VIRTUAL: To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Book Talk)

Sara T. Damiano, Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University

In To Her Credit, Sara T. Damiano uncovers free women’s centrality to the interrelated worlds of eighteenth-century finance and law. Focusing on everyday life in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island—two of the busiest port cities of this period—Damiano argues that colonial women’s skilled labor actively facilitated the growth of Atlantic ports and their legal systems. Mining vast troves of court records, Damiano reveals that married and unmarried women of all social classes forged new paths through the complexities of credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amid demographic and economic turmoil. In turn, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses.

Sara T. Damiano received her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University and is currently an assistant professor at Texas State University. She is a social and cultural historian of early America and the Atlantic world. Damiano has previously published articles on female administrators of estates and on collaborations between male and female financial agents. In the Spring of 2016, she was a Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) postdoctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her research has also received support from organizations and institutions including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Damiano teaches courses on early America, the Atlantic world, law and society, capitalism and economic culture, and American women’s and gender history. Prior to arriving at Texas State University, she taught courses at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Register