Through the complex, deeply human story of an iconic family of Boston tattooers, Loud, Naked, & in Three Colors forges a deeper understanding of the history of a vernacular art form and the folk who made a living from its subversive attractions.

From the 1910s until 1962, when Massachusetts banned tattooing statewide, Edward “Dad” Liberty and his three sons held a near-monopoly on the Boston tattoo scene from their shops in Scollay Square, the city’s gritty entertainment district. Over their lifetimes, the Liberty men accumulated an unmatched collection of hand-painted tattoo flash art, photographs, machines, shop signs, correspondence, ephemera, and family memorabilia. Loud, Naked, & in Three Colors brings together this evocative, sometimes eye-popping material to create a groundbreaking visual and narrative history of tattooing in Boston. It is an appealing work for general readers and tattoo enthusiasts, as well as a definitive resource for tattoo artists and historians of popular culture.

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For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo opens a window into Spanish-language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the city’s printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.

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The scholarship on African Americans and violence in the post Civil war South centers almost exclusively on the lynching of Black men. This book length project expands the terrain of the post war experience by focusing on intimate partner violence among African Americans. By using the transnational feminist methodologies of “critical fabulation,” “illegibility,” and “archives of difference,” this project discusses how African American women experienced, interpreted, and survived intimate partner violence in the first 50 years after slavery. This project is based on local court testimony and petitions made to the Freedman’s Bureau by African American women in the state of Georgia. Given that Emancipation was the first time that formerly enslaved people possessed legal rights to their own bodies, what did it mean for African American women to use the courts to adjudicate interactions in their private worlds? As this project reveals, despite the fact that the 15th Amendment denied African American women the right to vote, they used the courts to advance their own form of legal personhood. Moreover, the seemingly illegibility of African American women in the archive holds ramifications for the inability to see gendered violence in the contemporary era of Black Lives Matter.

Sponsored by the Program in African American History

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 Linking histories of women, relationships to the natural environment, material culture and art, Andrea Pappas presents a new, multi-dimensional view of eighteenth-century American culture from a unique perspective. This book investigates how and why women pictured the landscape in their needlework. It explores the ways their embroidered landscapes address the tumultuous environmental history of the period; how their depictions of nature differ from those made by men; and what women’s choices of motifs can tell us about their lives and their relationships to nature. Her insights change our understanding of the relationship between culture and the environment in this period and raise new questions about the unrecognized extent of women’s engagement with nature and natural science.

Sponsored by the Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History

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