Mission Statement

Insurrect! is an online publication devoted to anti-colonial frameworks and critiques of racial capitalism in Early American Studies.

Insurrect! publishes writing related to the historical and cultural legacies of colonialism in the Americas and Atlantic World, broadly defined. Our publications confront colonial violence, capitalism, and white supremacy in the present, and honor the legacy of anti-colonial movements in the history of the Americas. Insurrect follows the paradigm shifts of Black Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Disability Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Queer Theory, and serves as a resource for activists and educators who recognize that the historical and material conditions of the present are untenable. We prioritize the work of early career scholars or precarious scholars.

Insurrect! is committed to an unblinking confrontation with the power relations of settler mythmaking. For this reason, this publication centers Black and Indigenous liberation as anchored deep in the past. As the organizers and writers of Insurrect!, we recognize that activists and scholars have been writing and theorizing anti-colonial histories of the early Americas since the beginnings of European imperialism and settler colonialism in the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. In short, we are—by far—not the first writers to elevate these ideas; however, we find it necessary to hold up Black and Indigenous liberation frameworks as an intervention into the more formal academic field of Early American Studies. 

Early American Studies has long been a prop for white nationalist fantasies of the United States as an imperialist project. For generations, literary scholars and historians have reproduced teleological stories of empire: that it was inevitable Indigenous peoples would lose their lands and cultures when confronted by European settlers, that slavery was an aberration or departure from modern “liberal” mores destined to win in the end, that the American imperialist settlements were established as progressive cities on a hill, and that American history could only have resulted in the rise of the United States as a global hegemon. In our current moment, the future of early American history and literary studies is threatened by austerity and colonial hagiographies, inside and outside of the academy. This blog is therefore not just for academics, but for a public eager for radical change in historical writing about the Americas. 

Insurrect! understands the history of African and Indigenous slavery in the Americas as both the crux upon which all threads of American history converge, but also as a history that fundamentally shapes how we read, write, and think in the present. The writing published here is an amicus brief in movements for justice; in sum, we offer revitalized ways of confronting the institutions and historiography that perpetuate violence and inequality in our present.

FAQs

  • “Insurrect!” is a call to action against racist, sexist, and imperialist power in the Americas. We must confront these power relations in the history we write, in our conversations with family and friends, in our organizing communities, and in our classrooms, departments, and research centers. Insurrect! provokes writers and readers to understand insurrection, with all its uncivil connotations and its suggestion of pent-up rage, as a necessary condition for justice, and of change in general. It is finally a directive, encouraging all of us—including the co-organizers of this publication—to translate our writing, teaching, and theorizing into action.

  • To produce ethical and robust accounts of our past, Insurrect!’s model of Early American Studies eschews narrow methodological boundaries and the formal models of academic gatekeeping. The strongest possible challenge to the conservatism of the archive and of the academy is one that is accessible and wide in its scope and in its perspectives; as well as one that does not arbitrarily believe the words, records, and justifications set down by literate colonizers and enslavers over the epistemologies and memories passed down in oral traditions. We embrace methodologies that foreground historically marginalized communities, and recognize that many academic tools and resources are designed for a limited audience. We envision a possible future for Early American Studies in which there is little to no room to rehearse the biographies of colonizers, in which a public demonstration to tear down a colonizer’s monument is more powerful—and more relevant as history-writing—than a conference panel in a hotel attended by a handful of gatekeepers.

  • Insurrect! is for students and teachers seeking new primary sources, new avenues of research, and new motivations for the pursuit of that research in the first place. It is also for activists, writers, and thinkers outside of the formal channels of the education system who see the material conditions of their everyday lives shaped by the oppression of the past. Americans are hungry for a history that can help them understand the material realities of the present: this publication offers one possible answer to that need.

  • Insurrect! publishes pieces on a rolling basis, with exceptions made for roundtables highlighting a particular issue. In order to make sure we can keep to our publishing schedule, we ask that you as a contributing writer have a draft submitted to the editors by the date set by them. You can expect the editorial process to take about a month or so, depending on the scope of the piece.

  • The content on this website and blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The details of the license are explained here.

