A Chance to Be on TV (kind of)

C-SPAN is recording William M. Fowler’s talk about his new book, An American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783, at the Social Law Library tonight. The event runs from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and organizers ask people to arrive promptly so as not to disrupt the recording. But hey, if you want to be a blurry shoulder crossing in front of a camera halfway through the event, here’s your chance.

Bill Fowler is also host of this New England Quarterly podcast from last summer discussing Richard Brown’s article “‘Tried, Convicted, and Condemned, in Almost Every Bar-room and Barber’s Shop’: Anti-Irish Prejudice in the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1806.”

Prof. Brown is a very interesting historian of early America who organized one of the first history conferences I attended. This paper grew from the same research that led to The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, written with Prof. Irene Quenzler Brown, and he’s doing other research on the criminal justice system. Even on a topic that obviously means a lot to him, Dick Brown is somewhat dry as a speaker, thoughtful rather than effusive, so to liven up this recording there’s also…

Michael Dukakis!

The former governor, now a professor of government at Northeastern, comes into the conversation because he issued a proclamation acknowledging the injustices of the Daley and Halligan trial, modeled on a similar proclamation about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Tell me he doesn’t sound loose, casual, and still very smart about government.

An interesting aspect of the discussion, not fully explored, is that Brown concluded that anti-Irish sentiment was not a factor in Daley and Halligan’s conviction, though their defense counsel raised that issue. The prosecuting attorney, James Sullivan, was only one generation removed from Ireland himself, and Massachusetts would elect him governor the next two years. Other Irishmen were acquitted in similar trials at the same time. On the other hand, the rules of the court in 1806 were not what any of us would consider fair today.