Building a Common Place

In the past decade, and especially in the last few years, critics have complained again and again about the gap between the history historians write and the history the public wants to read. And the complaint is not without cause. Even as academic and trade presses have been forced to cut back their history lists and bookstores stock fewer and fewer scholarly titles, millions of Americans eagerly tune their televisions to A&E's Biography series and PBS's Antiques Roadshow, not to mention flocking to theatres to watch Mel Gibson's ponytail bob as he rides his horse through the swamps of South Carolina in The Patriot.

No one doubts that a gap exists, but what's to be done about it? Beginning this September, an innovative solution will be offered in the form of a new web journal, Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life (www.common-place.org). Common-Place aims to embrace both scholars and the public by building a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-Place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. Common-Place is a common place for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life--from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. And it's a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic films; and in popular culture.

Each issue of Common-Place consists of several Features, well-crafted essays based on original scholarship, investigative reporting, or reflections on the historian's craft; Reviews of recent scholarly books, historical novels, dramatic and documentary films, and interpretive websites; and five regular columns: Talk of the Past, commentary on recent stories about early American history that have made it onto the evening news; Ask the Author, in which prominent, award-winning authors answer probing questions about their work; The Common School, in which a schoolteacher tells of a particularly inspiring or troubling classroom experience; Object Lessons, in which a museum curator tours a new exhibit or ponders a curatorial issue; and Tales from the Vault, in which an archivist leafs through a repository's recent acquisitions or wrestles with an archival problem. Finally, a central place on the site is reserved for The Republic of Letters, an on-line message board system where readers can reply to Common-Place contributors, and to one another.

Common-Place's eclectic, accessible content will be well illustrated with its inaugural issue this September. Features will include literary and cultural historian Scott Casper's meditation comparing Edmund Morris' Dutch to Parson Weems' Life of Washington; as well as an excerpt from Michael Bellisles' new book, Arming America (Knopf, 2000), arguing that early Americans owned precious few guns and cared about them even less; and a roundtable discussion of Fred Anderson's Crucible of War (Knopf, 1999). Among the Reviews, James Kloppenberg will evaluate Jon Butler's provocative new synthesis, Becoming America (Harvard, 2000), and, in Common-Place's regular columns, Richard Slotkin answers a question posed by Ask the Author editor John Demos: "What can you do as a novelist that you can't as an historian--and vice versa?" while Richard and Irene Quenzler Brown will share the riveting tale of their work tracking down a case of incest in Tales from the Vault. Meanwhile, high school teacher Peter Laipson examines the challenges of teaching gender to young teenagers in The Common School and Alice Nash's Object Lesson takes readers on a tour of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.

Common-Place is the brainchild of Editors Jill Lepore (Boston University) and Jane Kamensky (Brandeis University) and is overseen by a thirty-three member Editorial Board consisting of academics, filmmakers, journalists, secondary school teachers, and museum professionals, including Gordon Wood (Brown), Gary Nash (UCLA), Margaret Drain (the American Experience), Philip Morgan (William and Mary), and Robert Archibald (Missouri Historical Society). It is funded by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts and the Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York, and receives additional support from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the John Nicholas Brown Center, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Organization of American Historians.

Readers--as well as potential contributors--should look for the first issue September 1, at <http://www.common-place.org/>.