Editors’ Note

This joint issue, “Writing To and From the Revolution,” is the product of a two-year collaboration with the William and Mary Quarterly aimed at reconsidering the ways in which the American Revolution served as a watershed separating the colonial and national periods and, by extension, much of the scholarship in the WMQ from that in the JER. We began with a series of questions: How and why does it matter that many of us still write to or from the Revolution? Are there better ways to conceptualize change and continuity? How has writing to or from the Revolution shaped the ways in which we have written about the Revolution itself ? Taken together, the essays collected in the two journals help us to see the American Revolution in new ways while pushing us to think about the implications of writing to or from the Revolution. The special issue’s introduction and conclusion, written by Alan S. Taylor and Serena Zabin, respectively, are published in the WMQ and the JER, but the journals contain different rosters of articles. This structure enables us to provide readers with more content and a wider range of perspectives. But we hope that it also encourages scholars rooted on one side of Revolution or the other to read across both journals.

“Writing To and From the Revolution” would not have been possible without the generous support of multiple institutions and individuals. We are deeply grateful for the financial support provided by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage and the Department of History at the University of Oklahoma; and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. We are especially indebted to Douglas Bradburn, Founding Director of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon, whose generosity made possible a two-day manuscript workshop, which he and his excellent staff hosted in the library. Workshop participants included—in addition to the authors published in the joint issue—Bradburn, Frank Cogliano, Edward Gray, Patrick Griffin, Barbara Krauthamer, and Mark Peterson. We are grateful to them for the energy and expertise that they brought to the conversation.

Articles in the William and Mary Quarterly issue of “Writing To and From the Revolution”:

Revolution in the Quarterly?

A Historiographical Analysis

Michael A. McDonnell and David Waldstreicher

Atlantic Cultures and the Age of Revolution

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Writing Women’s History Through the Revolution: Family Finances, Letter Writing, and

Conceptions of Marriage

Sara T. Damiano

Independence and Interdependence:

The American Revolution and the Problem of Postcolonial Nationhood, circa 1802

Eliga Gould

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