Mercy Otis Warren wasn’t your typical early American woman. She was a woman with strong political viewpoints, which she wrote about and published for the world to see and consider. Did anyone in society take her views seriously? Did her writings...
Historians often portray the American Revolution as an orderly, if violent, event that moved from British colonists’ high-minded ideas about freedom to American independence from Great Britain and the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. But...
How do you build colonies without women? Most of the colonial adventurers from England and France who set out for Jamestown, New France, and colonial Louisiana were men. But how do you build and sustain societies and spread European culture—in...
Colonial America comprised many different cultural and political worlds. Most colonial Americans inhabited just one world, but today, we’re going to explore the life of a woman who lived in THREE colonial American worlds: Frontier New England...
Who are you friends with? Why are you friends with your friends? In the early American republic, men and women formed and maintained friendships for many of the same reasons we make friends today: companionship, shared interests, and, in some cases...
What can the collections of the Harvard University Libraries teach us about our early American past? It turns out, quite a lot. Taylor Stoermer, a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, takes us through the Harvard...
George Washington stands as one of the most famous Americans in history, but what do we know of his helpmeet and partner, Martha? Who was the woman who stood beside and encouraged Washington? How did she assist him as he led the Continental Army and...
How did every day men and women experience life in colonial America? How did the American Revolution transform their work and personal lives? Today, we explore the answers to those questions by investigating the life of Betsy Ross with Marla Miller...
What was everyday life like for average men and women in early America? Listeners ask this question more than any other question and today we continue to try to answer it. Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman's World: The Life...
What do George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln have in common? They all grew-up in blended or stepfamilies. Lisa Wilson, the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of American History at Connecticut College and author of A History of...