The MHS organizes seven seminar series that operate from September to May. These sessions bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. After brief remarks from the author and an assigned commentator, the discussion is opened to the floor. All are encouraged to ask questions, provide feedback on the circulated essay, and discuss the topic at hand. Our sessions are free and open to everyone. Register below to attend and receive the session papers.
Seminar, Malgeri Modern American Society and Culture Seminar
“The Virus of Slavery and Injustice”: Analogy and Disabled Life in African American Writings, 1856-1892
28 October 2021.Thursday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Online Event
Vivian Delchamps, University of California, Los Angeles
Comment: Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University
Engaging Todd Carmody’s invitation to consider how “race might have been &lsquo ...
Engaging Todd Carmody’s invitation to consider how “race might have been ‘like’ disability in the late nineteenth century,” this essay explores texts by African American authors Charlotte L. Forten, Martin Robison Delany, and Frances E.W. Harper. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy renders slavery a “virus,” “deadly cancer,” and “wound,” necessitating cure; simultaneously, the novel depicts lived realities of disability, disrupts diagnostic reading practices, and takes a care-based, rather than curative, approach to disability itself. The essay thus reads literature as a generative site for asserting ableism’s centrality to the legacy of racial violence, and explores the value of using diagnostic-like narrative methods to target systemic sources of mass debilitation.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to join this special session in the Disability and the American Past series. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an exclusively online event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
More
Seminar, Environmental History Seminar
The “Science” of Dry-Farming: The Emergence of a Concept in Global Perspective
4 November 2021.Thursday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Online Event
Elizabeth Williams, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Comment: Jeremy Vetter, University of Arizona
This paper examines the emergence of dry farming as a new "scientific" agricultural method in the ...
This paper examines the emergence of dry farming as a new "scientific" agricultural method in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within broader global circulations of agricultural knowledge. Connecting the dry farming knowledge of American agronomists to that of French colonial officials working in North Africa who were themselves indebted to centuries of knowledge about dry farming techniques developed by farmers working in rainfed lands around the Mediterranean basin, it sheds light on the politics of expertise involved in the production of this “science.”
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
More
Seminar, Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar
Conversion in Confinement
9 November 2021.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Online Event
Justin Clark, Nanyang Technological University; Daniel Bottino, Rutgers University & Hannah Peterson, Independent Scholar
Douglas Winiarski, University of Richmond
This panel will consider two papers exploring the world of early American religious culture through ...
This panel will consider two papers exploring the world of early American religious culture through the lens of carceral conversions. Daniel Bottino’s essay will explore the 38 page conversion narrative of Patience Boston, a Native American woman hanged for murder in York, Maine, in 1735. The document offers an extraordinary opportunity for an exploration of religious culture in New England on the verge of the Whitefieldian awakenings of the 1740s. When examined in its proper historical context, the narrative reveals the spiritual power capable of being wielded even by the most socially marginal people in the intensely religious atmosphere of early eighteenth-century New England. Justin Clark’s essay will show that as Congregationalist New England’s eighteenth-century revivalists offered a brief window of spiritual hope for thousands of sinners, civil authorities began to extend additional periods of time to the region’s condemned convicts. This paper examines the emergence of these extended capital reprieves and their relationship to the accelerated spiritual conversions outside gaol walls. What role did the revivals play in encouraging New Englanders before the penitentiary to re-conceive of carceral time as transformative in itself?
The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a virtual event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
More
Seminar, Malgeri Modern American Society and Culture Seminar
The Reinvention of Tradition: Conformist Nationalism in the United States, 1923-1931
30 November 2021.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Hybrid Event
Kelly Lyons, Boston College
Comment: Jonathan Hansen, Harvard University
In the 1920s, amid fears that American national identity was under threat from communism, pacifism, ...
In the 1920s, amid fears that American national identity was under threat from communism, pacifism, and immigration, nationalist organizations in the United States standardized many of the patriotic rituals and traditions Americans performed in their daily lives. This Nationalist Network, led by the American Legion and U.S. Flag Association, grew increasingly right-wing in this period, inventing and reinventing patriotic traditions to “Americanize” those who were already citizens and control their behavior to adhere to white, upper middle-class norms. These traditions reinforced existing racial and class hierarchies and defined American nationalism along exclusionary principles.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Seminar, African American History Seminar
“Challenge or Be Challenged”: the Par-Links Black Women’s Golf Club in East Bay, CA
2 December 2021.Thursday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Hybrid Event
Paula C. Austin, Boston University
Louis Moore, Grand Valley State University
The Par-Links Golf Club was an association of Black women golfers founded in 1958 in East Bay, ...
