Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions and argues that the shift from state-regulated banks and private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

Free and enslaved Black women have been rendered nearly invisible in the historical and
popular imagination of the antebellum steamboat world. This essay examines how enslaved and free Black women negotiated power and place in this environment that was fraught with danger, but also brimming with opportunity. Hines argues that Black women who were unmoored from plantation landscapes by way of the western rivers trouble prevailing tropes of gendered mobility and immobility that pervade scholarship on slavery in the United States

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

All are welcome to join us for this FREE virtual event!

Lights and gatherings are an especially meaningful symbol of hope, celebration, warmth, and remembrance for many at this time of year. In this historic presidential election year, be inspired through an exploration of how the holidays come alive at the White House.

Dr. Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, will discuss the tradition of Hanukkah celebrations at the White House.

Stewart McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association, will discuss the 2020 White House Christmas ornament commemorating President John F. Kennedy.

As an added bonus, the 2020 White House ornament will be available to purchase at a discount from December 1 to 10. Details will be sent with event registration confirmation.

View the invitation:

Images: U.S. Army LTC Rabbi Shmuel Felzenberg lights the Menorah during a Hanukkah reception Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.). 2020 White House Christmas ornament.

When the Confederacy faced mounting military setbacks from 1864 to the end of the war, the Confederate government worked to advance the boundaries of warfare far beyond the South—and even beyond the United States. Lake Erie appealed to the Confederacy because the Union prison, Johnson’s Island, was located there and housed Confederate officers. There were plots planned and carried out by the Confederacy to release prisoners and use them as the force needed to attack the Union from the opposite direction—the North.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

Americans have been telling two very different stories about the Pilgrims. One is the tale of brave religious refugees who established Thanksgiving and democracy in the New England wilderness. The other is the story of unscrupulous invaders who betrayed their Indian allies, stole their land, and went to war against them. John G. Turner narrates a more complex history in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, tracing the contested meanings of liberty – and slavery – in the seven-decade history of Plymouth Colony.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

In Cross of Snow, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work--the soul--of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Charles Sumner. Highlighting research materials from the MHS archive, Basbanes will frame Longfellow’s life and work in the context of 19th century literary Boston.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

In 1791, a group of elite Bostonian men established the first historical society in the nation. With in-depth research and an expansive scope, Alea Henle offers a vital account of the formation of historical culture and consciousness in the early United States, re-centering in the record groups long marginalized from the national memory. These societies laid the groundwork for professional practices that are still embraced today: collection policies, distinctions between preservation of textual and nontextual artifacts, publication programs, historical rituals and commemorations, and more. At the same time, officers of these early societies faced challenges to their historical authority from communities interested in preserving a broader range of materials and documenting more inclusive histories, including fellow members, popular historians, white women, and peoples of color.