Letter from the Editor

This first issue of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal is an important milestone for The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. The Center has been producing annual volumes since 1997, when a collection of essays honoring founding director Richard S. Dunn was released as a supplement to that year's Pennsylvania History. In each of the years that followed, essays collectively known as Explorations in Early American Culture appeared. These five volumes form an impressive collection of early American scholarship, drawn from the Center's Friday afternoon seminars. But as the Center has grown in recent years, and the scholarship it supports has increasingly been recognized as some of the best in the fields of early American history, literary studies, art history, and other disciplines, "a group of worthy individuals" (as Benjamin Franklin would have put it) has recognized the need for a publication appropriate to the breadth and scope of scholarship that the McNeil Center encourages.

The current issue arrives just as we begin our celebration of the Center's twenty-fifth birthday. Many, many seminars have passed since Ned Landsman fielded questions at the first Philadelphia Center seminar in 1978. The years since have witnessed scores of scholarly debates on Friday afternoons, followed by the Center's signature social hour (at which all academic debate was to give way to good fellowship). Since I came to the Center in the summer of 1994, I have been struck by the learning opportunities available to those attending these seminars. Releasing some of the outstanding scholarship from those events makes this scholarship available to a much wider audience in a permanent format.

The new title of the journal coincides with the start of the Center's partnership with the University of Pennsylvania Press to produce Early American Studies. Penn Press's excellent production standards are evident in the Early American Studies book series that Kathleen Brown and Daniel Richter edit. We are excited by the possibilities that this partnership opens up for the journal and its contributors.

The final change to note is the expanded source of the essays for this volume. When first conceived, the McNeil journal was seen as an outlet for the impressive work presented at the Center's Friday seminars. This issue and those that follow come from that series, as well as other McNeil Center programs, including the "Salon" hosted by Michael Zuckerman, the Center Summer Series, conferences, and other programs.

Many thanks are due to those who contributed to the production of this first issue of Early American Studies. Dan Richter, whose constant good humor is perhaps surpassed only by his good judgment, found funds for our expanded publication schedule, negotiated publication contracts, assessed articles, listened to a weary editor, and offered consistently excellent counsel on all aspects of production. His assistant, Amy Baxter Bellamy, shouldered many of the production duties in the transition from one publisher to another. At Penn Press, Eric Halpern, Erica Ginsburg, and Christopher Jack have provided greatly appreciated help in every aspect of this production. The outstanding illustrations in this volume were supplied with the assistance of Margarettha Talerman of the American Swedish Historical Museum, Susan Newton of Winterthur Museum, John Pollock of the University of Pennsylvania's special collections library, and the staffs of the Moravian Archives, American Philosophical Society Library,New-York Historical Society, Boston Public Library, American Antiquarian Society, Huntington Library, and the University of Arkansas Archives. Judy Van Buskirk took time from completing her own book to offer much-appreciated advice to the editor. The Center's editorial board did the first work of this volume, selecting the essays that would appear and then mentoring authors through the initial editorial process.

Finally, my thanks go to William Pencak. My coeditor in each of the volumes of Explorations in Early American Culture, Bill planned to retire from editorial work, both for this publication and Pennsylvania History, as he began his plans for a sabbatical year at the Huntington Library. I am deeply grateful that he has agreed to stay on as senior consulting editor for Early American Studies. His experience in editing and publishing and his...