The New American Antiquarian

We're pleased to announce the publication of the fourth volume of The New American Antiquarian! Download the full volume, or read each article on our site here: naajournal.org/issues

Our website (naajournal.org) has been fully redesigned. Check it out 👀!

We encourage you to visit the newly redesigned naajournal.org to review our publications over the last three years. We enthusiastically welcome your participation in NAA’s mission, and we are always seeking contributions.

In a word, we will continue to be antiquarian, and we can offer this guarantee due to our independent publication model. Our support for the research enterprise of American history is not contingent on the support of those whose interest in the past extends only so far as its utility.

We will continue to be a venue for basic research on the entirety of hemispheric early America, regardless of how obscure or irrelevant its artifacts are to contemporary imperatives.

NAA remains committed to maximizing our factual understanding of early America through the empirical study and peer-reviewed publication of all its surviving evidence.

And its ascendance will mean fewer opportunities than ever for scholars whose work aims principally at the generation of new knowledge without special concern for that knowledge’s application in our present.

This project, in which history and historians are conscripted as inputs in the manufacturing of citizens, will necessarily be as riven with contradiction and omissions as it was in decades past.

American history will find significant support in this circumstance only to the extent that it can be applied to provide buttressing for the nation’s decayed scripts of citizen formation.

This trend will be further accelerated by a growing sense among Americans of the imminence of state failure in the United States and the hope that promoting national histories, of either conservative or revisionist varieties, can help stave off this failure.

The “patriotic” vision of history’s purpose is now federal doctrine. While future admins. may reject that vision's naïve substance, they are likely to respond to it by funding projects that serve to revise and rehabilitate popular understanding of the past for similar civic ends

It is clear which way the wind is blowing. In the wake of federal cuts, American university departments and historical institutions will face tremendous pressure to direct dwindling funds toward scholarship on the past that promotes republican citizenship and civic identity.

Today we issued a statement strongly disagreeing with recent decisions by the US government to defund basic research across academia. Full text here, and excerpts below, on what we believe is specifically at stake for early American scholarship. mailchi.mp/1ec180eae4d2...

The beta version of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) datb.cerl.org/estc/ is online. More changes to come over time

Thanks Mark!

ICYMI, our third issue was published this fall! Download the full issue or individual articles here: naajournal.org/issues/

We're very pleased to announce the publication of The New American Antiquarian 2 (Fall 2023). Now freely available for download at naajournal.org/issues