For 2026: New Republic, New Worlds
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We hope you join us for the fifth and final meeting in the “For 2026” series, a collaborative effort by Colonial Williamsburg, the Omohundro Institute, and William and Mary to spotlight emerging research, connect a diverse public to scholars and research, and convene significant conversations about how and why understanding the early American past is especially meaningful today.
This year, in addition to two days of panels on a wide variety of topics, special guided tours, and evening receptions, we will feature a Friday keynote talk by award-winning scholar Ronald Angelo Johnson (Baylor University)—“Slavery and Black Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic World”—and a Saturday keynote talk—“The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations”—by Pulitzer Prize Winner Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Tickets are $50 and include all events and receptions.
Learn more and register here: https://vastearly.am/4xTg9Kx
Program
Friday, October 23
Roundtable: “New Methods and Challenges in Communicating the Revolution”
Christopher Minty (University of Virginia)
James Risk (University of South Carolina), “Bringing the New Republic to Life: Role-Play to
Increase Student Engagement in Legislatively Mandated Founding Documents Courses”
Alisha Topete Cromwell (Georgia Gwinnett College), “"Black" and "White" as Catachresis:
Artificial Intelligence, Raciolinguistics, and American Slavery Scholarship”
RevEd Session: “Beyond the Anniversary: Building Lasting Public Engagement Through Teacher Professional Learning”
Mark Hofer (William and Mary) and other discussants TBA
Slate Seminar Session: “Following Freedom’s Trail in the New Republic: Tracing the Descendants of Bray School Scholars Isaac, Joanna, and Clara Bee from Williamsburg to Wisconsin”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
Keaton Drennan (Menokin, a National Historic Landmark)
“Revolutionary Promises, Gendered Realities: Black Women and the Family in Postrevolutionary America”
Scott Heerman (Omohundro Institute/William and Mary)
Laura Nelson (Princeton University), “Held Together on Paper: Black Women, Family, and the Limits of Gradual Abolition Law in Pennsylvania”
Taylor Brookins (University of Delaware), “Products and Casualties of the Gradual Abolition Regime: Black Women, Racial Capitalism, and the Lived Realities of Gradual Abolition in New Jersey”
Taylor Garrison (William and Mary), “‘Sold to satisfy her’: The Extralegal Possibilities of
Enslaved Family Maintenance, 1800-1865”
“The Power of the Word”
Donald Johnson (North Dakota State University)
Kevin Murphy (SUNY Stony Brook), “‘Interest’ and the Gradual Decline of Sworn Bond the Early Republic”
Susannah Haury, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, “‘Reminding North Carolina of Her Ancient Promise’: Militia Families and Legacy Formation in the Postwar Southern Backcountry”
Richard Tomczak (Stony Brook University), “LeBlanc and Bellivau: Two Acadian Prisoners of
War and Their Escape Back to Quebec, 1777-1778”
RevEd Session: “After 250: Legacies of George Washington”
Wendy Wright (Mount Vernon)
Morgan Smith (ICPS)
Slate Seminar Session: “Preserving The Reservation: Place, Memory, and the Descendant Community”
Johnette Gordon-Weaver (Descendant Community Member)
Mary Lassiter (Descendant Community Member)
Rosa E. Lee (Descendant Community Member)
Stephanie M. Dunmore (Descendant Community Member)
Molly Robinson (William and Mary)
Taylor Jones (William and Mary)
“Statistics of Bondage: Enumerating Populations in the Post-Revolutionary Atlantic”
Ronald A. Johnson (Baylor University)
Nathaniel C. Green (Northern Virginia Community College), “‘Unless These Data Are False, or Unless Figures Will Lie, the Conclusion Must be True’: The Census and the Slave Power”
Meagan Wierda (Université de Montréal), “To Count and Be Counted: Antebellum Black Activism, the Census, and Civic Epistemologies and Ontologies of Quantification”
John Balz (University of Wisconsin Madison), “‘…they watch what others are doing and imitate those actions’: A New Data History to the Study of Slavery on St. Croix using a Moravian
Church Register”
“Print, Printers, and the Early Republic”
Jordan Taylor (Colonial Williamsburg)
