Historical Diaries Panel at Plymouth, 13 May

On Tuesday, 13 May, I’ll be at the Plymouth Public Library as part of a panel discussion on using diaries in historical research. This event will run from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. in the Otto Fehlow Meeting Room, and is free and open to the public.

The other panelists will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, and Ondine Le Blanc, Director of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society and thus one of the people behind the publication of Ellen Coolidge’s travel diary.

I’ll describe my work on boys’ diaries in the Revolutionary period, including those of John Quincy Adams, Peter Thacher, and Quincy Thaxter. I also plan to share secrets from the diary of John Rowe.

Donna Curtin, Executive Director of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, will moderate the discussion and question session to follow.

As long as I’m talking a bit about me, here are links to a couple of articles that appeared on the web last week:

• I’m continuing to review episodes of the Turn television series for Den of Geek, and also wrote a profile of John Graves Simcoe, the real British officer behind [far behind—almost invisible in the distance behind] one of that show’s main villains. For more on Simcoe, check out Todd Braisted’s terrific article on Rachel Smith’s excellent new blog, Turn to a Historian.
• At the Journal of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael and I teamed up to write a pair of articles about the figure of a musket-toting woman shown above. Can A.P. U.S. History test-takers fairly deduce anything about that image without context? And where did it originate?