The Par-Links Golf Club was an association of Black women golfers founded in 1958 in East Bay, Oakland California. Using photographs, organizational documents, and scrapbooks, this paper examine the possibilities and realities of Black leisure, recreation, and community care and play practices before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It places Par-Links in the context of the burgeoning sport, the development of Black golf clubs, and within the local and national fights to desegregate public golf courses and professional golf in US Civil Rights Movement histories.
The African American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Seminar, Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar
Crisis: 1774-1775
7 December 2021.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Hybrid Event
Sarah Beth Gable, Brandeis University
Comment: Donald Johnson, North Dakota State University
This project explores the role of the Committees in Massachusetts communities during the American ...
This project explores the role of the Committees in Massachusetts communities during the American Revolution, particularly the role they played in punishing community dissent and compelling ideological allegiance to the Revolutionary cause. This chapter highlights these committees' activities in the aftermath of the passage of the Massachusetts Government Act in May 1774 and argues that this period served as a training ground for later reprisals against community members. During this period, Massachusetts saw the most dramatic actions against suspected loyalists – the Committees deployed mobs to suspected loyalists' homes, detained Colonial officials, and drove others out of the towns into Boston. This paper argues that the heightened tension of the moment created an atmosphere of suspicion and conspiracy under which the definition of loyalism began to broaden.
The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Seminar
Digitizing Early Massachusetts Court Records
9 December 2021.Thursday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Hybrid Event
Sally Hadden, University of Western Michigan
Comments: Jessica Otis, George Mason University; Susanna Blumenthal, University of Minnesota
Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature records represent one of the fullest collections of ...
Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature records represent one of the fullest collections of colonial court documents in North America, covering the entirety of the eighteenth century. This seminar explores the process of transcribing, annotating, and presenting this information via Mirador, the browser-based interface that gives the end user control over how much or how little information to display. The database used to capture annotations and make them searchable using complex queries will also be described. This project is underwritten by the Ames Foundation and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
The Shapiro Digital history Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Seminar, History of Women, Gender and Sexuality Seminar
“The Kind of Death, Natural or Violent”: Fetal Death and the Male Midwife in Nineteenth-Century Boston
14 December 2021.Tuesday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Hybrid Event
Hannah Smith, University of Minnesota
Comment: Nora Doyle, Salem College
This dissertation chapter examines a lecture by Boston man-midwife Walter Channing. The lecture is ...
This dissertation chapter examines a lecture by Boston man-midwife Walter Channing. The lecture is meant to offer his (male) midwifery students the skills to serve as expert witnesses in infanticide trials. However, Channing also uses the lecture to promote his opinions of both infanticide and intentional abortion. This chapter focuses on the language Channing uses to frame these acts, as well as the nature of the lecture itself as a form of communication, in order to establish how this lecture fits within the broader discussions around infanticide, abortion, and man-midwifery taking place in the Anglo-Atlantic world at this time.
The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Seminar, Environmental History Seminar
Local Food Before Locavores: Growing Vegetables in the Boston Market Garden District, 1870-1930
16 December 2021.Thursday, 5:15PM - 6:30PM
Sally McMurry, Pennsylvania State University
Comment: Andrew Robichaud, Boston University
The Boston market garden district was a national leader in vegetable production from 1870 to 1930 ...
The Boston market garden district was a national leader in vegetable production from 1870 to 1930. Suburban market gardeners' practices both countered and anticipated broader trends in the US food system. For example, intercropping (though long-known) stood well outside the US agro-ecological mainstream. Boston growers also developed the modern forcing house, an engineered greenhouse environment dependent on fossil fuels, irrigation, and commodified insect pollinators. Year-round lettuce from these houses helped prepare the way for consumers to embrace a de-seasonalized, nationalized vegetable supply. This agro-environmental episode shows how the history of local food complicates our narratives about US food system modernization.
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Engaging Todd Carmody’s invitation to consider how “race might have been ‘like’ disability in the late nineteenth century,” this essay explores texts by African American authors Charlotte L. Forten, Martin Robison Delany, and Frances E.W. Harper. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy renders slavery a “virus,” “deadly cancer,” and “wound,” necessitating cure; simultaneously, the novel depicts lived realities of disability, disrupts diagnostic reading practices, and takes a care-based, rather than curative, approach to disability itself. The essay thus reads literature as a generative site for asserting ableism’s centrality to the legacy of racial violence, and explores the value of using diagnostic-like narrative methods to target systemic sources of mass debilitation.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to join this special session in the Disability and the American Past series. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an exclusively online event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
close
This paper examines the emergence of dry farming as a new "scientific" agricultural method in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within broader global circulations of agricultural knowledge. Connecting the dry farming knowledge of American agronomists to that of French colonial officials working in North Africa who were themselves indebted to centuries of knowledge about dry farming techniques developed by farmers working in rainfed lands around the Mediterranean basin, it sheds light on the politics of expertise involved in the production of this “science.”
