As we begin to consider climate as an everyday problem, it's valuable to see how people did that in the past. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling and analyzing…

This paper considers Atlanta mayor Andrew Young’s shifting ideas about job creation and economic opportunity to investigate how Democrats abandoned their 1970s goal of full employment in favor of…

When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as…

This panel discussion brings together the histories of health, disease, and the environment to cast new light on key sites of Colonial American history. Molly Nebiolo’s research highlights how…

Collective protest, in addition to being a constitutionally protected right, is a fundamental and enduring part of American life and culture. Protest and agitation have at times proven powerful…

Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States passed laws in the name of national…

The transcontinental railroads reshaped the United States—its politics, economy, culture and environment. But as Sean Fraga argues, these railroads also saw themselves as part of an emergent…

From the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, slavery has been central to creating wealth and generating race-based inequality in Massachusetts. Family fortunes, institutional endowments, and…

In the mid-20th century, Boston emerged as a laboratory for “the modern alcoholism movement,” a campaign to replace penal responses to chronic drunkenness with medico-moral treatment focused on…

Some celebrate Lincoln for freeing the slaves; others fault him for a long-standing conservatism on abolition and race. James Oakes provides another exploration of Lincoln and the end of slavery.…

Please join us for a special evening in which historian Kerri Greenidge will receive the 2020 Gomes Prize for Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter. Greenidge will…

In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists and Transcendentalist intellectuals, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by…

Driving While Black demonstrates that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility— has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to…

Afflictions of all sorts coursed through eighteenth-century New England – towns and cities set ablaze by epidemics, soldiers sickened and injured in the fight for empire, families and households…

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED

The Nile travel diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews are an important yet underutilized resource for the so-called “Golden Age” of Egyptian archaeology in the late…

Revolutionary love and marriages in the Black Panther Party were powerful aspects of Black Power politics. This paper argues that Panthers viewed Black romantic love as an act and a tool of…

Between the 1830s and 1860s, Americans began fighting over a curious topic: female foreheads. While feminists and phrenologists saw “high brows” as an alluring sign of intelligence in women,…

Settling the Good Land is the first institutional history of the Massachusetts Bay Company, a cornerstone of early modern English colonization in North America. Agnès Delahaye analyzes…