    We encourage readers to share work that appears on Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies widely and to use it in their classrooms with attribution. If you use Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies’ posts in your scholarly work, please cite it using the citation style most appropriate for your field. Most citation guides provide instructions for how to cite blogs and websites. We have provided some common examples and links to citation guides below.

    CHICAGO

    Footnotes:
    1. Author’s First name, Author’s Last Name, “Post Title,” Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, Month Day, Year of Post, URL.

    Bibliography:
    Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. http://insurrecthistory.org.

    MLA

    Author’ Last Name, Author’s First Name, “Post title.” Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. Date Month Year. Web. Date Accessed (URL).

    APA

    Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies. (Year, Month Date). Title of Post [Blog post]. URL.

    If you have any questions please contact us before publishing at insurrect.history@gmail.com

Submit to Insurrect!

Style Guide

  • Essays: Typically 1,000-1,500 words, essays take up a personal, professional, or political topic relating to anti-racist and anti-colonialist topics in Early American Studies, broadly conceived. Open to lengthier essays that make a clear case for the length.

    Comments: Typically 300-500 words, comments are shorter essays that draw connections between current events and early America or reviews of books, television, or other media done in a rigorous but publicly-orientated style.

    Primary Source Pedagogy Essays: Typically 500-1000 words, these submissions will approach a primary source, database, or small collection of primary sources through the lens of critical pedagogy. Such essays can be aimed at any level of educator and designed to expand the way that early American studies are taught.

    Other formats will be accepted at the discretion of the editorial team. Please do not hesitate to suggest new genres of writing that may align with our mission.

  • Below are general guidelines to keep in mind before submitting your writing to Insurrect!.

    • All pieces of writing should be aimed at a larger audience, beyond just the academy. Strive to be accessible in language and tone. We encourage a more informal tone than would be found in a standard academic journal. 

    • Please submit complete drafts. They will undergo editing, and therefore do not need to be perfect, but they should be finished and proofread for spelling and grammar.

    • Avoid footnotes and endnotes, unless it is absolutely necessary. Insurrect! relies mainly on hyperlinks for in-text citation. Include as many links as possible before submission. Please attribute sources generously.

    • If appropriate, include recommended reading suggestions to accompany your piece at the bottom of your draft.

    • Make sure you have secured image permissions for any images you are using.

    • Attach any images to the submissions email, do not embed them in the text. Please make sure the image is high resolution (300 pixels per inch) and copyright friendly.

    • Submit your draft as an attached .doc / .docx word document, or as a linked google doc. The submissions editor will create a new google doc file for your draft in Insurrect!’s google drive before sending it along to the editorial team. Any edits that you make in the review process after submission will happen subsequently in this google doc.

    Below are specific guidelines to keep in mind before submitting your writing for Insurrect!.

    References

    You are responsible for giving proper attribution to other’s work and ideas

    • Hyperlinks should be used to provide supporting material or context for people, places, historical events, developing news stories etc. that do not fit or relate specifically to the piece at hand.

    • The external webpages that you link to are up to you. During the editing process, we may ask that additional links be included, or the editors might add them at their discretion.

    • If you cannot find an internet source for your quotation and a direct quote is necessary, use Chicago style footnotes.

    Headlines

    You are welcome to suggest a title for your piece, but editors will make the final decision.

    Style

    We use American English standards of spelling.

     General Punctuation & Formatting

    • Do not double space after periods

    • Do not indent paragraphs

    • Lines should be single spaced

    Dates & Periods

    • Write out numerical dates for centuries (e.g.- twentieth century instead of 20th)

    • Use an American style date: Month, Day, Year.

    Quotations

    • Use double quotes for direct quotes and the titles of poems, journal articles, short stories.

    • Use double quotes for emphasis on individual words.

    • Only use single quotes for quotations within larger quotations.

    • Punctuation should go inside quotations marks (there are some exceptions and are up to the editor).

    Numbers

    • Spell out whole numbers longer than two words – i.e. two hundred, 265, one.

    • Do not spell out percents of any value, use numbers (e.g. 50% not fifty-percent).

    Abbreviations

    Use AP style for abbreviations for measurements, states, countries, etc.

