Crowd control technologies—turnstiles, bleachers, stanchions, and seats—channel bodies through the spaces of cultural performance: theater, music, and sport. The increasing rationalization and standardization of crowd control in the early 20th century corresponds with a critical and popular understanding of crowds as dangerous and destabilizing. This paper mines archival evidence to show how industrial-age crowd control was framed as technology that ordered masses (into lines or rows), thereby rendering masses orderly (cooperative, docile, and non-threatening).

The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come 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 held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

As the French abolitionist movement gathered momentum alongside the Revolution, Parisians could have seen hundreds of theatrical performances on themes related to race and slavery.  By contrast, the American stage grappled with the choice to perpetuate a slave system within a democracy.  Some performances hinted at slavery’s cruelty, some depicted newly-freed black characters living happily alongside whites, and others proposed returning blacks to the continent as the solution for a dilemma Thomas Jefferson described as holding “a wolf by the ears.”  This paper explores the black revolutionary figure on the U.S. and French stages during the last decade of the eighteenth century, as both nations struggled to put their principles of universal freedom into practice.  

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 an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

This panel discussion considers the queer histories of two modern institutions: colleges and prisons. Marc Stein explores how activists at more than twenty colleges went to court in the 1970s to challenge their institutions’ refusal to recognize LGBT student groups. Stein’s paper analyzes these cases and situates the successful litigation at Virginia Commonwealth University in relation to contemporaneous Virginia rulings that upheld the criminalization of same-sex sodomy and the prosecution of an interracial threesome. Ashley Ruderman-Looff’s essay considers the Lavender Scare's impact on women's prison reform. Her essay tells the story of Dr. Miriam Van Waters, a superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women who was dismissed from her post in 1949. This paper analyzes Van Waters’ subversive use of the Rorschach inkblot test, allowing her to eschew homosexual diagnosis and include queer women in the reformatory’s rehabilitative programs.

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to come 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 held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

After the US Civil War, white southerners claimed federal reimbursements for the value of freed slaves Federal lawmakers rejected these claims in the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, historians have long concluded that white southerners accepted uncompensated emancipation. Why did Americans forget these claims? This paper argues that white southerners abandoned them in the 1880s-1890s and rewrote history. They insisted that property in humans was “unprofitable,” and they did not need compensation after Confederate defeat. This narrative helped them reestablish political power and absolve themselves of four years of bloodshed and generations of enslavement. 

The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come 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 held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

In 1841, a dozen or so African American male youth aged twelve to sixteen established the Young Men’s Literary Society in Boston with the stated aim to promote intellectual growth. The very success of this endeavor laid bare the severe educational inequalities and inequities that African American youth faced in Boston’s public schools. In response, these youth organized for change. This paper traces their organizing efforts and describes how their skills in composition, penmanship, elocution, and the literary arts set the stage for the “overthrow of caste schools” in Boston in 1855.

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 an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

This paper brings a fresh perspective to the study of modern American environmental thought as well as modern American radicalism by exploring the significance of nature in the lives and writing of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, following a narrative arc from their formative years in different parts of the Italian countryside to their final years as dedicated revolutionaries confined to Massachusetts prisons.

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 held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

The New England Biography Series begins with a discussion of three recent biographies, published during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we know from the months of uncertainty we’ve all lived through so far, there are lessons about persistence, resistance and resilience to be learned from looking at the past. Tufts University professor Julie Dobrow, author of After Emily, will chair a panel featuring Nicholas Basbanes (Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Kimberly Hamlin (Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener) and John Loughery (Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century) to explore how their subjects prevailed in times of personal tragedy and public dissent, and how the authors learned to apply the lessons of their subjects to their own trials and travails as writers.

Please note, this is an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

This panel brings together the work of two historians investigating the Caribbean. Casey Schmitt’s paper explores the intersection of warfare and human trafficking in the 17^th century. Unmet demand for enslaved labor in smaller markets coupled with near-constant warfare among major European powers in the region reinforced practices of raiding and captivity. Schmitt’s paper shows how the lure of seizing captives facilitated manning expeditions during wartime, and demonstrates the centrality of violence against enslaved communities to 17^th-century warfare. Carrington Farmer’s paper explores why New England emerged as a breeding ground for horses in the eighteenth century, and how it came to dominate the equine trade to the West Indies. Whilst some of the horses that crossed the Atlantic were riding horses, many were destined for “the slavery of the draught” toiling crushing sugar.

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 an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

1864. A ship leaves its New England port carrying a USCT regiment to fight Confederates on the Louisiana front. But on the way, a showdown takes place when Pvt. John Green refuses his commanding officer's order to cut his hair, protesting that it was contrary to his religion. In the events that follow, a revealing picture of black self-assertion in the making of freedom emerges, one too often hidden by a Civil War master narrative. This paper tells John Green's story, and asks how we might look at emancipation differently when we view it through his dreadlocks.

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 an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.

This panel considers the spatial and material worlds of Black women living in Antebellum America. Kelly Sharp’s work weaves together the thin documentary record with rich archaeological evidence to reconstruct the daily life and labor of women enslaved at the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, SC. Her paper exemplifies how house museums are beginning to incorporate the story of bondpeople in an authentic and transparent manner. Alisha Hines’s essay examines how enslaved and free black women negotiated power and place in the antebellum steamboat world. Hines argues that black women who were unmoored from plantation landscapes by way of the western rivers trouble prevailing tropes of gendered mobility and immobility that pervade scholarship on slavery in the United States.

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 an online event held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program.