Jennifer Merriman (William and Mary), “The Saur Family after the American Revolution: The Transformation of a German-American Printing Dynasty”
Mark J. Noonan (City Tech CUNY), “Irish Ink and American Exile: Rekindling the Spirit of ’76 and ’98 in the Early Republic”
Kaitlin Tonti (Raritan Valley Community College), “The White Woman's Gaze and Early Republic Hierarchies in the Poetry of Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin”
RevEd Session: “Building a City: Revolutionary Experiments in Place-Based Learning”
Cece D’Arville (The Valentine)
Sam Futrell (William and Mary)
Slate Seminar Session: “WandM Bray School Lab Student Thought Partners: Life in the Lab”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
A Talk by Ronald Angelo Johnson (Baylor University)
“Slavery and Black Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic World”
Saturday, October 24
Mississippi Valley
Christopher Hodson (Brigham Young University)
Susan Gaunt Stearns (University of Mississippi), “What Happened in Natchez Stays in Natchez: Crossing the Line in the Spanish-American Borderlands, 1780-1796”
Kent Peacock (Creole Heritage Center and Northwestern State University of Louisiana),
“Louisiana Creole Patriots?: Revolutionary-Era Creole Lives and Contemporary
Commemoration”
Justin Pope (Missouri University of Science and Technology),
“The French Uprising on the Mississippi During the Revolutionary War, 1778-1785”
“Researching and Re-Interpreting the Era of the American Revolution: Collaborative Projects with William and Mary’s National Institute of American History and Democracy (NIAHD) Faculty and Students”
Julie Richter (Director of NIAHD)
Sarah E. McCartney (NIAHD)
Robyn Schroeder (NIAHD)
Roundtable: “Local Government: Changes and Continuities through the Founding Era”
Gabriel Loiacono (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh)
Daniel Dostie (Temple University)
Dillon L. Streifeneder (United States Naval Academy)
William P. Tatum III (County Historian, Dutchess County, New York)
Carolyn Zola (California State University, East Bay)
RevEd Session: “It’s Revolutionary! A multiplicity of access points to Revolutionary (or any) times. Plus, a how to and what not to.”
Sally Causey Bloom (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)
Jessica Pratt (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)
Slate Seminar Session: “Documenting the New Republic: Preserving Community History in Special Collections”
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
Jay Gaidmore (William and Mary Special Collections Research Center)
Daniel Sunshine (William and Mary Special Collections Research Center)
“Governance, Credit, and Nation after the American Revolution”
Patrick Callaway (University of Maine, Presque Isle), “Learning the Wrong Lessons from Revolution: Jefferson, Madison, and the Problems of Economic Coercion as Political Policy 1806-1812”
Donovan Fifield (University of South Carolina), “Public Credit, Land Speculation, and Merchant Power in the Early American Republic”
Timothy Milford (St. John’s University, New York), “Capital Intrigues: Liberal Imperialism, the Spanish Colonies, and Anglo-American Enterprise”
Roundtable: “Crossing Currents: New Ways of Exploring Transatlantic Biographies of Black Loyalist Women”
Alexandra Montgomery (George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon)
Justin Iverson (Public Historian, Department of Defense)
Shantelle Vanterpool (Mixed Media Artist, Shoemaker)
Stephanie M. Dunmore (Project Manager, Digital Systems Transformation Project at the Historic First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA)
Akindele Decker (Heritage Consultant, Genealogist, Public Historian)
“Indigenous Reconfigurations at the Edge of the Early Republic, 1781-1801”
Samantha Seeley (University of Richmond)
Russell J. Arbic (McGill University), “One Nation Under Bowles: Cherokee-Creek Diplomacy
in the Aftermath of the American Revolution”
Edward P. Green (University of Oklahoma), “Making Peace, Building a Nation, and Facing the
Future: The Choctaw Nation, 1780-1801”
Lucas P. Kelley (Valparaiso University), “Nickajack: Native Sovereignty, Settler Memory, and
the Exaggerated Destruction of an Eighteenth-Century Cherokee Town”
Alec Zuercher Reichardt (University of Missouri), “Remaking the Eastern Door: Haudenosaunee
