The Liberator’s Legacy explores popular memory of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and their fellow abolitionists in the decades following the Civil War and reveals how that legacy influenced the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Through the lens of collective memory, this book will examine the changing meaning of the Civil War in American thought.

The Quincy, Adams, and Hancock families represent three different social classes all living in the small village of Braintree, MA before the American Revolution. This talk considers how the men and women of the families interacted, especially in their attitudes towards England in the late colonial era, and the different roles the families played in fomenting agitation against English rule.

Disability emerged in the Early Republic as a meaningful bureaucratic, legal, institutional, and cultural category. It was rooted in ideas about work, social worth, and economic independence and increasingly determined by the expert discourse of medicine. This project examines this development and considers its consequences for the new nation and its citizens.

This talk considers the maritime economy in the early modern Atlantic World, focusing on the infrastructure of commercial exchanges as port cities adapted to larger ships, increased consumer goods, and productivity challenges in environments that included bays, rivers, and estuaries. The argument is grounded on historical documents, maps, objects, and archaeological fieldwork to show that people—from dock workers to financiers—sought to stabilize local variables to accommodate rapid market shifts.

This project uses food in the British Atlantic to understand ideas about the body, race, and freedom. In New England, the Caribbean, and the Gold Coast of Africa, supplies of foodstuffs sustained colonization and slavery. Food allowed for survival, and also demarcated hierarchies of class, gender, and especially race. However, subjugated populations often used food-related practices to negotiate degrees of freedom within (and in defiance of) oppressive systems of colonization and slavery.

Tasked with maintaining the comfort and happiness of their families even in the face of adversity, many middling- and upper-class women in the early-nineteenth century saw expressing and managing emotions as the foundation of their daily labors. This talk explores the everyday realities of this emotion work and helps us understand women’s actions and self-perceptions—as well as wider familial and social dynamics—in the early republic.

Culinary activists furthered republican values in the revolutionary era as part of a political and cultural ideology. They developed a culinary vocabulary expressed in words and actions such as the refusal to consume politically charged comestibles, like imported tea, and the celebration of a national horticulture. Through these choices, they established a culinary discourse involving food, political culture, and national identity from the Stamp Act to the early republic.

Eunice Ross. Phebe Ann Boston. Sarah Roberts. Sarah Parker Remond. Charlotte Forten Grimké. Joanna Turpin Howard. These six African American women, among others, played an integral role in the fight to desegregate public schools in antebellum Massachusetts. They authored anti-discrimination petitions, they helped to organize boycotts, and they wrote missives against racial prejudice. As this school desegregation campaign grew, so too did an activist network that bound together African American women, men, and children as well as their allies from Salem to Nantucket to Boston.

This project examines conflicts over liberty poles in the 1790s. Liberty poles offered grassroots partisans a tangible symbol through which to channel debates about political participation, popular sovereignty, and dissent under the new Constitution.

Accused regicide and former pastor of Salem, Massachusetts, Hugh Peter was the target of colorful satirical ballads and mock-sermons in the mid-seventeenth century. This presentation will explore the ways Royalists attacked Peter as a way of mocking the culture of puritanism, expressing anxieties about the very existence of puritan colonies.