This paper explores the lives of working actresses and theatre managers in Boston through the early republic, contextualizing their places in the developing cultural identity of an “American” city. Using actress-manager Elizabeth Powell as a case study, and supplementing her story with additional figures, this paper illuminates how the working actress presented herself to potential employers and audiences, creatively deploying her femininity in an attempt to balance the dueling tensions of economic practicality and gendered social expectations. In this way, patterns of performative behavior are constructed, revealing new aspects of the working actress’s life in Boston.

When Gay Community News ceased publishing in the 1990s, it was the oldest, continuously published national gay newspaper. This panel will explore the impact GCN had and continues to have on LGBTQ+ writing, news coverage, and activism.

This paper uncovers a multi-generational history of domestic workers’ fight for dignity and economic justice. The problem household employees tackled in Greater Boston centered on their degraded cultural, legal, and economic standing throughout American history. Adopting a powerful and unexpected organizing style that was community-based, multi-issue oriented, and propelled by working-class women of color, local household employees and their allies blazed a trail towards systemic reform that clinched legislative victories, including the nation’s broadest state-level minimum wage protections for domestic workers since 1932. Ultimately, their historical efforts continue to inform low-wage workers’ struggles against social injustice and economic inequality in contemporary times.

Although the Civil War and World War I were fought only 50 years apart, the perceived time between these two cataclysmic events seems far longer in popular American memory. Wars Civil and Great breaks down these barriers of time and memory and shows how close and how similar these two conflicts really were in the American experience. President Wilson looked to Lincoln during the Great War for guidance on national leadership at wartime; General John J. Pershing remembered the Civil War of his childhood and sought to learn lessons from Grant and McClellan; and the doughboys on European battlefields held firm to the culture of honor and duty that had inspired their forefathers to take up arms. Wars Civil and Great questions what legacy the Civil War left, how the World War I generation interpreted the lessons of the Civil War, and how both wars contributed to the modernization of the United States.

Throughout its run, Gay Community News' staff, volunteers, and readership all debated how to answer the question, "What is gay news?" This panel will explore the intersections and divergences of opinions about what issues GCN covered, from feminist politics to international affairs.

Phillis in London, a new play written by Ade Solanke, dramatizes and reimagines Phillis Wheatley’s experience of being an enslaved African woman writer abroad in London in 1773. She was “celebrated” by the elite of the British empire, despite visiting at the height of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Phillis Wheatley, who published the first book by an African American woman, has recently been the subject of plays and artistic renderings. Ade Solanke, David Waldstreicher and Tara Bynum will discuss the legacy of Wheatley and how artists have chosen to portray her.