Participant Info

First Name
Nicole
Last Name
Breault
Country
United States
State
CT Connecticut
Affiliation
University of Connecticut
Website URL
https://history.uconn.edu/doctoral-students/nicole-breault/
Keywords
Availability
No Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
other credentials

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a third-year doctoral student in early American history at the University of Connecticut, studying with Dr. Cornelia H. Dayton. My research is focused on law and society in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British North America with specific interests in the history of governance, institutions, and gender. Under the direction of Dr. Joshua L. Reid, I completed my master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts Boston and wrote a thesis titled “Tenacious of their Lands: Fortifying the District of Mashpee, 1834-1842,” a focused micro-history of legal action and government formation in the Mashpee Wampanoag community of Cape Cod. My current work undertakes the first comprehensive study of the night watch system during the long eighteenth-century. Focused primarily on the Boston town watch, the dissertation-in-progress explores the watch from a socio-legal perspective, focusing on their role matters of law, as well as their positions as communal figures. My project not only illuminates eighteenth-century urban surveillance and policing, but also contributes to our understandings of Anglo-American law and governance, as well as aspects of family, intimate, and daily life often hidden from the historian’s view.

I am interested in joining panels/discussions on legal history, gender, history of surveillance and policing, society and culture, urban life, Atlantic port towns, space, governance, and general topics in early America and the revolutionary period.

Recent Publications

“Keeping Order in the North End: On Patrol with Boston’s eighteenth-century Night Watch,” The Messenger, Old North Church http://themessenger.oldnorth.com/2018/03/24/keeping-order-in-the-north-end-on-patrol-with-the-night-watch/

Review of Virginia Anderson, The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and The American Revolution, in Connecticut History Review, No. 57, Vol. 1 (Spring 2018)

“Their supervision was temporal not ecclesiastical: The Establishment of Mashpee Parish, 1834-1840,” in Decentering Discussions on Religion and the State: Emerging Narratives, Challenging Perspectives, ed. Sargon Donabed and Autumn Quezada-Grant (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015)

Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
England, United States
Expertise by Chronology
Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century
Expertise by Topic
American Revolution, American Founding Era, Family, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Law, Local & Regional, Material Culture