The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1800

This Institute is both a colloquium and a collections-based virtual workshop that will explore how media was used during the Age of the American Revolution, a critical era of change in the American news milieu, in media use, in business, politics, and community life. We will examine how news—in all its various forms—was connected to civic engagement and how media fit into the public and private lives of the American people.

The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865

Today, mass media and social media infuse every aspect of our lives. New digital technologies have disrupted traditional forms of print, radio, and television and transformed not only how we communicate with one another, but how we participate in the economy, community, and civic life. The internet has dramatically changed how we produce, share, and consume media content. One form of media content especially important for public life and civic participation is news. And news has been revolutionized as well.

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

In this talk, Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (November 2024), reveals the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear.

Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color.

Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History

In this virtual program Whitney Barlow Robles discusses her recent book, a compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives. Part history of science, part modern voyage tale, and part personal journey, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History poses questions such as: Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know? 

Book Anatomy: Body Politics and Materiality in Indigenous Book History

Books bear the imprint of our humanity, from the social and cultural means of their production to the notes written in their margins. And Indigenous books, embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, are contested spaces. These publications, authored by Native Americans during the long nineteenth century, included a variety of nontextual components‒‒illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more‒‒shaping how they were read and understood.