Brown Bags

This project sets the experiences of fashion, consumerism, and consumption within a cosmopolitan Atlantic world that carried the elegant fancies of fashionable London to the gentility of provincial British America. The garments and textiles housed at the MHS offer insights into the ongoing debate over the process of Anglicization in pre-Revolutionary America. Particular attention will be paid to the textiles associated with the Byles and Hancock families in Boston.

In the decades before the Civil War, opera in the United States became a major financial and infrastructural undertaking that generated enormous attention from fans and investors alike. As a result, opera generated intense conflict about the manner in which this entirely new scale of entertainment would be produced. This presentation traces how “a muss among the flunkies”--the haphazard strikes of anonymous choristers and instrumentalists--grew into the nation's first performers' unions and protective associations, which in turn continue to shape our contemporary ideas and practices of creative work.

Senator, statesman, presidential advisor, and presidential candidate by popular demand, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and his national political career that stretched from the 1930s to the 1970s have up to now escaped biographical treatment. During the height of the Cold War, Lodge was consistently at the epicenter of power, whether in the Senate, Saigon, or his bipartisan roles serving four successive presidents from Kennedy to Nixon.

This project examines the political, economic, and social influence the revolutionary American colonies had on the British Atlantic islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas from 1763 through the 1780s. The MHS collection of British commercial documents relating to the New England-Bermuda trade, business papers and correspondence, and patriot maps indicating the locations of Bermuda's pro-American inhabitants will establish the degree of influence the rebellious Americans had on the British Atlantic islands over the course of the American Revolution - one that moved from strongly supporting the American cause, to becoming Britain's western Gibraltar.

How did northern investors, financial markets, land speculation, and the law shape the dynamics of Indian dispossession, territorial expansion, and slavery in the Deep South during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This research uses the Yazoo land sales to explore these questions. By providing a deep history of the Yazoo sales that focuses on the motives, strategies, and networks of speculators in Yazoo lands, as well as the particular political and economic context from which the sales emerged and in which their legal afterlife unfolded, this project offers new insights into the transformation of the Southeastern borderlands and emergence of the Cotton Kingdom.

This talk will examine how Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens helped convert a radical social movement into a program for political change. It will illustrate how state formation and progressive constitutionalism during Radical Reconstruction were inspired by the abolitionist vision of an interracial democracy.