New England

Madame Restell (1811-1878) was the most famous abortion provider and female physician in nineteenth-century America, so much so that "Restellism" became a synonym for abortion.  Nicholas Syrett, author of The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023), reflects on Restell's life, placing it alongside the history of the criminalization of abortion in the United States.

The story of Hiram Harwood (1788-1839) is the story of an individual's struggle to achieve manhood within a family devoted to the ideal of patriarchy. In this lecture based upon his recent book, A Tale of New England, Robert E. Shalhope details how the pressure on Hiram to conform--to become a diligent farmer--was tremendous. Viewing himself as a man of pleasure rather than a man of business, Hiram struggled against the efforts of his father and grandfather to make him live up to their expectations.

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America was published by Knopf in 1994, and won the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington prizes in American history. Since then, it has become a model for new approaches to writing narrative history. In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos offers a striking retelling of the aftermath of the 1704 French and Native American raid on the Puritan settlement in Deerfield, Massachusetts.