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.

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.

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 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 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. 

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.

This paper explores the context within which Black indentured children indentured labored, lived, and thought. Contracts and asylum records offer glimpses into the voices, hopes, and expectations of children living in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependence. Their experiences demonstrate how the ‘in-between-ness’ of childhood was also classed. The (theoretically) moral, spiritual, and educational responsibilities of those who signed indenture contracts reached beyond employment to pseudo-adoption and the partial integration into family units. The work identifies the choices and behaviors of Black children as means of survival, self-preservation, and self-protection, but also as resistance, protest, and assertions of selfhood.

This panel examines the presence of loyalism in the North Atlantic following the American Revolution. Alexandra Mairs-Kessler’s work demonstrates how Bermuda, a colony whose population remained loyal to the Crown while simultaneously providing economic support to the rebellion, became home to loyalist refugees seeking to rebuild. Refugees William Browne and Bridger Goodrich highlight the tension between pragmatism and vengeance that was part of the loyalist diaspora. These two refugees from Massachusetts and Virginia took different paths during the war, and both their passive and active choices shaped their lasting attitudes regarding the post-war Atlantic World. This study explores how wartime experiences of violence and loss shaped the relationship between these two men and their new colonial home. Ross Nedervelt’s paper discusses how British officials and loyalists turned neighboring border-sea territories—specifically the Bahamas—into sites where imperial forces challenged the United States and its citizens’ sovereignty through resistance and subversive activities. Bahamian colonists, Seminoles, and Black maroons became strategic players in Britain’s counterrevolutionary operations during and immediately after the War of 1812, and an active threat to the United States’ westward expansion. The Bahamian, Seminole, and maroon groups’ armed resistance resulted in General Andrew Jackson and the U.S. army invading Spanish Florida, solidified the U.S.-British Empire border, and began the development of an American foreign policy intended to resist European interference in the western hemisphere.

This panel brings together two projects on reproductive healthcare and childbirth in early America. As Nora Doyle’s work shows, scholars of early American and Atlantic World history have shown particular interest in the link between perceptions of childbirth pain and the nascent concept of race. Yet by focusing primarily on racial ideology formation, historians have missed opportunities to understand the rich medical cultures in which these women were participants and practitioners. Doyle’s paper focuses on the medical cultures of Native women in early North America to show that these women were concerned about painful and difficult deliveries and therefore availed themselves of a variety of medical techniques and practitioners to manage their birth experiences. Jennifer Reiss’s paper places early American medical and social approaches to impregnation, gestation, parturition, and mothering in the context of early American disability history. It argues that both the male dominated, professionalizing, medical community and women themselves understood the female body and its reproductive labor as disabled and disabling, respectively. While providing a deep history for the current crisis in reproductive healthcare, the paper also suggests that thinking about reproduction as disablement should give additional meaning and nuance to how historians assess the concept of disability before the antebellum era.

In establishing their archives after decolonization, postcolonial archivists faced a shortage of extant documents. As they sought to repatriate historical materials from their colonizers, American archivists promoted microfilm copying as a solution, citing the U.S. as the model postcolonial nation who likewise had to copy overseas records. This dissertation chapter explores how U.S.-led archival internationalism—rooted in the American experience of assembling archives for Turnerian frontier history—was thwarted by tropical climates that undermined archival preservation in postcolonial nations. It reveals international, imperial, and environmental dimensions of key American archival innovations, including the MHS’s publication of the Adams Papers.