Diplomacy and Spatiality from Grand River and Buffalo Creek, 1783-1795”
RevEd Session: “Peopling the American Revolution: Building Connection and Historical Empathy in the Classroom”
Catherine VanDyke (Jamestown Yorktown Foundation)
Emily Koch (National Park Service)
Anne Marie Baker (Jamestown Yorktown Foundation)
Slate Seminar Session: “Bray School Descendants in a New World”
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
Frances Green (Colonial Williamsburg, Descendant Community Member)
“Memories and Responses: the Black Postwar Experience”
Serena Zabin (Carleton College)
William Brewster Morgan (Indiana University), “Revolutionary Belonging: Land, Family, and Citizenship in New England”
Ervin L. Jordan (University of Virginia Libraries), “Echoes of Silence: Voices of Revolutionary War Black Virginians”
Andrew Wehrman (Central Michigan University), “The Gravedigger's Tale: How Scipio Gray
Challenged New York’s Medicine and its Politics”
Andrew Lawler (Independent Scholar), “Exiled from the Land of Liberty: The African American Diaspora at the Revolution’s End”
“Indigenous Challenges to the New Republic”
Joshua Piker (William and Mary/Omohundro Institute)
T. Wyatt Reynolds (Columbia University), “We Hold These Truths Against You: Indigenous Claims on the American Revolution in the Early Republic”
Joanne Jahnke-Wegner (University of Wisconsin Eau Claire), “Dematriation in Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Women During the Sullivan Campaign in 1779 and Beyond”
Zoie Horecny (The George Washington Presidential Library At Mount Vernon), “George Washington’s Southern Tour: Reflections of the Revolution in the Early Republic”
Roundtable: “Publishing the Revolution in 2026: New Books on the American
Revolution”
Katherine Carté (Southern Methodist University)
Richard Bell (University of Maryland)
Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Travis Glasson (Temple University)
Ronald A. Johnson (Baylor University)
RevEd Session: “Teaching the Founding at 250: Engaging Students Through Inquiry and Digital Resources”
Lindsey Horner (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Jessica Johns (Gloucester County Schools)
Joe Schmidt (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Heather Nice (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Slate Seminar Session: “Bray School Lab Five Years Later: Listening and Learning to Move Forward”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
A Talk by Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
“The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations”
This year, in addition to two days of panels on a wide variety of topics, special guided tours, and evening receptions, we will feature a Friday keynote talk by award-winning scholar Ronald Angelo Johnson (Baylor University)—“Slavery and Black Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic World”—and a Saturday keynote talk—“The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations”—by Pulitzer Prize Winner Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Tickets are $50 and include all events and receptions.
Learn more and register here: https://vastearly.am/4xTg9Kx
Program
Friday, October 23
Roundtable: “New Methods and Challenges in Communicating the Revolution”
Christopher Minty (University of Virginia)
James Risk (University of South Carolina), “Bringing the New Republic to Life: Role-Play to
Increase Student Engagement in Legislatively Mandated Founding Documents Courses”
Alisha Topete Cromwell (Georgia Gwinnett College), “"Black" and "White" as Catachresis:
Artificial Intelligence, Raciolinguistics, and American Slavery Scholarship”
RevEd Session: “Beyond the Anniversary: Building Lasting Public Engagement Through Teacher Professional Learning”
Mark Hofer (William and Mary) and other discussants TBA
Slate Seminar Session: “Following Freedom’s Trail in the New Republic: Tracing the Descendants of Bray School Scholars Isaac, Joanna, and Clara Bee from Williamsburg to Wisconsin”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
Keaton Drennan (Menokin, a National Historic Landmark)
“Revolutionary Promises, Gendered Realities: Black Women and the Family in Postrevolutionary America”
Scott Heerman (Omohundro Institute/William and Mary)
