This talk will examine the emerging legal category of the “disabled” American at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the construction of disability in Civil War literature, broadly conceived. In texts ranging from hospital newspaper poetry to mendicant narratives sold for veterans’ financial support, representations of Civil War injury engaged shifting understandings of disability: from individual condition to evolving social class.

Focusing on the period 1880‒1920, the peak of Irish emigration to the United States, this talk examines the education, professional training and wider public activism of first-generation Irish American women teachers.

This talk examines the religious expressions of 18^th- and 19^th-century female Federalist writers, specifically Catharine Sedgwick, in the context of the Federalist commitment to public religion. Sedgwick’s 1824 novel Redwood looks to the French Revolution as a site of U.S. debate about role of religion in a republic, signaling her interest in her father’s earlier Federalism while staking her position in the Unitarian controversy of the early 1800s.

This talk studies Phillis Wheatley’s significance to the history of black prodigy, focusing on Wheatley’s education as an enslaved child. It reconstructs Wheatley’s education in relation to early American philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, looking to primers, tract literature, and the influence of Locke. From there, it examines the often-cited (and likely fictionalized) “trials” of Phillis Wheatley—and to Jefferson’s Notes on Wheatley—to show the performance of authenticating and/or discrediting black intellect as a cultural tradition which Wheatley’s literary career inaugurated.

This talk examines the Anglo-Wabanaki War of 1722-1727 in the American Northeast. It situates the conflict as the final resolution of a half-century of imperial crisis in the region. The talk argues the limits of indigenous, colonial, and imperial power influenced the war’s outbreak, the fighting, and its resolution.

This talk follows the intertwining of race and ecology in Albery Allson Whitman’s 1884 The Rape of Florida through an analysis of colonial cartographic practices. Using maps to examine the cartographic representation of swamps and other wetlands that permeate the boundary between land and water, this talk opens questions about the porous ecologies of maroon communities and the poetics that follow from such ecologies.

In 1775, New York City merchant Frederick Rhinelander told a friend, “if this province ever fights, it will be for the King.” Yet Rhinelander’s reasons were not based on New Yorkers’ blind loyalty to George III or Great Britain. Instead, for him and many of his friends, loyalism was a tool to challenge political opponents.

Despite their reputation as sites of abuse and neglect, 19th-century hospitals for the insane were originally envisioned as “technological marvels” that would solve the national mental health crisis. This talk examines how New England lunatic hospitals were designed to mobilize sensory experience to cure mental illness, and how these designs shaped patient experiences.

This talk focuses on the commercial and cultural connections between New Englanders and Parsis in Bombay from the 1770s to the 1850s. Commercially, the Parsis began to act as agent-brokers for Massachusetts merchants in the late 1780s. But Parsi Zoroastrian religious ideas and rituals were already known to at least a few readers in New England by spring of 1772, when the first European translations of Zoroastrian texts were sent, at Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation, to the Redwood Athenaeum’s librarian.

With the 1954 U.S. government-backed overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, scholars have focused on ties between the State Department, the CIA, and el pulpo, the octopus, the United Fruit Company. This talk reveals how the Company's influence reached further to Boston-based congresspersons, Caribbean Basin dictators, and Guatemalan exiles.

This talk traces how the federal government surveyed immigrants in the early-20^th century and how such attempts helped solidify the racial boundary-making for the nation. By dissecting the tenuous connections between racist ideology, state power, and social science knowledge, this talk provides an empirical account of how categories such as race and ethnicity emerge from confusion and contradiction in knowledge production.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars made significant advances in the historical and critical study of the Bible, often with highly controversial and factious results. This talk will examine how such exciting but potentially subversive European scholarship was received and transformed by its early American readers, through a close study of the books owned and annotated by seventeenth-century readers in New England and elsewhere.