1826-1850

In this virtual program based on her new book, Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Female Academy (2025), Jennifer Rycenga tells the story of a high school that became the most advanced form of higher education open to women of any race before it was forced to close because of white opposition.  Located in Canterbury, Connecticut, the Canterbury Academy was established in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandall for "young Ladies and little Misses of color."  Local white anger tried to prevent, and later, close the school, but within its walls dedicated lea

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.

Join us as scholar Ron Tyler discusses his latest publication Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images. Westward expansion in the United States was deeply intertwined with the technological revolutions of the nineteenth century, from railroads to telegraphy. Among the most important of these, if often forgotten, was the lithograph. Before photography became a dominant medium, lithography—and later, chromolithography—enabled inexpensive reproduction of color illustrations, transforming journalism and marketing and nurturing, for the first time, a global visual culture.