In my writing

When writing introductions and annotations for the historical readings that appear on this website, I follow these guidelines:

• I favor the term indigenous over Native American prior to the passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. In all cases, however, I prefer to identify indigenous people by their tribal identities.

• To sidestep the problem of how to render the term Latino gender-inclusive, I use Hispanic. I prefer, however, to identify Hispanic people by a more specific nationality (Mexican, Puerto Rican, etc.).

• In cases of dispute over whether or not to capitalize a term, I favor lowercase. Hence, for example, I favor British empire (not British Empire), pope (not Pope unless it is a title immediately preceding a name), evangelical (not Evangelical), indigenous (not Indigenous), and black (not Black). I capitalize racial or ethnic labels that are derived from place names (African American); I do not capitalize colors used as racial labels (black, white).

I favor lowercase in part because I’ve observed that when identity labels such as evangelical, indigenous, or black shift from lowercase to capitalized, those shifts are often accompanied by essentializing tendencies. Witness, for example, the Associated Press’s announcement that it would henceforth capitalize Black to convey “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community,” or the New York Times‘s explanation that it would capitalize Black but not white because “white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does.” I’m aware of the argument that capitalizing identity labels can denaturalize those invented identities. But capitalization can do the opposite as well—as it does, in fact, in the two examples just quoted.

Language around identity is prone to contention, frequently framed in absolutist terms. As a teacher, I try to cultivate among my students a sense that these disputes are complex and that people of goodwill can adopt different usages for defensible reasons. I tell my students that they should feel free to employ their own thoughtful, good-faith preferences when it comes to identity language, most especially when it comes to their own identities. By the same token, I hope they will be open-minded and tolerant when I employ different usages in the service of the intellectual work that I’m trying to accomplish.

In the historical readings

When preparing the historical documents that appear on this website, I aim to maximize their readability for students. The older a document is, the more it will diverge from modern conventions of spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and typography—and thus the more difficult it will be to read. I therefore edit the documents to bring them more in line with modern conventions. I also regularize inconsistent usage within documents, correct grammatical or spelling errors in the sources, and even emend particularly difficult syntax. I provide a summary at the end of each document of the editorial changes I’ve made. However, I usually do not signal these kinds of changes in the text itself—I don’t enclose them in square brackets—in order to avoid textual clutter, which would make these documents difficult to read in a different way.

To wit: These are edited versions of historical documents, created for particular teaching purposes, not transcriptions suitable for research purposes. For those who wish to see the original documents, I provide bibliographic citations and, where possible, links to digital scans of the sources.

• Because I created this website with US students in mind, I apply American spellings to historical documents that used British ones.

• For the sake of readability, I prefer to minimize capitalization in the edited documents. The closer we get to the present day, though, the more likely I am to defer to a source publication’s usage when it comes to capitalizing such things as divine pronouns, religious terminology, officers or institutions, or identity labels (including racial labels) that historically have been lowercase. The farther back in time we go, the more likely I am to downcase such terms when capitalized in the source, since the more likely I am to be making other editorial changes as well to modernize those documents. Again, I note at the end of each document if such changes have been made.

• If a historical document surprises me with a usage that seems more characteristic of the 21st century than the past—such as consistently capitalizing Black or Pagan in an 18th- or 19th-century text that capitalizes sparingly—I tend to retain the surprising usage.

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