June 16th, 2022, 5:30 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

In Disaffected, Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism’s paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. In this presentation, Yao will focus on Chapter 4 “Objective Passionlessness : Black Women Doctors and Dispassionate Strategies of Uplifting Love,” which was informed by her time as a fellow and features archival material from the Library Company and Drexel.

2021 Innovation Award Winner Guide to Indigenous DC

July 21st, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

Guide to Indigenous DC is a digital map, mobile application, and monograph of sites of Indigenous importance in the nation’s capital. By highlighting sites of importance to Native peoples within, and contributions to, Washington, DC, Guide to Indigenous DC showcases empowering stories of how this prominent city is a place of tribal gathering, presence, and advocacy with a long, rich history. Users of this free iOS application have access to a map of 17 sites of Indigenous importance, including photos, descriptions, and external resources, and can be used for both in-person touring or virtual tours with 360-degree on-the-ground views of the sites.

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August 18th, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

Matthew Kruer is Assistant Professor of Early North American History and the College at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. His first book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2022), is based on a doctoral dissertation that was awarded the 2016 Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians.

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September 15th, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

The American Revolution disrupted households and family economies increasing the number of women on their own–widows, wives with absentee husbands, and single women–who often found themselves in great need. When women’s individual efforts to survive failed, many petitioned the government for assistance, but Pennsylvania’s unstable economy and the nature of the petitioning process, pulled women into long and entangled relationships with governing bodies. Some spent lifetimes petitioning. This talk explores the petitioning efforts of Pennsylvania women–patriots, loyalists, and those who fell somewhere in between–during the war and in its long aftermath. It examines how wartime disruptions shaped family economies and household responses.

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October 20th, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

In the kitchens and garrets of colonial New England homes, surrounded by barrels of foodstuffs and other reminders of daily work, slept a diverse group of unfree laborers, some enslaved, others indentured or hired. These laboring women and men—African, Indigenous, and Euro-American—have long remained marginal in histories of colonial New England. In this talk, Dr. Carbonell reveals how we can critically press written and material archives to locate glimpses of the everyday experiences of this racially diverse set of New Englanders who are often treated as absent in colonial archives. By centering unfree people in our understanding of early New England’s early history, she reveals the foundational role they played in the development of the region’s economy and society.

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