Daniel Chester French is America's best-known sculptor of public monuments, having created the statue for the Lincoln Memorial, the John Harvard statue, and The Minute Man in Concord. This new biography combines rich personal details from French's life with a nuanced study of his artistic evolution. It explores French’s diligent dedication to perfecting his craft with beautiful archival photographs of his life and work.

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 the years before the Civil War, Boston was at the forefront of numerous American radical and reform movements. At the same time, the city was also a site of contestation over which reforms should take priority. Although these tensions could at times grow heated, this talk examines the ways that the relationship between the abolitionist and the early labor (or “social reform”) movements in Boston was marked by conversation and cooperation as much as competition, revealing an overlap of personnel and ideas that in many ways grew stronger as the country headed towards an irrepressible conflict over slavery.”  

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.

Crowd control technologies—turnstiles, bleachers, stanchions, and seats—channel bodies through the spaces of cultural performance: theater, music, and sport. The increasing rationalization and standardization of crowd control in the early 20th century corresponds with a critical and popular understanding of crowds as dangerous and destabilizing. This paper mines archival evidence to show how industrial-age crowd control was framed as technology that ordered masses (into lines or rows), thereby rendering masses orderly (cooperative, docile, and non-threatening).

The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come 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.

The rise of the Religious Right has coincided with the privatization movement in public schools. While some may feel that this is coincidental, there is reason to believe there is a directly causal relationship between these two factors. Two scholars, from different disciplines, will discuss how their work comes together to help explain the history and current state of efforts to diminish, if not dismantle, the American public education system. Katherine Stewart has written on the rise and increasing power of the Religious Right in her book The Power Worshipers. She will be joined by Diane Ravitch who has written extensively on education and, in her recent book Slaying Goliath, explores the history of the school privatization movement and the efforts to oppose it.

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 1745, a group of New England volunteers who called themselves Patriots launched an expedition against the French fortress of Louisbourg, in present-day Nova Scotia. Who were these “Patriots”? What did they want with Louisbourg? And what can this incident tell us about British imperial politics in the mid-eighteenth century? This expedition reveals that the British Empire was dividing on sharp partisan lines in the 1740s, laying the groundwork for the revolutionary decades to come.

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.

Paul Szep, a two-time Pulitzer Prize and Thomas Nast Prize winning editorial cartoonist and New York Times best-selling author William Martin will discuss their careers. They will focus on Szep’s time as the Chief Editorial Cartoonist at The Boston Globe from 1967 – 2001 and a look at how the field of political cartoons has changed. Szep has been described as a pioneering cartoonist with “scathing wit and a drawing style that turns editorial cartoons into pieces of art.” Martin has written eleven novels, many of which are set in and around Boston and has been recognized with the New England Book Award and the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award.

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.

As the French abolitionist movement gathered momentum alongside the Revolution, Parisians could have seen hundreds of theatrical performances on themes related to race and slavery.  By contrast, the American stage grappled with the choice to perpetuate a slave system within a democracy.  Some performances hinted at slavery’s cruelty, some depicted newly-freed black characters living happily alongside whites, and others proposed returning blacks to the continent as the solution for a dilemma Thomas Jefferson described as holding “a wolf by the ears.”  This paper explores the black revolutionary figure on the U.S. and French stages during the last decade of the eighteenth century, as both nations struggled to put their principles of universal freedom into practice.  

The Pauline Maier Early American History 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.

The chain of green spaces and waterways that comprise the Emerald Necklace park system is an invaluable urban oasis. Described as “the lungs of the city” this parkland and its rivers and ponds clean the city air, provide habitats for birds and other wildlife, and greatly improve quality of life for Boston residents. Our panel will explore the past, present, and future of this urban wild, beginning with Olmsted’s vision, through the lens of social equity and environmental justice.

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.

