These individual biographies seek to foreground the experiences of all the individuals held in bondage by the Ashley family.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked.

Daniel’s preordained path as Republican steward began well enough, but it soon took a tragic detour.

The Proctor of the play was inspired by Miller’s projection of himself into events of 1692 and it is worth digging a bit deeper into the family matters between John and Elizabeth. 

What happens when we place furniture into a context of lively and fraught interaction?

He held multiple allegiances during the Revolution, all of which were connected or stemmed from the importance he placed on familial self-preservation.

There is a kind of actor who inhabits his role rather than himself. His true life takes place onstage.

Courtroom Drama, Constitutional Crisis and the Southern Quest to Nationalize Slavery

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many—that is […]

Although the Shakers’ material culture has received the most modern attention, arguably the most vital facet of Shaker life was not the production of material objects, but rather the production of music.

Along with the broadening of the palate came a taste for dining rooms suited to more epicurean appetites. Indeed, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the designated dining room had become a central fixture of the Victorian home.

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.

Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility of the individual and society at large, and an increasing emphasis on the determining power of innate characteristics.

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available.

Nineteenth-century viewers were just as likely to envision war through the more personalized lens of the family album as through the battlefield.

This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

He was a man stretched between worlds: one of cautious belief, another of passion and sentiment; one of rational learning, another of devotion and deep emotion.

Once again abandoned by her husband and afflicted with uncertainty and poverty, Eunice began to direct her own life…

Recent scholarship reminds us how eighteenth-century letters were produced and consumed very differently than we might imagine, certainly in the Native communities of New England.

As a result of her exemplary efforts, McCaskill has given us not only our richest account of the Crafts’ remarkable lives but also made a significant contribution to African American print culture broadly construed.

Wolf skillfully weaves together a narrative of Johnson’s life, tracing his triumphs and defeats as he sought both freedom and a meaningful place in his community of Warrenton, Virginia

By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

I’ve always been a big proponent of historical fiction, for the life and imagination it brings to often dry historical […]

Women were not merely objects of male colonists’ desires; they also gloried in their reproductive abilities.

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty.

“[I]f justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end?”

Poet Afaa M. Weaver explores his ancestors’ ability to maintain loving structures despite the pressures of slavery.

The presence of educated Native young men who pursued legal action in American courts, addressed American legislative bodies, and created written constitutions did not confirm the success of American acculturation efforts; rather, it threatened American efforts to seize Native land.

This photograph of Abraham Lincoln and his son Thomas (Tad) was taken by Anthony Berger in Mathew Brady’s Washington, D.C. […]

Lawmakers believed that men who fathered children had fulfilled a patriotic duty, which they continued to pursue by providing for their families.

Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts Common-place asks Michelle Morris about her 2013 book, Under Household Government: Sex and Family […]

Students can see how the virtue and nurturing nature of women is clearly reflected in the mother’s face and through the calm manner she exhibits as not one but two children demand her attention.

Sitting in a sunlit reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I pored over letters I knew from genealogical records and internal evidence were the material remains of a stepfamily.

Lorenzo Dow Dreams of Empire in the Era of Good Feelings Before they left for a preaching tour of England […]

What was the meaning of the Revolution for African Americans and whites in Rhode Island in terms of their understanding of race and citizenship?

“So when we’ve lost our traditions we can come here and learn them from you.”

Plantation doctors understood that they worked for the slaveholder, not the patient, and elevated their reputations over their patients’ desires.

Even on the old frontier, those who were at the top took pains to let everyone know.

Translating John and Abigail’s correspondence into contemporary social media posts prompted students to look outward and consider the continuities and discontinuities between past and present social media.

“Godbeer challenges our early-twenty-first-century understanding that it is natural that each person have a distinct sexual orientation that comprises a major part of personal identity–a sexuality. Early European Americans had no such understanding.”

“In about their eighth year, children develop a sense of time and an ability to abstract that connect stories with pasts. They begin, that is, to think historically.”

“As the Internet continues to enable and encourage possibilities for professional-nonprofessional collaboration, the historian and genealogist may find that the gulf between them has been bridged–almost in spite of themselves.”

“I’m not sure how I made it this far without realizing that I would find Wilder’s books on the fiction shelf.”

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

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