whiche maye well bee althowgh wee bee all borne of Adam and Eue, and knowe not the caufe why god hath fo ordeyned it, otherwyfe then to confyder that his diuine maieftie hath doonne this as infinite other to declare his omnipotencie and wifedome in iiich diuerfities of colours as appere not only in the nature of man, but the lyke alfo in beaftes, byrdes, and floures, where dyuers and contrary colours are feene in one lyttle fether, or the leaues growynge owt of one lyttle ftalke.

No leffe maruayle is it to confyder that men are whyte in Siuile and blacke at the cape of Buena Speranza, and of cheftnutte colour at the ryuer of Plata, beinge all in equall degrees frome the Equinoctiall line. Lykewyfe that the men of Affryke and Afia that lyue vnder the burnte line (cauled Zj}na Torridd) are blacke : and not they that lyue beneathe or on this fyde the fame line as in Mexico, Yucatan, Quauhtema, Lian, Nicaragua, Panama, Santo Domingo, Paria, Cape faynt Auguftine, Lima, Quito, and other landes of Peru which touch in the fame Equinoctiall.

Several leading historians turned down an invitation co serve on Emory's external review commicree, even thoug h th ey were offered $ 10,000.6

the guns th ey had were unreliable and didn't shoot straig ht; few people hunted with guns, instead relying on tr apping and animal husbandry; even in bat tle, even in the Rev-olutionary War, swords, axes, and fire were more deadly than guns

In 1929, Shelby Little called Mary "illiterate, untidy, and querulous," even though we know she was literate, if not especially well read.

YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR F IRST . ources they cited and was, almost immediately v the pnmary s . . . ' e:ted ~ f h . • nterpretations and the opportumties they miss d some o t err 1 e

In fact, women historians have often reminded us that we don't always know what we think we know. There's a lot more work to be done, and it's not limited to "women's history.

but developed with the expansion of the gun industry, becoming fixed in our society with the Civil War. That’s it.

Nearly two decades later, Arming America remains a source of controversy. A great number of historians, by no means all of them politically conservative, point to the book as a classic example of contemporary political bias clouding a scholar’s interpretation of the past.

She turns the lone English account of Weetamoo’s na-ked body washing up drowned in the Taunton River in the summer of 1676 into a storyof rape and murder, but with no proof whatsoever.

Living through the epidemics and the fi rst wave of colonization, she experienced unimaginable grief and loss. Yet she birthed and raised at least two daughters, Weetamoo (or Namumpum) and Wootonakanuske, who survived several epidemics, as well as threats of violence, to mature into leaders among their communities. Yet in Winslow’s account, this signifi cant mother and leader was not even named.

Yet, as time went on, the succession of plantation revolts, and especially the consolidation-in Jamaica, and in the Guianas-of large colonies of runaways with whom colonial governments had to negotiate, gradually undermined the image of submission and the complementary argument of pathological misadaptation

What we call the Re-naissance, much more an invention in its own right than a re-birth, ushered in a number of philosophical questions to which politicians, theologians, artists, and soldiers provided both con-crete and abstract answers. What is Beauty? What is Order? What is the State? But also and above all: What is Man?

Indeed, the contention that enslaved Africans and their descen-dants could not envision freedom-let alone formulate strategies for gaining and securing such freedom-was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants.

For people who traveled not as emigrants seeking new lives in new places but as commodities, transatlantic exile admitted none of the return journeys, correspondence, and other means of contact by which migrants shaped networks of social and information ex-change between their origins and destinations, the Old and New Worlds. Atlantic slaves in diaspora did not lack connections to the "Old World."

The latter comprised mterna co res~onden_ce between and among officials in London and agents stationed m Afric d h A . • · con-a an t e mencas.

If they could not reassemble some meaningful way to map their social worlds, "slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory."

In Hartman's account especially, slavery is not only an object of study, but also the focus of a personal memoir.

Each member sets a concrete goal for the next week, such as making an out-line, finishing a section of a manuscript, reading a book, or writing 1,000 words.

Humans are too frail for such a system.

We run open-ended, come-as-you-are meetings for anyone who wants

THE MOST UNIVERSAL DEFINITION of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonored and vio-lated, the slave defines the position of the outsider.

Eunice's sister Ellen had just moved to Alabama when I had to leave. I returned later that sum-mer, staying until Eunice, alone and poor, began to worry about the approaching New Hampshire winter of 1863. I visited again in December and stayed until Eunice's sister Ellen imparted the terri-ble news to their brother Henry in 1881

We all know mo-ments when the brain is not working for us, when we reach for words and they aren't there, when language won't flow

As he puts it, “To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.”

Scholarly projects expand and mutate. It is disorienting to deal with an ever- changing collection of possibilities, most of them mu-tually exclusive.

Treating academic writing as a craft enables us to be more effective in both our writing and our thinking.

Too often we treat our academic work as a measure of our inner worth, rather than as a process of learning how to use a specific set of skills. We hobble ourselves if we believe our writing ability is evidence of having (or not having) the “right academic stuff.”

By their form, they imply that the discoveries spring full‐blown in the heads of experts.