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Picturing Political Power offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between images, gender, and power. This examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. Prof. Allison Lange shows how pictures, from early engravings and photographs to colorful posters, proved central to suffragists’efforts to change expectations for women, fighting back against the accepted norms of their times. Picturing Political Power demonstrates the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the power of images to change history.

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After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this modernizing process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced unimagined wealth and material comfort for some, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point. John Larson analyzes the roots of an American “culture of exploitation” that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be.

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The publishing phenomenon of summer reading started in the nineteenth century, as both print culture and tourist culture expanded in the United States. Drawing on publishing records, book reviews, readers’ diaries, and popular novels of the period, Donna Harrington-Lueker explores the beginning of summer reading and the backlash against it. Countering fears about the dangers of leisurely reading—especially for young women—publishers framed summer reading not as a disreputable habit but as a respectable pastime and welcome respite. Harrington-Lueker works to shed new light on an ongoing seasonal publishing tradition.

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Megan Kate Nelson reveals the fascinating history of the Civil War in the American West.
Exploring the connections among the Civil War, the Indian wars, and western expansion,
Nelson reframes the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and
South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces us to nine charismatic individuals who fought for self-determination and control
of the region. Through the personal stories of these figures, Nelson sheds light on an
overlooked chapter of American history.

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Mary Beth Norton will give us a preview of her new book, a narrative history of the “long       
year” of 1774, or the months from December 1773 to April 1775, which have tended to be overlooked by historians who focus instead on the war for independence. But John Adams, who lived through that era, declared that the true revolution took place in the minds of the people before a shot was fired at Lexington. The year 1774, Norton argues, was when that revolution occurred.

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On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph—for the first cabinet meeting. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges, Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. Lindsay M. Chervinsky reveals the far-reaching consequences of Washington’s choice to create what has become one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government: the presidential cabinet.

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Former Boston Globe reporter and best-selling New York Times author Larry Tye discusses his new biography Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, and the lessons that McCarthy's reign offer for our times. Tye had first-ever access to McCarthy's personal and professional papers, along with his military and medical records. The author shows how – by recklessly charging treason against everyone from George Marshall to much of the State Department – the Wisconsin senator became the most influential and controversial man in America. But Demagogue is a story not just of a senator, but of America's long-standing love affair with bullies.

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On the evening of March 5, 1770, soldiers occupying the town of Boston shot into a crowd, killing or fatally wounding five civilians.

In the aftermath of what soon became known as the Boston Massacre, questions about the command to “Fire!” became crucial. Who yelled it? When and why? Because the answers would determine the guilt or innocence of the soldiers, defense counsel John Adams insisted that “Facts are stubborn things.”

But what are the facts? The evidence, often contradictory, drew upon testimony from dozens of witnesses. Come learn about the Boston Massacre and “hear” for yourself—through a selection of artifacts, eyewitness accounts, and trial testimony—the voices of ordinary men and women, and discover how this flashpoint changed American history.

Learn more about the Massacre on our companion website.