This panel discussion considers the queer histories of two modern institutions: colleges and prisons. Marc Stein explores how activists at more than twenty colleges went to court in the 1970s to challenge their institutions’ refusal to recognize LGBT student groups. Stein’s paper analyzes these cases and situates the successful litigation at Virginia Commonwealth University in relation to contemporaneous Virginia rulings that upheld the criminalization of same-sex sodomy and the prosecution of an interracial threesome. Ashley Ruderman-Looff’s essay considers the Lavender Scare's impact on women's prison reform. Her essay tells the story of Dr. Miriam Van Waters, a superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women who was dismissed from her post in 1949. This paper analyzes Van Waters’ subversive use of the Rorschach inkblot test, allowing her to eschew homosexual diagnosis and include queer women in the reformatory’s rehabilitative programs.

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to come 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.

In recent history, the question of what to do with monuments--particularly those of Confederate origins--has become a source of contentious debate. The City of Boston only possessed one such monument on Georges Island, however, it was removed in 2017. Does this mean that Boston no longer possesses any problematic statues? In the words of Boston Globe journalist Ty Burr, “Are Boston’s statues honoring all the right men?” And, who gets to decide?

Join Eleanor Citron, MHS’s summer intern, for a virtual tour of Metro Boston’s monuments--from those championed by the city, to those beheaded or uprooted, and things in between.

Join us for the opening session of the virtual 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, "'Shall Not Be Denied': The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications." MHS President Catherine Allgor will give opening remarks at 2:00pm

The first of five conference sessions, "Biographies of Suffrage Champions" will begin at 2:30pm. This panel discussion will consider three pre-circulated essays: Ellen DuBois's “Frederick Douglass & Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Thomas Dublin's “The Changing Shape of the Black Women Suffrage Movement, 1870-1920," and N. Lynn Eckhert's “The Role of African American and Women Physicians in Voting Rights in America.”

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email for each session containing Zoom log-in information as well as instructions for accessing conference papers. Please register for each conference session you would like to attend. Learn more about the full conference. The events are free and open to everyone.

This is the second session of the virtual 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, "'Shall Not Be Denied': The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications."

This panel discussion will consider three pre-circulated essays: Helene Quanquin's “Troubling Marriage: Abby Kelley and Stephen S. Foster and the Fifteenth Amendment,” Carol Faulkner's “Suffrage and the Specter of Interracial Marriage,” and Jessica Derleth's “Marital Unity Through the Franchise: Suffragists’ Manipulation of Gender and Marriage Norms.”

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email for each session containing Zoom log-in information as well as instructions for accessing conference papers. Please register for each conference session you would like to attend. Learn more about the full conference. The events are free and open to everyone.

A People's Guide to Greater Boston reveals the region’s richness and vibrancy in ways that are neglected by traditional area guidebooks and obscured by many tourist destinations. It highlights tales of the places and people involved in movements to abolish slavery; to end war and militarism; to achieve Native sovereignty, racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation; and to secure workers’ rights. This one-of-a-kind guide points the way to a radically democratic Greater Boston, one that sparks social and environmental justice and inclusivity for all.

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.

This is the third session of the virtual 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, "'Shall Not Be Denied': The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications."

This panel discussion will consider three pre-circulated essays: Silvana R. Siddali's “African American Suffrage, Western State Constitutions, and the Fifteenth Amendment,” Sunu Kodumthara's “Oklahoma, the 19th Amendment, and the ‘Threat’ of Racial Equality,” and Laura R. Prieto's “Still Subjects, Not Sovereigns: The Nineteenth Amendment and American Empire in the Philippines.”

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email for each session containing Zoom log-in information as well as instructions for accessing conference papers. Please register for each conference session you would like to attend. Learn more about the full conference. The events are free and open to everyone.

This is the fourth session of the virtual 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, "'Shall Not Be Denied': The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications."

This panel discussion will consider four pre-circulated essays: Corinne T. Field's “Turning Ridicule into Respect: Old Women and Leadership in the Long Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1850-1920,” Nicole Etcheson's “‘When Women Do Military Duty’: Women Suffrage and the Civil War Era,” Kara W. Swanson's, “Inventing Voters: Ability, Patents, and Civil Rights, 1870-1920,” and Rabia S. Belt's “Disability and the Struggle for Voting Rights.”

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email for each session containing Zoom log-in information as well as instructions for accessing conference papers. Please register for each conference session you would like to attend. Learn more about the full conference. The events are free and open to everyone.

