Remembering the Revolution: The Siege of Boston

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

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Plain Text Program
 

This afternoon mini-symposium examines the Siege of Boston (April 19, 1775 – March 17, 1776) and considers how the Revolution has been preserved, interpreted, and remembered through documents, objects, scholarship, and public memory.
 

2:30pm Doors Open

2:45pm Welcome & Introductions

Daniel L. Smail
Chair, Department of History
Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History

Paulina L. Alberto 
Professor of African and African American Studies and of History
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of African and African American Studies 
 

3:00pm - 4:05pm: Panel One: Hands On the Revolution: Documents, Objects, and Methods

Moderated by Tiya Miles, Michael Garvey Professor of History, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor

Scott E. Casper
President, American Antiquarian Society
Talk Title: Researching the Revolution at the Library the Revolution Built

Scott E. Casper was appointed the eighth president of the Society in December 2020. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States, he has been associated with AAS for three decades, beginning as a Peterson Fellow in 1990. Before joining AAS he served as dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and as Foundation Professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Scott is the author of Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (2008) and Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1999), which won the book prize of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. He is the editor, co-editor, or co-author of seven other books, including A History of the Book in America, volume 3, The Industrial Book (with Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship) and Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary (with Joanne D. Chaison and Jeffrey D. Groves). Scott has received fellowships from the National Humanities Center, Winterthur, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, among other institutions.

Scott serves on the boards of Mass Humanities and the Worcester Regional Research Bureau and on the steering committee for Worcester’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Community Breakfast. He also serves on the selection committee for the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American book history, awarded triennially by the Bibliographical Society of America. He has previously served on the boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, Nevada Humanities, Maryland Humanities, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance; edited the annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section of the Journal of American History from 2008 to 2018; and was acting editor of The William and Mary Quarterly in 2008-09. Scott has worked extensively with K-12 educators through the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the Center for Civic Education, and the Northern Nevada Teaching American History Project, and he has been on the faculty of Rare Book School since 2017. He holds an AB in history from Princeton University and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University. 

Sara Martin
Editor in Chief, The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society
Talk Title: “In the pockets of the distressed women”: Abigail Adams during the Siege of Boston

Sara Martin is the Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is a historical editor and directs the project that publishes the multigenerational archive amassed by Abigail Adams, John Adams, and three generations of their family. Martin holds a doctorate in history from the University of Melbourne and has worked in the public history sector for more than twenty years. 

Kyera Singleton
Executive Director, The Royall House and Slave Quarters
Talk Title: Black Life in the Aftermath of Revolution

Kyera Singleton is the executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters and a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies Initiative at Tufts University. 
 

4:05-4:15: Break
 

4:15pm – 5:55pm: Panel Two: “The Decisive Day is Come”: Boston on the Brink of Siege
Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, June 1775: “perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends.”

Moderated by David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History

Benjamin L. Carp
Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History, Brooklyn College
Talk Title: Tea, Tar, and Feathers: The View from Boston’s Wharves 

Benjamin L. Carp is the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College. He also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. He focuses particularly on urban politics, society, and culture in eighteenth-century America. In addition to his new book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he has also written Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (which won the triennial Society of the Cincinnati Cox Book Prize in 2013) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution. 

Jacqueline Jones
Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women's History Emerita, University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: The Promise and the Peril of the Siege for the Black Community

Jacqueline Jones is Professor Emerita at UT Austin, formerly holding positions as the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History. Her most recent book, No Right to an Honest Living:  The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2024.

Brendan McConville
Professor of History
Boston University
Head of the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society
Talk Title: The Battle for Islands and Peninsulas: The Committees of Safety & the Siege of Boston

Brendan McConville is a native of New Jersey. He received his undergraduate education at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and was a fellow of the Thomas Watson Foundation in 1985-1986.   He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Brown University under the direction of Gordon S. Wood and received his Ph.D in 1992.    Professor McConville is the author of The Brethren: A Story of Faith and Conspiracy in Revolutionary America; The King’s Three Faces:  The Rise and Fall of Royal America; and These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace:  The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey, as well as being the co-creator and co-host of the radio program The Historians, which airs on 1550 AM Boston.   He is currently a professor of history at Boston University and is head of The David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, as well as a trustee of the David Library of the American Revolution.  Professor McConville is also a fellow of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Historical Society.  He lives in the West Roxbury section of Boston.  

Cedric Woods
Director, Institute for New England Native American Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston
Talk Title: Diplomacy, Negotiation, and Muskets: An Exploration of Native Strategies to Survive the American Revolution

Dr. Cedric Woods, a citizen of the Lumbee Indian Tribe of North Carolina and founding director for the Institute for New England Native American Studies, brings over two decades of experience in tribal government administration and academia to his current projects supporting regional Native communities. These projects include supporting Native health and wellness, creating and expanding higher educational opportunities for Native students, and developing collaborative relationships with tribal communities, federal and state agencies, and universities. 

5:55pm: Closing Remarks 

Lisa McGirr 
Charles Warren Professor of American History 
Director of the Charles Warren Center

6:00pm-7:00pm: Reception featuring a graduate student Boston Brown Bread Bakeoff!

Robinson Hall, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA 02138