Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

About Me: I am a Ph.D. candidate 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: “Do You Think to Stand Four Regiments?”: Conflict and Authority in the Streets of Occupied Boston, The Beehive, Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2019/07/do-you-think-to-stand-four-regiments-conflict-authority-in-the-streets-of-occupied-boston/#respond

“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)

Expertise by Chronology: Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic: American Revolution, American Founding Era, Family, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Law, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Museums, Urban History, Women