Thomas Nast (1840-1902), pioneered American political cartooning. He created the Republican elephant and popularized the depiction of Santa Claus. Many prominent figures felt the sting of biting satire, including “Boss” Tweed of Tammany Hall. However, Nast's legacy also includes contradictions. He supported civil rights, the Union Army, and Black veterans, but also used offensive stereotypical images of black men and suggested that their votes were easily manipulated. Halloran and celebrated editorial cartoonist Bagley will speak about the life and legacy of Thomas Nast with a particular focus on his views on African American voting and on cartooning as a form of political commentary.

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.

This is the final session of the virtual 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, "'Shall Not Be Denied': The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of Their Ratifications."

This panel discussion will consider two pre-circulated essays: Adam H. Domby's “The Lost Cause and the 15th Amendment: Disenfranchisement and the Passage of the 19th Amendment,” and Elizabeth Katz's “Women’s Suffrage and the Right to Hold Public Office.” The session will be followed by concluding remarks given by Allison Lange, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Christian Samito, Boston University School of Law.

Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email for each session containing Zoom log-in information as well as instructions for accessing conference papers. Please register for each conference session you would like to attend. Learn more about the full conference. The events are free and open to everyone.

As migrants arrived in the United States after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the new nation balanced the economic potential of migration against domestic and international turmoil. Debates over regulation centered around potential disloyalty in the trans-Appalachian west, the environment of interstate competition, and foreign commercial interference. From these debates developed the first national migration policy codified when Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790.

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.

America has Hamilton-mania! Its crafty lyrics, hip-hop tunes, and big, bold story have rejuvenated interest in the real lives and true histories that Hamilton: the Musical puts center stage. In this talk, Dr. Richard Bell explores this musical phenomenon to reveal what its success tells us about the marriage of history and show-business. Bell will examine what the musical gets right and gets wrong about Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolution, and the birth of the United States. He will also discuss Hamilton’s cultural impact: what does its runaway success reveal about the stories we tell each other about who we are and about the nation we made?

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.

Join Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian for a look at our virtual exhibition Who Counts? A Look at Voter Rights through Political Cartoons.  Political cartoons have long served as provocateurs of public debate illustrating opinions of the day for the masses. Our show looks at how cartoons have explored two broad themes: efforts to expand access to voting and efforts to restrict access to voting. Illustrations explore voting as a civil right, women suffrage, and voting by mail as well as Gerrymandering, the Electoral College; and political corruption.

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.

After the US Civil War, white southerners claimed federal reimbursements for the value of freed slaves Federal lawmakers rejected these claims in the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, historians have long concluded that white southerners accepted uncompensated emancipation. Why did Americans forget these claims? This paper argues that white southerners abandoned them in the 1880s-1890s and rewrote history. They insisted that property in humans was “unprofitable,” and they did not need compensation after Confederate defeat. This narrative helped them reestablish political power and absolve themselves of four years of bloodshed and generations of enslavement. 

The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come 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.

The reputations of all of the founders have changed dramatically over the course of American history, none more than that of Thomas Jefferson. Historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf will discuss the implications of recent political and social developments for our image of the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing the importance of situating Jefferson in his own historical context for a better understanding of the history and future prospects of democracy in America.

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 1841, a dozen or so African American male youth aged twelve to sixteen established the Young Men’s Literary Society in Boston with the stated aim to promote intellectual growth. The very success of this endeavor laid bare the severe educational inequalities and inequities that African American youth faced in Boston’s public schools. In response, these youth organized for change. This paper traces their organizing efforts and describes how their skills in composition, penmanship, elocution, and the literary arts set the stage for the “overthrow of caste schools” in Boston in 1855.

The African American History 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.

Massachusetts has more house museums and historical organizations than most states twice our size. In recent years there’s been a national conversation about the sustainability of house museums. Our presenter argues that this widespread, mostly small class of museums vary tremendously. While many of our community-based historical organizations preserve and present their collections in historic houses, a house museum is something different. We will hear from three outstanding ones that are grappling with the usual challenges of audience engagement, preservation and interpretation.

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.

This paper brings a fresh perspective to the study of modern American environmental thought as well as modern American radicalism by exploring the significance of nature in the lives and writing of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, following a narrative arc from their formative years in different parts of the Italian countryside to their final years as dedicated revolutionaries confined to Massachusetts prisons.

