Indeed, early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years. This deeper history of salt shaped space, relations, and power dynamics during the eighteenth century in ways both explicit and obscure.

Rather than seeking to extinguish the humanity of its victims, slavery rather invests in, and relies upon, their human capacity for suffering.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production.

Before we move forward, it is a good time to look back on the history of Commonplace and its place in digital humanities over the last two decades.

We are excited to share some Commonplace news! New update! As of May 26, 2021, we are not accepting any more applications for the editorial position or the editorial board. Thank you so much.

In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial.

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals.

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 […]