Laura Nelson (Princeton University), “Held Together on Paper: Black Women, Family, and the Limits of Gradual Abolition Law in Pennsylvania”
Taylor Brookins (University of Delaware), “Products and Casualties of the Gradual Abolition Regime: Black Women, Racial Capitalism, and the Lived Realities of Gradual Abolition in New Jersey”
Taylor Garrison (William and Mary), “‘Sold to satisfy her’: The Extralegal Possibilities of
Enslaved Family Maintenance, 1800-1865”
“The Power of the Word”
Donald Johnson (North Dakota State University)
Kevin Murphy (SUNY Stony Brook), “‘Interest’ and the Gradual Decline of Sworn Bond the Early Republic”
Susannah Haury, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, “‘Reminding North Carolina of Her Ancient Promise’: Militia Families and Legacy Formation in the Postwar Southern Backcountry”
Richard Tomczak (Stony Brook University), “LeBlanc and Bellivau: Two Acadian Prisoners of
War and Their Escape Back to Quebec, 1777-1778”
RevEd Session: “After 250: Legacies of George Washington”
Wendy Wright (Mount Vernon)
Morgan Smith (ICPS)
Slate Seminar Session: “Preserving The Reservation: Place, Memory, and the Descendant Community”
Johnette Gordon-Weaver (Descendant Community Member)
Mary Lassiter (Descendant Community Member)
Rosa E. Lee (Descendant Community Member)
Stephanie M. Dunmore (Descendant Community Member)
Molly Robinson (William and Mary)
Taylor Jones (William and Mary)
“Statistics of Bondage: Enumerating Populations in the Post-Revolutionary Atlantic”
Ronald A. Johnson (Baylor University)
Nathaniel C. Green (Northern Virginia Community College), “‘Unless These Data Are False, or Unless Figures Will Lie, the Conclusion Must be True’: The Census and the Slave Power”
Meagan Wierda (Université de Montréal), “To Count and Be Counted: Antebellum Black Activism, the Census, and Civic Epistemologies and Ontologies of Quantification”
John Balz (University of Wisconsin Madison), “‘…they watch what others are doing and imitate those actions’: A New Data History to the Study of Slavery on St. Croix using a Moravian
Church Register”
“Print, Printers, and the Early Republic”
Jordan Taylor (Colonial Williamsburg)
Jennifer Merriman (William and Mary), “The Saur Family after the American Revolution: The Transformation of a German-American Printing Dynasty”
Mark J. Noonan (City Tech CUNY), “Irish Ink and American Exile: Rekindling the Spirit of ’76 and ’98 in the Early Republic”
Kaitlin Tonti (Raritan Valley Community College), “The White Woman's Gaze and Early Republic Hierarchies in the Poetry of Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin”
RevEd Session: “Building a City: Revolutionary Experiments in Place-Based Learning”
Cece D’Arville (The Valentine)
Sam Futrell (William and Mary)
Slate Seminar Session: “WandM Bray School Lab Student Thought Partners: Life in the Lab”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
A Talk by Ronald Angelo Johnson (Baylor University)
“Slavery and Black Freedom in the Revolutionary Atlantic World”
Saturday, October 24
Mississippi Valley
Christopher Hodson (Brigham Young University)
Susan Gaunt Stearns (University of Mississippi), “What Happened in Natchez Stays in Natchez: Crossing the Line in the Spanish-American Borderlands, 1780-1796”
Kent Peacock (Creole Heritage Center and Northwestern State University of Louisiana),
“Louisiana Creole Patriots?: Revolutionary-Era Creole Lives and Contemporary
Commemoration”
Justin Pope (Missouri University of Science and Technology),
“The French Uprising on the Mississippi During the Revolutionary War, 1778-1785”
“Researching and Re-Interpreting the Era of the American Revolution: Collaborative Projects with William and Mary’s National Institute of American History and Democracy (NIAHD) Faculty and Students”
Julie Richter (Director of NIAHD)
Sarah E. McCartney (NIAHD)
Robyn Schroeder (NIAHD)
Roundtable: “Local Government: Changes and Continuities through the Founding Era”
Gabriel Loiacono (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh)
Daniel Dostie (Temple University)
Dillon L. Streifeneder (United States Naval Academy)
William P. Tatum III (County Historian, Dutchess County, New York)
Carolyn Zola (California State University, East Bay)
RevEd Session: “It’s Revolutionary! A multiplicity of access points to Revolutionary (or any) times. Plus, a how to and what not to.”