The Environmental History 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.

The New England Biography Series begins with a discussion of three recent biographies, published during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we know from the months of uncertainty we’ve all lived through so far, there are lessons about persistence, resistance and resilience to be learned from looking at the past. Tufts University professor Julie Dobrow, author of After Emily, will chair a panel featuring Nicholas Basbanes (Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Kimberly Hamlin (Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener) and John Loughery (Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century) to explore how their subjects prevailed in times of personal tragedy and public dissent, and how the authors learned to apply the lessons of their subjects to their own trials and travails as writers.

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.

Massachusetts is a famously literary culture. At the birth of the house museum movement in the late 19th century, authors’ houses were among the first to be preserved, notably John Greenleaf Whittier and now others like Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and more. We will explore three outstanding authors’ houses and how they grapple with the challenges of audience engagement, preservation and interpretation.

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.

Historian Michelle Marchetti Coughlin explores the life of Plymouth Colony First Lady Penelope Pelham Winslow, a woman of influence during the eventful years of Plymouth's existence, through wartime and the end of its independence. Tracking fragmentary records and traces of Penelope Winslow's material world, Coughlin illuminates the story of a long-forgotten historical figure and offers fresh insight into the experiences of women in early New England.

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.

This project combines digital history methods with theories from critical archive studies to explore the intersection of data, power, documentation and violence in antebellum Virginia. It explores these issues through a history of the First African Baptist Church (FABC) in Richmond, Virginia, which, in the years before the American Civil War, was a religious space open to both free and enslaved people of color, and simultaneously a site of surveillance and violence. This project combines quantitative analysis, interactive visualization and traditional historical narrative in order to tell the history of the FABC in new ways.

The Digital History Projects Seminar at the MHS 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.

Most of our 351 towns have a community-based historical organization. Many are volunteer-run. Collectively, they present and preserve the stuff and stories that make up our history - usually with an emphasis on local art, industries, and material culture. William Hosley has criss-crossed Massachusetts visiting them in every corner of the state, from Adams to Andover, Northampton to Nantucket. We will hear from three of what he calls gems - house museums and historicals with amazing stuff and stories, that fly a bit under the radar. They too are grappling with the usual challenges of audience engagement, preservation, and interpretation.

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.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. Prof. Jennifer Van Horn investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. This presentation is the second annual lecture in honor of President Emeritus Dennis Fiori in recognition of his leadership. This lecture is made possible by gifts from friends of the Society.

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.

This panel brings together the work of two historians investigating the Caribbean. Casey Schmitt’s paper explores the intersection of warfare and human trafficking in the 17^th century. Unmet demand for enslaved labor in smaller markets coupled with near-constant warfare among major European powers in the region reinforced practices of raiding and captivity. Schmitt’s paper shows how the lure of seizing captives facilitated manning expeditions during wartime, and demonstrates the centrality of violence against enslaved communities to 17^th-century warfare. Carrington Farmer’s paper explores why New England emerged as a breeding ground for horses in the eighteenth century, and how it came to dominate the equine trade to the West Indies. Whilst some of the horses that crossed the Atlantic were riding horses, many were destined for “the slavery of the draught” toiling crushing sugar.

The Pauline Maier Early American History 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.

1864. A ship leaves its New England port carrying a USCT regiment to fight Confederates on the Louisiana front. But on the way, a showdown takes place when Pvt. John Green refuses his commanding officer's order to cut his hair, protesting that it was contrary to his religion. In the events that follow, a revealing picture of black self-assertion in the making of freedom emerges, one too often hidden by a Civil War master narrative. This paper tells John Green's story, and asks how we might look at emancipation differently when we view it through his dreadlocks.

The African American History 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.

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.

This panel considers the spatial and material worlds of Black women living in Antebellum America. Kelly Sharp’s work weaves together the thin documentary record with rich archaeological evidence to reconstruct the daily life and labor of women enslaved at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, SC. Her paper exemplifies how house museums are beginning to incorporate the story of bondpeople in an authentic and transparent manner. Alisha Hines’s essay examines how enslaved and free black women negotiated power and place in the antebellum steamboat world. 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.

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.