the first half of the sequence, we focused more on historiography, and students finished the semester by … Continue reading
Delaware Indians on Pennsylvania’s colonial roads
It seems that I promised way way back in the day (okay, February) that I’d share any updates on the Pennsylvania rivers/roads project, not just to provide more fodder for students to give me a hard time about how much … Continue reading
Letting it go
I included among my summer goals the final pre-submission revisions to an essay I’ve discussed here several times, and today was the day: I attached files to an email and hit “send,” and I sealed and mailed the envelope with the … Continue reading
School’s out for summer
I can’t be the only one who thinks of Alice Cooper every year around this time, right? No more red pens, no more books, no more students’ dirty looks? Commence three months of sleeping in (ha!), growing a beard (that may … Continue reading
“William Penn was not a terrorist.”
So the title of this post comes from a half-joking suggestion about an alternative title for “From Conquest to Identity: New Jersey and the Middle Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” the McNeil Center’s recent conference held in Trenton, NJ. Imagine my surprise … Continue reading
Unwieldy bodies of work
It’s a semi-interesting odyssey, and pretty typical of my usual process, in which I write way too much to make a point, and wind up hacking and chopping and eventually trimming it all down to something more manageable. (Though often … Continue reading
Diplomatic metaphors in Pennsylvania
Back in September, I gave a paper at the American Society for Ethnohistory’s annual meeting, in New Orleans. That marked my return to the conference circuit after a protracted (and frankly, probably irresponsible) absence, and I was more than a … Continue reading
