Editor’s Page

Yearly Shearly Shindig, New York Style

Just a couple of days after Hogmanay, on Saturday, January 3, 2009, the King Juan Carlos I Center at New York University was the venue for our latest annual AHA fete generously hosted by NYU’s Department of History and cosponsored by the Friends of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the JER’s publisher, Penn Press. When the last guests departed the 6:00–7:30 p.m. affair around 10 p.m. (now that’s what I call a SHEAR shindig!) everyone agreed that the packed house of SHEARites of all ages had had a braw time, but that it was particularly gratifying to see so many young early Americanists in attendance. Whether our esteemed president, Paul Gilje, treated the company to samples of the primary source material from his current project, “To Swear Like A Sailor: Cursing in the American Age of Sail,” remains shrouded in mystery—you know the rule, what happens in Juan Carlos, stays in Juan Carlos—but damn, he’s good. Next year the good times will be rolling in San Diego.

Shear in Springfield

Ah, yes, yet again ’tis the time to laud one of the benefits of membership enjoyed by you, the programmatically advantaged! Get a jump on booking the highlight event of your summer because, hermetically sealed along with this issue of the JER, is your copy of the program for the 2009 SHEAR conference to be held in the land of Lincoln from July 16 to 19. Local Arrangements Committee Chair Tom Schwartz of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is working hard with his team to ensure yet another superb SHEAR conference and, as you can see, the Program Committee under Jim Huston of Oklahoma State University’s chairmanship have put together quite the intellectual feast. Bon appetit; see you in the heartland.

Kudos

Heartiest congratulations to SHEAR stalwart and 2006–2008 Advisory Committee Member, Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University, who won the 2008 National Book Award’s nonfiction category for her study of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). The National Book Foundation committee of Marie Arana (Chair), Farah Jasmine Griffin, Russell Jacoby, Megan Marshall, and Kevin Starr rated Annette’s book the best of the staggering 540 titles they considered, and issued the following citation:

In the mesmerizing narrative of Annette Gordon-Reed’s American family saga, one feels the steady accretion of convincing argument: Her book is at once a painstaking history of slavery, an unflinching gaze at the ways it has defined us, and a humane exploration of lives—grand and humble—that “our peculiar institution” conjoined. This is more than the story of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave Sally Hemings; it is a deeply moral and keenly intelligent probe of the harsh yet all-too-human world they inhabited and the bloodline they share.

Check out the video of the award ceremony including Annette’s eloquent acceptance speech at http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2008_nf_gordon_reed.html .

So that’s a 2008 Grand Slam for prominent SHEARites—Dan Walker Howe’s Pulitzer and now Annette’s National Book Award. Nae bad for the little organization that could, and an affirmation, I think, not just of quality of our colleagues’ scholarship, but also of the importance and centrality of the early republic to our understanding of our past and ourselves.