    Insurrect! is always italicized.

    Language and Terms to Avoid

     Diversity in authors and readers is important to us. We respect the profession, race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity of our readership, and we ask that authors keep that in mind.

    • We encourage the use of the singular They where applicable as well as all appropriate pronouns for subjects.

    • Avoid using any ableist language.

    •  Avoid using categorical terms to describe people. Instead of “slave,” use “enslaved person.” Instead of “the homeless,” use “homeless people.”

    • Avoid writing about Native people in very broad categories, and use language that emphasizes sovereignty (e.g. The Hidatsa woman, Sacagawea — instead of, The Indigenous woman, Sacagawea).

    • Avoid colonialist language around exploration, discovery, conquest, examination when discussing the analysis of archival artifacts or sources. Insurrect! follows the guidelines of Black and Indigenous scholars and capitalizes Black and Indigenous.

    A Note on Generative AI tools

    Insurrect! does not accept writing that was completed with the help of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, as such text generators are notorious for historical inaccuracies, plagiarism, and misinformation. We expect our writers to cite their sources and to develop their writing through their own human labor and critical thinking without AI. We also do not accept AI generated images as header images, and encourage writers to find copyright friendly images that are historically aligned with their writing.

  • Though Insurrect! is not formally peer-reviewed, we do engage in a thorough editing process of all submissions with our editorial team to make the process as beneficial to the author as possible and maintain a consistent style across the publication. The best way to facilitate this process is to gain a familiarity with past pieces, or to read pieces from the online publications found on recommended resources page to get a sense of structure, argument, and tone.

    Once you turn in a draft to your editor, don’t make any changes until you get it back from them. One of our editors will make a first pass for “Development.”  This is a structural edit, and might consist of moving paragraphs, comments about the argument or the structure, or questions about evidence. Writers will revise from this first developmental edit before moving on to a “Line” edit, which checks for style, clarity, and grammar. Writers may revise again based on this edit, but editors will usually just change things like clunky sentence structure in text or historical fact checking. Please try not to revise outside the parameters of the edit- for example, don’t make major structural changes at the line edit stage. The final edit is a copy edit, which is proofreading for typos and other mistakes. Writers do not revise on a copy edit.

    Be advised, we do not make changes after publication except in extreme circumstances to correct facts. We will do our very best to ensure that your piece goes live with no typos, but they do happen. There’s no need to email us about typos after publication.

    Finally, if a draft has been in the editorial stage for upwards of 6 months, we reserve the right to pull the piece for the sake of keeping our editorial pipelines open.

    Using Google Docs

    We use Google Docs to revise submissions collaboratively. It helps us keep track of versions and changes, and makes documents accessible across our whole organization.

    • If you do send your first draft as a google doc, enable editing permissions for your editor. You can do this by sharing directly with them, or by sending a link with editing permissions turned on.

    •  You’ll need to make all revisions and changes directly into the Google Doc. Do not copy and paste new versions from your own word processor! This makes it impossible for us to track versions and changes.

    • Editors will use the comment feature to leave you notes and suggestions. You can reply to comments or leave your own. There’s also a chat function where all users of a document can talk. Editors will make line edits directly in the text, which will be saved in the version history. You should do the same when making your own revisions.

Our Team

Managing Editors:

  • Marisa Budlong, Historic Deerfield

  • Lila O’Leary Chambers, Cambridge University

  • Elise Mitchell, Swarthmore College

  • Fallon Murphy, Boston University

  • Ittai Orr, University of Michigan

  • Elizabeth Polcha, Drexel University

  • Alanna Prince, Northeastern University

Editorial Team Members:

  • Laura McCoy, Northwestern University

  • Efren M. Lopez, San Diego State University, Imperial Valley

  • Amanda Kong, University of California, Davis

  • Bradley Craig, Boston University

  • Adam McNeil, Rutgers University

  • Janine Yorimoto Boldt, Chazen Museum of Art

  • Kimberly Takahata, Villanova University

  • Christofer Rodelo, University of California, Irvine

  • Gabriela Valenzuela, University of California, Los Angeles