Common-Place Releases a New Issue

The American Antiquarian Society and the University of Connecticut have released the newest issue of the online journal of history, Common-Place.  The new issue asks us to consider the work of recovering lost stories and writing new histories.  Our Poetic Research column features a collection of reflections on the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the continued institutional resistance to acknowledging the horror of the event.  Jonathan Beecher Field takes Publix’s cheerful Thanksgiving salt & pepper shakers as an occasion to reflect on the buried memories of violence and chaos that mark American holiday celebrations, past and present.  A roundtable of scholars on the innovative digital Colored Conventions Project describes the difficult but exhilarating work of recovering nineteenth-century African American stories that have been neglected, and the need to avoid the biases that  helped to obscure them in the first place.  Martha J. Cutter shares new information about Henry “Box” Brown’s career as a street magician who would creatively re-enact his remarkable escape into freedom.   Michelle  Burnham describes her own discovery of the Pacific’s presence in the early American literature we’ve come to consider Atlantic production, Matthew R. Halley provides a first look at previously unstudied letters by John Audubon, and much more!  www.common-place.org is published by a partnership of the American Antiquarian Society and the University of Connecticut. Editors, Anna Mae Duane and Walt Woodward, University of Connecticut.