“The One that Wears the Breeches”: Women’s Fashion, Dress Reform and Gender Expectations in Nineteenth Century America

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

Virtual & Free

This Fireside Chat will pull from Laura Ping’s book manuscript Beyond Bloomers: Fashioning Change in Nineteenth-Century Dress which explores case studies of women who protested unequal gender roles by abandoning fashionable dresses in favor of loose clothing, specifically trousers and modified underwear (popularly known as dress reform).  This book demonstrates that dress reform was more widely accepted when it was adopted for function rather than as a symbol of women’s rights.

Entangling Lives: Locating Early American Women’s History in the Built Environment

May 19th, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

In four books and several articles, UMass Amherst Distinguished Professor of History Marla Miller has explored women’s work in early America, from artisanal skill in clothing and textile trades to the everyday experience of domestic service to, most recently, the particular settings of health care and hospitality work. In this talk she invites viewers to join her on a virtual tour of Forty Acres, the historic house in Hadley, Massachusetts that sheltered the women whose lives are contemplated in Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts, published in the Program in Early American Economy and Society series edited by Cathy Matson and published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as well as the generations of pastkeepers who both preserved and elided those stories.

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.

REGISTER