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 13th, 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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November 17th, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

In the final months of 1814, the twentieth largest American city was actually in southwest England: more than five thousand American prisoners of war were stranded in Dartmoor Prison, a giant facility built by the British to house PoWs from the Napoleonic wars. In The Hated Cage, Nicholas Guyatt, Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge, tells the extraordinary story of the American presence at Dartmoor, and brings to life the desperate but lively worlds built by the prisoners during their years of captivity. With a particular focus on the interactions between Black and white prisoners, it asks a fundamental question: as Americans back in the United States debated whether Black and white people could live alongside each other in freedom, did Dartmoor prove that they could forge a shared existence in captivity?

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

Virtual & Free

Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers–a reality that resonates to this day. Brian Luskey is Professor of History at West Virginia University, where he teaches a variety of courses about the nineteenth-century United States.

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January 19th, 2023, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

American women abroad have often been more than tourists. In this Fireside Chat, Etta Madden will share her research on Anne Hamptom Brewster form her recent book Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. Engaging Italy depicts the intertwined lives of three now-little-known figures—Caroline Crane Marsh, Anne Hampton Brewster and Emily Bliss Gould—whose paths crossed as they lived abroad for more than fifteen years. These women seized opportunities to be engaged in the political changes of the 1860s and 70s known as Italian Unification.

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