This chapter from Aston Gonzalez's book manuscript examines black geniuses recognized in mathematics and the natural sciences in the decades after the American Revolution. Gonzalez analyzes how domestic and transatlantic print culture authored by African Americans and British abolitionists contributed to the conceptual development of “black genius.” Journalists, medical professionals, and antislavery activists turned a public spotlight onto three Black men – the mental calculator Thomas Fuller, doctor James Derham, and astronomer Benjamin Banneker – whose skills, they argued, directly contradicted widespread assertions that people of African descent possessed innately and unchangeably inferior intellectual faculties.

This paper is an excerpt from a book project that examines the musical revue Pins and Needles—a production of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) which became the longest running Broadway show of the 1930s. Specifically, the paper examines how the unique feminist nature of the ILGWU and the emphasis on social justice shaped the cast of workers’ experiences during the rehearsals, as well as the content of the show, and how they navigated their unexpected stardom status to claim their place in American culture, celebrating working-class ideology of gender equality and solidarity. 

This chapter analyzes the use of “flap anatomies”, or layered, printed illustrations of human anatomy, in three sites of medical training in the late 19th century: Harvard University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Université de Paris. In an era characterized by rampant anxiety concerning both physical and moral ‘degeneration’, the role of flap anatomies in disseminating anatomical knowledge and helping shape public opinion regarding the medical profession was especially crucial in matters related to human reproduction. How was the flap anatomy – with its nudity, references to sexuality, and exploration of the body’s interior – able to reconcile these competing tensions? 

This program’s guests—a first-time author and a veteran novelist—spent decades researching family histories shadowed by war, global politics, and anti-Asian racism. Kim Liao discovered a many-layered story suppressed both in her family and by the Taiwanese government featuring her grandfather, a leader of the Taiwanese independence movement after World War II. Marnie Mueller, born in a Japanese American concentration camp in 1942 and later befriended by Mary Mon Toy, a talented “showgirl” incarcerated in a different camp, became her friend’s executor. After Mon Toy’s death in 2009, a hidden life story emerged that begged to be told alongside Mueller’s own long-concealed history. Learn about “intimate biography” from two authors who are inventing the form.

This paper re-examines the relationship between civil rights activists and the system of cash bail in the 1960s. Historians have largely considered cash bail as a legal hassle, an obstacle that naturally arose as a consequence of civil disobedience. Aside from the “jail, no bail” practice of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), little attention has been paid to the questions of how activists critiqued and organized around bail. Yet, as this paper shows, SNCC innovated a range of strategies and understood bail as a very specific mechanism of racialized state repression.

This paper considers the postwar experiences of disabled or chronically ill veterans of the First World War through an examination of pension files kept by the US Bureau of War Risk Insurance and the Veteran's Bureau. While this work will demonstrate how gendered notions of service, suffering, and recovery influenced the treatment available to both men and women, it will specifically focus on the treatment of women veterans, caretakers, and widows as documented in these files. The pension and insurance system tended to obscure the physical and emotional labor performed by women in the war and postwar period. At the same time, individual investigations frequently made spectacles of women whose behavior transgressed imagined prewar gender norms, or whose testimony disrupted dominant narratives of victory and resilience. These stories challenge familiar historical narratives of war and recovery, while drawing connections to our own postwar present.

This panel investigates forms of social control in 17th century New England. Arthur George Kamya’s paper examines the regulation of distilled liquor in 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, exploring how authorities navigated competing moral, economic, and security imperatives. Initially targeting a cross-section of colonists, liquor laws evolved to focus on servants, Native Americans, and eventually African Americans. The colony's approach shifted from moral censure to pragmatic revenue generation, with officials using fines and licenses to fund government operations. Kamya’s study illuminates how alcohol regulation became a tool of social control, state-building, and the construction of racial hierarchies in colonial New England, offering insights into the complex interplay between commerce, governance, and identity formation in early America. As discussed in Alice King’s work, Connecticut adopted a notable strategy towards certain Indigenous populations during the initial decades of settlement, attempting to control and exploit Native communities by turning them into colonial tributaries who would provide essential supplies, wampum, and military aid. King’s paper considers the evolution of tributary politics at the end of the seventeenth century after the Dominion of New England and Glorious Revolution had destabilized colonial authority and left colonists vulnerable to attack by French and Native forces, including the Wabanaki Confederacy during King William’s War, 1689-1697, when Connecticut leaders sought to raise soldiers for New England’s defense from these historic tributary communities.

In the 1990s, public libraries underwent a historic transformation catalyzed by new digital technologies, patrons’ changing demands, and neoliberal commitments to making public institutions and the individuals who used them more entrepreneurial. These changes are evident in the architecture and organization of space, as well as libraries’ outreach to the growing ranks of displaced contingent workers and self-employed who struggled to find stability outside the structure of conventional, full-time work. As public libraries sought to help their patrons maintain a foothold in the changing economy, they were challenged to assert their own distinctive value as once-restricted resources became widely available.

Megan Marshall’s innovative books, including The Peabody Sisters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller, are treasured works of American biography. Now Marshall turns her narrative gift to her own art and life, reinventing the personal essay as a portal to the past and its lessons for living into the future. The book’s six chapters range across centuries and continents, from Heian Kyoto to Hawthorne’s Concord, WWI Paris to 1960s Pasadena, Marshall’s California hometown, when Civil Rights gave way to Black Power as seen through the short, tragic life of her classmate Jonathan Jackson. Join Megan Marshall in conversation with distinguished historian John Stauffer as they discuss the biographer’s impulse to learn from others, as Marshall writes, “how to live, how not to live, what it means to live.”

When Chicago-based textile artist Robert Earl Paige designed the Dakkabar fabric set for Sears it marked both a turning point in Paige’s career and an illumination of the global political economy reshaping African American cultural production in the age of decolonization. An active member of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement and inspired by travel to newly-independent Senegal, Paige sold Dakkabar as a piece of Africa for the American home. Yet the fabrics also record Paige’s craft of creative (mis)translation. Reading Dakkabar as a conduit between the American and Senegalese consumer textile markets, this paper reframes the commerce of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement within the postcolonial Atlantic World.