Events

New England is more seismically active than most would expect. Several notable earthquakes shook the northeast in the past, including those in 1638, 1663, 1727, 1755, and 1783. In early America, earthquakes were rare enough to be perceived as unusual events that…

Boston National Historical Park is one of America’s most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of 
visitors annually. Tourists flock to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere’s midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of…

Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois stands as one of the most groundbreaking books in American history. Scholars have acknowledged how the book, published in 1935, and Du Bois’s arguments in it, pioneered the study of Reconstruction today. This paper…

This panel discussion will consider two papers on the history of money from the mid-18th through the early 19th centuries. Katie Moore’s essay will examine the political, economic, and monetary preconditions that informed the colonial Massachusetts land bank "…

Please note this program has been postponed and will now take place May 5th. 

Join us for a special evening in which Professor of English Abram Van Engen will receive the 2021 Gomes Prize for City on a Hill: A History of American…

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era—but not about his love life. Poor Richard’s Women reveals the long-neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and…

Too often public history organizations have believed that there were not enough records to give voice to enslaved people and other underrepresented voices from America’s past. This program will feature three projects at historical organizations that have been able…

Join the current and former Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers to discuss the 1997 film Amistad. The film explores the history of the slave ship, Amistad, which set sail from Cuba to America in 1839. During the trip the enslaved people on board held an…

Against the enduring mystery of Phillis Wheatley’s African origin, this talk will address how the poet established bearings in a world far from her natal landscape. A Christian convert whose poems celebrate a spiritual journey from darkness to light, from perdition…

In 1911, civilian workers at the Army’s Watertown Arsenal struck against the arrival of management engineers with stopwatches, leading Congress to ban certain Taylorist methods in military and other federal workplaces. After three decades, however, the ban was…

At the end of the 1976 football season, more than forty Harvard athletes went to Boston's red light district to celebrate. In the city's adult entertainment district, drugs and prostitution ran rampant, violent crime was commonplace, and corrupt police turned the…

We confess: the idea came to us last October. Why not talk about the curious and creepy, eerie and inspiring enterprise of hunting up one’s subject’s final resting place? The NEBS steering committee members, Dobrow, Dykstra, and Marshall, all have stories to tell—…

Today, we remember this iconic American family as the vanguard of wealth, power, and style rather than as the descendants of poor immigrants. Neal Thompson introduces us to the…

This article examines efforts to quarantine people with AIDS during the mid-1980s. The campaign started after a PBS documentary aired about Fabian Bridges, a Black gay man, in 1986. Bridges lost his job and home after an AIDS diagnosis. As…

The Industri-Plex Superfund Site in Woburn, Massachusetts, now the site of a Target Superstore, has been hailed as a success story. Woburn played a pivotal role in creating, shaping, and reforming Superfund, formally known as the Comprehensive…

This paper investigates the transnational history of the feminist self-help handbook Our Bodies, Ourselves in the 1970s and 1980s. It follows sociologist Kathy Davis’s approach of investigating feminism as an epistemological project and examines from a history of…

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States saw a massive expansion of popular entertainment. Scholars have long pointed to the importance of this burgeoning industry, linking its products to the changing racial dynamics, gender relations, and…

On November 6, 1931, Juliette Derricotte was killed in a car accident just outside of Dalton, Georgia. Although the thirty-four-old social reformer survived the initial collision, she later succumbed to her injuries because the local hospital did not treat African…

How did Black abolitionists engage the meaning of higher learning at a time when American colleges were financially and intellectually tied to the political economy of Atlantic slavery? This paper will focus on Black abolitionist thought on higher learning and its…

Driven by the strong conviction that water resources needed to be managed, controlled, and used in a rational manner, fears about not being able to meet present and future water needs triggered and justified the proliferation of large water infrastructure projects…

This dissertation chapter examines newspaper advice columnists as resources for queer Americans. From the early 1960s onward, columnists like Abigail Van Buren, Ann Landers, and Helen Bottel elevated queer voices to millions of readers. Within the context of the…

The House Act of 1949 famously promised “a decent home…for every American family.” But this was just a goal, not a right of citizenship. This paper revisits the debates that culminated in the 1949 Act to argue that it was the piecemeal liberalization of mortgage…

The Dartmouth Digital History Initiative (DDHI) is an open-source digital humanities project developing new ways of exploring oral history archives. In this paper, we discuss tools and methods developed since the project’s…

 In-Person Event
Fairmont Copley Plaza
138 St. James Ave. | Boston

5:30 pm
Sponsor Reception with Heather Cox Richardson

Award-winning scholar Daniel K. Richter is one of the most prolific historians working on Native American and Early American history. More than just serving as a premier academic as the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of…

Join us for a special evening in which Professor of English Abram Van Engen will receive the 2021 Gomes Prize for City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Van Engen will join historian Adrian Weimer to discuss the stories often told about the…

In the 1920s, amid fears that American national identity was under threat from communism, pacifism, and immigration, nationalist organizations in the United States standardized many of the patriotic rituals and traditions Americans performed in their daily lives.…