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           C    O    M    M    O    N    -    P    L    A    C    E
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              http://www.common-place.org/     September 1, 2000
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   What happens to history in the hands of Hollywood?  What happens to a
   presidency in the hands of a biographer?  Does blending fact and fiction
   ever add up to truth?  At Common-place (www.common-place.org), a new web
   journal launched today, you can find out what historians think of The
   Patriot, how George Washington's first biographer shaped his legacy, and
   how historical novelists work.  Created to bridge the gap between what
   academic historians write and what the public wants to read,
   Common-place brings together historians and history buffs, high school
   teachers and archivists, collectors and college students, to explore and
   exchange ideas about American history.  It promises to change how
   Americans think about their past.

   An elegantly designed, sophisticated, and literary website, Common-place
   is a common place for all sorts of people to learn about
   pre-twentieth-century American life and culture--from architecture to
   literature, from politics to parlor manners.   Its essays and reviews,
   along with its on-line discussion board, provide a forum for examining
   the story of America as it is told not only in history books and college
   classrooms but also in newspapers, museums, historical societies,
   popular culture, documentary and dramatic films and on television and
   radio. Because Common-place is committed to the principle that everyone
   deserves to learn from cutting-edge thinkers--and that those thinkers
   will themselves learn from being in contact with readers and writers of
   every stripe--subscription is free and available to anyone who uses the
   web.

   Each issue of Common-place includes several Features, lively,
   well-crafted essays based on original scholarship, investigative
   reporting, or reflections on historical practice; Reviews of recent
   scholarly books, historical novels, dramatic and documentary films, and
   interpretive websites; Talk of the Past, commentary on stories about
   American history in the daily news; Ask the Author, in which prominent,
   award-winning authors answer probing questions about their work; The
   Common School, where schoolteachers tell of particularly inspiring or
   unsettling classroom experiences and seek feedback from readers; Object
   Lessons, a place where museum professionals and scholars tour new
   exhibits or ponder curatorial issues; and Tales from the Vault, in which
   archivists leaf through recent acquisitions or wrestle with archival
   problems. The site's most intriguing feature is something like early
   American town pump-sites and pubs, coffeehouses and tea-tables: The
   Republic of Letters capitalizes on the latest in web technology to
   create an easily accessible community of ideals and ideas where readers
   participate in ongoing conversations with contributors and with one
   another. Designed by John McCoy, senior designer for Public  Interactive
   and freelance print and web designer for McCoy Design
   (http://www.mccoy.pair.com/), Common-place offers readers an easy, fun
   way to read about and contribute to history on the web.

   September's inaugural issue excerpts Emory University historian Michael
   Bellesiles' new book, Arming America (Knopf, 2000), in which he argues
   that, contrary to popular myth (and NRA rhetoric) early Americans owned
   precious few guns and cared about them even less.  The first issue also
   includes University of Nevada literary historian Scott Casper's
   meditation comparing Edmund Morris's Dutch, his controversial biography
   of Ronald Reagan, to early American biographer Parson Weems' Life of
   Washington. In its commitment to dialogue, September's Common-place
   presents a roundtable discussion of University of Colorado historian
   Fred Anderson's Crucible of War (Knopf, 1999), his radical new history
   of the Seven Years' War. In Ask the Author, National Book Award finalist
   and Yale historian John Demos asks Wesleyan University historian and
   novelist Richard Slotkin: "What can you do as a novelist that you can't
   as an historian - and vice versa?" University of Connecticut professors
   Richard and Irene Quenzler Brown share their tale of tracking down an
   1805 case of incest in Tales from the Vault. In The Common School,
   Concord Academy high school teacher Peter Laipson writes about the
   challenges he has faced teaching the concept of "gender" to young teens.
   And University of Massachusetts historian Alice Nash takes readers on a
   tour of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Ledyard, Connecticut, for
   Common-place's column, Object Lessons. Finally, in Talk of the Past,
   Common-place editor and Bancroft Prize-winner Jill Lepore compares the
   recently-released Hollywood blockbuster The Patriot with the PBS/BBC
   documentary, The 1900 House.

   Common-place was founded and is edited by Lepore (Boston University) and
   Jane Kamensky (Brandeis University), who oversee a thirty-three-member
   editorial board of academics, filmmakers, journalists, secondary school
   teachers, and museum professionals. Charter members include Gordon Wood
   (Brown University), Gary Nash (University of California, Los Angeles),
   Margaret Drain (PBS's The American Experience), Philip Morgan (William
   and Mary), Laurie Kahn-Leavitt (Blueberry Hill Productions), Laurel
   Ulrich (Harvard University), and Robert Archibald (Missouri Historical
   Society).  Common-place will be published quarterly, in September,
   January, April and June.  Future issues will feature in-depth coverage
   of current approaches to American slavery, an investigation of the
   controversy over the 9,000-year-old remains of "Kennewick Man," and
   Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and historian Molly McCarthy's expose
   of eBay and its impact on private and public collecting. Common-place is
   funded by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, and the
   Gilder Lehrman Institute in New York. It 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.

For more information about Common-place, please contact Editors Jill Lepore
([log in to unmask]) and
Jane Kamensky ([log in to unmask]) or Publicity Director Catherine
Corman ([log in to unmask]).


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Booth, Charles
Email: [log in to unmask]
"University of the West of England"




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