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is an online event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
close
This panel will consider two papers exploring the world of early American religious culture through the lens of carceral conversions. Daniel Bottino’s essay will explore the 38 page conversion narrative of Patience Boston, a Native American woman hanged for murder in York, Maine, in 1735. The document offers an extraordinary opportunity for an exploration of religious culture in New England on the verge of the Whitefieldian awakenings of the 1740s. When examined in its proper historical context, the narrative reveals the spiritual power capable of being wielded even by the most socially marginal people in the intensely religious atmosphere of early eighteenth-century New England. Justin Clark’s essay will show that as Congregationalist New England’s eighteenth-century revivalists offered a brief window of spiritual hope for thousands of sinners, civil authorities began to extend additional periods of time to the region’s condemned convicts. This paper examines the emergence of these extended capital reprieves and their relationship to the accelerated spiritual conversions outside gaol walls. What role did the revivals play in encouraging New Englanders before the penitentiary to re-conceive of carceral time as transformative in itself?
The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a virtual event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
close
In the 1920s, amid fears that American national identity was under threat from communism, pacifism, and immigration, nationalist organizations in the United States standardized many of the patriotic rituals and traditions Americans performed in their daily lives. This Nationalist Network, led by the American Legion and U.S. Flag Association, grew increasingly right-wing in this period, inventing and reinventing patriotic traditions to “Americanize” those who were already citizens and control their behavior to adhere to white, upper middle-class norms. These traditions reinforced existing racial and class hierarchies and defined American nationalism along exclusionary principles.
The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close
The Par-Links Golf Club was an association of Black women golfers founded in 1958 in East Bay, Oakland California. Using photographs, organizational documents, and scrapbooks, this paper examine the possibilities and realities of Black leisure, recreation, and community care and play practices before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It places Par-Links in the context of the burgeoning sport, the development of Black golf clubs, and within the local and national fights to desegregate public golf courses and professional golf in US Civil Rights Movement histories.
The African American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close
This project explores the role of the Committees in Massachusetts communities during the American Revolution, particularly the role they played in punishing community dissent and compelling ideological allegiance to the Revolutionary cause. This chapter highlights these committees' activities in the aftermath of the passage of the Massachusetts Government Act in May 1774 and argues that this period served as a training ground for later reprisals against community members. During this period, Massachusetts saw the most dramatic actions against suspected loyalists – the Committees deployed mobs to suspected loyalists' homes, detained Colonial officials, and drove others out of the towns into Boston. This paper argues that the heightened tension of the moment created an atmosphere of suspicion and conspiracy under which the definition of loyalism began to broaden.
The Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close
Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature records represent one of the fullest collections of colonial court documents in North America, covering the entirety of the eighteenth century. This seminar explores the process of transcribing, annotating, and presenting this information via Mirador, the browser-based interface that gives the end user control over how much or how little information to display. The database used to capture annotations and make them searchable using complex queries will also be described. This project is underwritten by the Ames Foundation and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
The Shapiro Digital history Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close
This dissertation chapter examines a lecture by Boston man-midwife Walter Channing. The lecture is meant to offer his (male) midwifery students the skills to serve as expert witnesses in infanticide trials. However, Channing also uses the lecture to promote his opinions of both infanticide and intentional abortion. This chapter focuses on the language Channing uses to frame these acts, as well as the nature of the lecture itself as a form of communication, in order to establish how this lecture fits within the broader discussions around infanticide, abortion, and man-midwifery taking place in the Anglo-Atlantic world at this time.
The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close
The Boston market garden district was a national leader in vegetable production from 1870 to 1930. Suburban market gardeners' practices both countered and anticipated broader trends in the US food system. For example, intercropping (though long-known) stood well outside the US agro-ecological mainstream. Boston growers also developed the modern forcing house, an engineered greenhouse environment dependent on fossil fuels, irrigation, and commodified insect pollinators. Year-round lettuce from these houses helped prepare the way for consumers to embrace a de-seasonalized, nationalized vegetable supply. This agro-environmental episode shows how the history of local food complicates our narratives about US food system modernization.
The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.
Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information.
Register to attend in person Register to attend online
close