Free & Virtual

Sandra Moats, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Parkside

Navigating Neutrality explores the unexpected role George Washington’s 1793 Neutrality Proclamation played in energizing the U.S. government’s constitutional responsibilities to support and promote America’s commercial and sovereign interests. Designed to avoid warfare as Great Britain and France battled in the Atlantic during the French Revolutionary Wars, neutrality encompassed a wide range of issues, including diplomacy, law, defense, commerce, and domestic politics.

Proclaiming neutrality proved easier than enforcing it. American citizens eagerly accepted lucrative French privateering commissions, and Britain retaliated by attacking American ships, cargos, and sailors. In response, Washington and his cabinet formulated policies to enforce neutrality across all three branches of the government and around the globe. Maritime citizens, stranded in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, especially came to appreciate the government’s rescue efforts. As Sandra Moats shows, enforcing neutrality galvanized all three branches of the nascent U.S. government, serving as a manifesto of the young nation’s quest to be respected in its independence and helping to build a U.S. government capable of supporting its global aspirations.

Sandra Moats is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside and author of Celebrating the Republic: Presidential Ceremony and Popular Sovereignty, from Washington to Monroe.

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Free & Virtual

Zachary M. Schrag, Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University

Zachary M. Schrag will discuss the steps in a research project — as laid out in the newly-published Princeton Guide to Historical Research — with examples from his other new book, The Fires of Philadelphia.

The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian’s craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.

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Free & Virtual

This presentation examines the parallel lives of two white gentlemen who were born in Great Britain, became enslavers in the West Indies and West Africa, and then published works of History on Africa and peoples of African descent in the year 1793. It argues that their texts were reactions to the rise of the abolitionist movement. For over three centuries, enslavers had collaborated with metropolitan chroniclers to produce new knowledge about the Atlantic World. With the rise of abolition, enslavers lost their trust in these inherited structures of knowledge production and were compelled to create an archive of their own.

Devin Leigh is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. He studies the Atlantic World in the early-modern period, with a particular focus on connections between the British Isles, West Africa, and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century.

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Van Gosse, Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies, Franklin and Marshall College

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution’s ratification through Abraham Lincoln’s election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states.

Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.
Van Gosse (he/him) is a Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles and books on post-1945 politics and social movements, including Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left. More recently, he has written on African American politics in the antebellum era. He is also co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy (www.historiansforpeace.org).

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