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 The argument is grounded on historical documents, maps, objects, and archaeological fieldwork to show that people—from dock workers to financiers—sought to stabilize local variables to accommodate rapid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.