Seminars

“Developing Women” is a chapter of a book-in-progress on U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter focuses on the  “women in development” movement of the 1970s. It shows how indigent women came to be seen as potential “income generators” who were central to anti-poverty programs.

The consensus among historians has largely been that Massachusetts was unexceptional in its attitudes towards slavery; recent scholarship contends that the colony laid a foundation for enslavement and perpetuated its practices elsewhere. However, this paper emphasizes that there was considerable resistance to ideas of forced labor embedded within Puritan ideology as it offers a nuanced reading of the Massachusetts policy debates of the 1640s during the critical first period of slavery in the colonies.

In 1861, the transcontinental telegraph was completed, allowing signals to be transmitted through wires from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This system, often overshadowed by the transcontinental railroad, advanced three great projects of American history: expanding capitalism, building the state, and conquering nature with technology. This essay focuses on the models of capital accumulation employed in building the telegraph and on the financial models and environments that made regional telegraph networks with different features.

This chapter is drawn from Professor Capó’s forthcoming book, Welcome to Fairyland, which chronicles the transnational forces that helped shape Miami's queer world from 1890 to 1940. In this chapter, Capó traces how urban authorities policed the perceived "suspect" sexualities of Miami's temporary and permanent settlers from the Bahamas and how their increased migration similarly informed gender and sexual norms on the archipelago.

In New York City in 1793 Henry Bedlow was tried for, but not convicted of, the rape of Lanah Sawyer. This paper questions the success of the civil lawsuit for seduction that Sawyer’s step-father, John Callanan, brought one year later. The case offers a window into the use of civil law in sexual assault cases and prompts readers to consider how women struggling for recourse can become pawns in battles between men over money and masculine honor.

Carol Bundy (The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., 1835-64) will moderate this discussion with Fredrik Logevall, the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History at Harvard University. His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History. Logevall will discuss his current book project, a biography of John F. Kennedy.

In 1808, John Palmer Parker inaugurated rapid changes to Hawaii’s economy by building a beef and hide industry that would facilitate the U.S. annexation of the archipelago. Lacher’s essay, “The Paniolos of Parker Ranch: Cattle Ranching on the Slopes of Mauna Kea,”  examines this site of environmental transformation and cultural exchange. Roberts’s paper, “A Dog’s History of Early New England: Indigenous Dogs in the Societies and Ecology of the Northeast,” argues that dogs should be considered as Native American livestock that were raised to fulfill a wide variety of tasks including serving as hunting partners and sources of meat. The essay further considers the mutal influences of European contact, the dog population, other wildlife, and human disease.

Roughly 900,000 French Canadians left their homes in search of better opportunities in the U.S. between 1837 and 1929. Most of them settled in New England, where their ideas about nationalism and the doctrine of ultramontanism rocked the Catholic establishment in the last two decades of the 19th century. This paper explores the influence of immigration on larger debates over North American Catholicism. It examines the response of the New England episcopacy, whose Americanism helped to preserve the structure and ideas of the Irish-American religious establishment.

Riordan’s essay, “Revisiting Thomas Hutchinson: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Loyalist Biography” argues that loyalism’s deep colonial roots, wartime travails, and British Atlantic diaspora are its most important qualities. Hutchinson’s place at the center of our understanding of the subject causes us to lose critical aspects of the loyalist experience. Carrick’s essay, “‘The earlier we form good Connections the better’: David Greene's Loyalist Merchant Network in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” explores how some Loyalist refugees, like Greene, found ways to develop new prospects and connections while in exile. After returning to Boston in 1785 Greene used his social and commercial connections to the wartime enemy to make himself appealing in the new Republic.

A conversation about black feminisms that will encompass issues of identity, class, and culture and pay tribute to the scholarship of Leslie Brown of Williams College. Ford is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II, while Lindsey’s forthcoming book is Colored No More: New Negro Womanhood in the Nation’s Capital.

Devienne’s essay, “Shifting Sands: A Social and Environmental History of Los Angeles’s Beaches, 1920s-1970s” examines the beaches as urban spaces whose modernization had profound consequences for the working-class. The beach clean-up and enlargement turned a popular shoreline into a semi-privatized playground for the white middle class. Nelson’s essay, “Assembling the Metropolis, Arresting the Metropolis: Competing Unit Geographies of Boston and Its Region, 1890-1930,” approaches parks as landscapes that express attitudes toward community, polity, and territory. By examining Sylvester Baxter’s metropolitan parks and Benton MacKaye’s Bay Circuit, it explores the intellectual tensions between Progressivism and the radical cultural regionalism that followed.