The origins and development of copyright practices in the eighteenth century were at once a local, national, and imperial project. While literary property itself was limited to English soil — and English citizens — across the Atlantic a group of colonial and Indigenous Americans sought to establish an alternative legal regime with substantial political ramifications, ramifications that reverberated in the debates over intellectual property in the early national and antebellum periods.

One hundred years ago, upper class Boston-area residents spent summers in Rivermoor on Third Cliff in Scituate. They included dentists, lawyers, executives, suffragists, and the first American to provide prefabricated houses. They and their families came for the area’s ocean views, beaches, and cooling breezes on the wraparound porches of Colonial Revival houses built by George Welch. Welch turned what had been farmland since Native American times into a select summer colony.

This project explores the role of the Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses and the Woman’s Education Association of Boston in advancing the cause for women’s admission to Trinity College Dublin and Harvard University.