I love New Years. I know the January 1 “start” of the new year is an arbitrary date, but I still love how new years mean new beginnings. A chance to set new goals and start fresh.

2023 marks a BIG new beginning for me and a new phase in my career. In a few days, I will begin a new job at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as its Founding Director of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios. My directive: Build a team and oversee the creation of the digital content needed for Colonial Williamsburg’s virtual museum dedicated to early American history. It’s a BIG task! And one I am wicked excited to undertake.

a GOOD FIT FOR NEW CHALLENGES

I like to build things. I like to generate ideas, plan out their construction, build the infrastructure I need to execute the idea, and iterate until execution is as close to perfect as I can get it (I’m a high-achiever, not a perfectionist). I love getting my “hands dirty” to create something new and useful. As the Founding Director of CW Innovation Studios, I’ll get to do a lot of creation and help build a team of historians who I can support and mentor by facilitating their creative and public history work too.

I also like to connect with people. History is about people. It tells us who we are, how we came to be who we are, and provides direction for how we can build a better future by avoiding mistakes and actions that did not work in the past. Like the early historians of the United States, I believe history has the power to bring Americans together by showing them how diverse peoples with diverse experiences interacted and intermixed and worked to forge something new in North America. Early America and its study is key to understanding who we are as Americans.

Working to build a digital museum that helps us better understand the complexities of the United States’ origins and the ideas, actions, experiments, and iterations that went into creating the complex nation and populace we have today is a dream come true. My new work will continue to marry early American history and civics education.

A NEW PLACE TO INNOVATE

What drew me to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) is its vision for the future. So that the future may learn from the past, the CWF wants to build on its impressive reputation and deeds as a museum to lead in digital and virtual experiences that help people all over the world, as well as across the United States, better understand early American history and how that history is integral to the present we inhabit and experience today.

In essence, the CWF wants me to scale and expand the digital public history work I’ve been doing for more than 8 years with Ben Franklin’s World. It would like me to oversee the creation of new podcasts, video programs, video games, augmented and virtual reality experiences, and so much more! We will be building digital tools to help expand visitors’ in-person visits to Colonial Williamsburg, and digital programs that will help those who cannot visit Williamsburg come to appreciate, experience, and better understand early America and the foundations of the United States. Where the in-person experience will remain about Williamsburg, Virginia and its contributions to the American Revolution, the virtual museum will focus on Vast Early America and how nearly four centuries of history across a global landscape helped shape and bring forth the experiences and ideas that shaped North America and what would become the early United States.

A NEW ADVENTURE

To undertake this amazing opportunity and new phase of my career, I need to embark on another new beginning and adventure in 2023: I need to relocate. In mid-March, my family and I will leave my home in Boston and New England and relocate to Williamsburg, Virginia. Although I’m sad to leave my home, I’ve also done this before when I moved to Pennsylvania, California, and New York State over the course of 12 years in the early 2000s. In each new region, I immersed myself in its culture. I plan to do the same in Virginia. I’ve never lived in the south and as a Boston-born, New Hampshire-raised New Englander, I have some ideas about southern culture that may not be accurate. I look forward to learning the truth of southern ways and making new friends.

GRATITUDE

I am excited about my new beginning, new work, and new adventure. I’m grateful to the Omohundro Institute (OI) and my colleagues there for teaching me the basics of how history nonprofits and scholarly publishers work. I am also grateful for my colleagues Karin Wulf, who gave me the opportunity to work for and learn from the OI and who continues to teach me a lot about the “business-side of history,” and Joseph Adelman, who, along with Karin, is one of the best collaborative partners a historian can have. My colleague Holly White is a godsend who does more than you know behind-the-scenes of Ben Franklin’s World to help keep the podcast on schedule.

Thankfully, my new job does not mean an end to my collaborations with these three colleagues. Holly is coming with me to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to continue our important work with Ben Franklin’s World and to partake in this new adventure. And Joe, Karin, and I have a new collaborative project: the Historians.Social Mastodon Community. It’s a social media community for working and learning about history. To meet our goals for this community and to ensure its long-term sustainability, we found it necessary to create a new nonprofit organization, Clio Digital Media.

More on Clio Digital Media and Historians.Social in a future post. One of the goals I’ve set for 2023 is to blog at least quarterly.