Sally Causey Bloom (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)
Jessica Pratt (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources)
Slate Seminar Session: “Documenting the New Republic: Preserving Community History in Special Collections”
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
Jay Gaidmore (William and Mary Special Collections Research Center)
Daniel Sunshine (William and Mary Special Collections Research Center)
“Governance, Credit, and Nation after the American Revolution”
Patrick Callaway (University of Maine, Presque Isle), “Learning the Wrong Lessons from Revolution: Jefferson, Madison, and the Problems of Economic Coercion as Political Policy 1806-1812”
Donovan Fifield (University of South Carolina), “Public Credit, Land Speculation, and Merchant Power in the Early American Republic”
Timothy Milford (St. John’s University, New York), “Capital Intrigues: Liberal Imperialism, the Spanish Colonies, and Anglo-American Enterprise”
Roundtable: “Crossing Currents: New Ways of Exploring Transatlantic Biographies of Black Loyalist Women”
Alexandra Montgomery (George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon)
Justin Iverson (Public Historian, Department of Defense)
Shantelle Vanterpool (Mixed Media Artist, Shoemaker)
Stephanie M. Dunmore (Project Manager, Digital Systems Transformation Project at the Historic First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA)
Akindele Decker (Heritage Consultant, Genealogist, Public Historian)
“Indigenous Reconfigurations at the Edge of the Early Republic, 1781-1801”
Samantha Seeley (University of Richmond)
Russell J. Arbic (McGill University), “One Nation Under Bowles: Cherokee-Creek Diplomacy
in the Aftermath of the American Revolution”
Edward P. Green (University of Oklahoma), “Making Peace, Building a Nation, and Facing the
Future: The Choctaw Nation, 1780-1801”
Lucas P. Kelley (Valparaiso University), “Nickajack: Native Sovereignty, Settler Memory, and
the Exaggerated Destruction of an Eighteenth-Century Cherokee Town”
Alec Zuercher Reichardt (University of Missouri), “Remaking the Eastern Door: Haudenosaunee
Diplomacy and Spatiality from Grand River and Buffalo Creek, 1783-1795”
RevEd Session: “Peopling the American Revolution: Building Connection and Historical Empathy in the Classroom”
Catherine VanDyke (Jamestown Yorktown Foundation)
Emily Koch (National Park Service)
Anne Marie Baker (Jamestown Yorktown Foundation)
Slate Seminar Session: “Bray School Descendants in a New World”
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
Frances Green (Colonial Williamsburg, Descendant Community Member)
“Memories and Responses: the Black Postwar Experience”
Serena Zabin (Carleton College)
William Brewster Morgan (Indiana University), “Revolutionary Belonging: Land, Family, and Citizenship in New England”
Ervin L. Jordan (University of Virginia Libraries), “Echoes of Silence: Voices of Revolutionary War Black Virginians”
Andrew Wehrman (Central Michigan University), “The Gravedigger's Tale: How Scipio Gray
Challenged New York’s Medicine and its Politics”
Andrew Lawler (Independent Scholar), “Exiled from the Land of Liberty: The African American Diaspora at the Revolution’s End”
“Indigenous Challenges to the New Republic”
Joshua Piker (William and Mary/Omohundro Institute)
T. Wyatt Reynolds (Columbia University), “We Hold These Truths Against You: Indigenous Claims on the American Revolution in the Early Republic”
Joanne Jahnke-Wegner (University of Wisconsin Eau Claire), “Dematriation in Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Women During the Sullivan Campaign in 1779 and Beyond”
Zoie Horecny (The George Washington Presidential Library At Mount Vernon), “George Washington’s Southern Tour: Reflections of the Revolution in the Early Republic”
Roundtable: “Publishing the Revolution in 2026: New Books on the American
Revolution”
Katherine Carté (Southern Methodist University)
Richard Bell (University of Maryland)
Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Travis Glasson (Temple University)
Ronald A. Johnson (Baylor University)
RevEd Session: “Teaching the Founding at 250: Engaging Students Through Inquiry and Digital Resources”
Lindsey Horner (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Jessica Johns (Gloucester County Schools)
Joe Schmidt (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Heather Nice (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
Slate Seminar Session: “Bray School Lab Five Years Later: Listening and Learning to Move Forward”
Elizabeth Drembus (William and Mary Bray School Lab)
Tonia Cansler (LoneStar College, Descendant Community Member)
A Talk by Kathleen DuVal (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
“The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations”
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Where is it happening?
William & Mary School of Education, 301 Monticello Ave,Williamsburg,VA,United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherOmohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
