American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime in the back room of a New York brothel transformed Lanah Sawyer’s life. It was the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, the seventeen-year-old seamstress did what virtually no one else dared to do: she charged a gentleman with rape. The trial rocked the city and nearly cost Lanah her life. And that was just the start.
Join us as author John Wood Sweet discusses his new publication The Sewing Girl's Tale, rooted in extraordinary historical detective work and the first published report of an American rape trial, of which the American Antiquarian Society holds one of two surviving copies. Lanah Sawyer’s story takes us from a chance encounter in the street into the squalor of the city’s sexual underworld, the sanctuaries of the elite, and the despair of its debtors’ prison—a world where reality was always threatened by hope and deceit. It reveals how much has changed over the past two centuries—and how much has not.
John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the former director of UNC’s interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. He graduated from Amherst College, earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University, and has held a series of post-doctoral fellowships at leading research centers including Johns Hopkins, Penn, Brown, and Yale. He has also been awarded major national fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. He has written and edited a number of books, including The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America, (Henry Holt and Co., 2022).Written as an experiment in historical storytelling, the book was reviewed enthusiastically in newspapers across the country and has been awarded seven book prizes in a variety of categories, including the Bancroft Prize for the best book on American History and the Parkman Prize for the book that best combines historical merit with literary distinction.