Seventeenth Annual Omohundro Institute Conference (review)

Building on the approach that Omohundro director Ron Hoffman has encouraged over the past several years, the seventeenth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture not only provided its participants with important new work in early American history but drew on its regional location. This year it had a special focus on the Huguenot immigrants who first settled that part of the Hudson Valley. The conference opened Thursday evening, June 16, with a walking tour that led participants down historic Huguenot Street. The tour helped to set the scene (literally and figuratively) for the conference, and was bookended by a plenary on the final day entitled "Reconsidering New York and the New Nation."

Any successful conference depends not only on the intriguing nature of the papers presented but on the depth and range of questions they inspire and the animated nature of the exchange that follows. While we were not able to review every panel (since the program boasted up to four sessions at a time during the first two days), we hope what follows will give a flavor of the lively discussions and the diverse topics explored throughout the conference.

Beginning early Friday morning, a series of papers plunged participants into topics as diverse as law and the American Revolution, circuits of scientific and medical knowledge in Anglophone America, the Dutch Atlantic, and conflicts between Cherokee and European cultures. The panel on law and the American Revolution, with papers by Tim Milford and Dan Hulsebosch, conveyed the extent to which American politics was immersed in international concerns: the law of nations constrained decisions, alliances, and choices, even at the highest level. The "English and the Enslaved" panel (with papers by Claire Gherini, Jessica Wolcott Luther, and Sara Georgini) encouraged participants to consider how our explorations of the terms "science" and "race" have shifted over the past decade. As commentator Sara Gronim noted, whereas once we would have bracketed the word "science" while using the word "race" without multiple qualifiers, the discourse seems to have shifted to stabilize science in its diverse historical contexts, while transforming race into a "mutually incoherent" term that requires extensive explanation and interpretation. These themes were picked up in a panel on the destabilizing effects of the slave trade, which featured papers by Greg O'Malley, Justin Pope, and John Barrington. O'Malley argued that the slave trade was an exception to mercantilism; not shaped by empire, it exemplified free trade. Justin Pope challenged existing explanations for slave uprisings in the mid-eighteenth century by using statistical analysis to argue that they cannot be simply connected to the growth of the slave trade and the newly enslaved, but rather to complex cultural issues (which came out more fully in the question period). Barrington used a Benedict Anderson-inspired approach to argue that South Carolina planters celebrated freedom in their newspapers (despite their large number of slaves for sale) in the decades before the Revolution.

Indeed, slavery was a subtheme of the conference, even if it was not extensively used in the Hudson Valley. A Saturday morning panel featured papers by Caitlin Fitz, Molly Warsh, and Wendy Warren that raised issues of race and slavery. They variously argued that economics and culture cannot be locally contained. Warren, for example, maintained that slavery was much more integrated into the economy of early New England in that some merchants had plantations in the West Indies and were simply practicing an early version of keeping their businesses offshore.

The discussion in these sessions helped to remind speakers and spectators about the complex historiographical foundations on which our current scholarship rests. For example, David Waldstreicher offered a historiographical challenge to both panelists and audience members during the discussion of how visual and print media shaped the Revolution (featuring papers by Joseph Adelman and Zara Anishanslin). Waldstreicher pointed to the shifts in scholarly dialogue that alternately privileged visual versus print culture, highlighting what he termed a "crisis of representation...