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.

REGISTER

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.

REGISTER

February 16th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Spanning a century and a half and drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.

REGISTER

March 16th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

In the years between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called “fragments.” American Fragments recovers this archive of the romantic period to raise a set of pressing questions about the relationship between aesthetic and national realities: What kind of artistic creation was a fragment?, And how and why did deliberately unfinished writing emerge alongside a country that was itself still unfinished?

REGISTER

April 20th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET

Virtual & Free

Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge. While the middle and upper classes were espousing conservative literary tastes and attending family matinees and operas, laborers were reading dime novels and watching downtown spectacle melodramas like Nymphs of the Red Sea and The Pirate’s Signal or, The Bridge of Death!!! As audiences traveled from the reading parlor to the playhouse (and back again), they accumulated a vital sense of social place in the new nation. In other words, culture made class in 19th-century America.

REGISTER