Revere House‘s Fall Lowell Lecture Series

The Paul Revere House’s annual Fall Lowell Lecture Series starts tonight, with the talks available for free both in-person and online.

The theme for this year’s series is “Beyond the 13: The American Revolutionary Era Outside the Emerging United States,” and the speakers will focus on “areas that have not traditionally received much attention in explorations of the American Revolutionary period.” Here’s the lineup:

Tuesday, 27 September, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“‘To Begin the World over Again’: Revolutionary Rights”
Janet Polasky, Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, explores how American claims to Revolutionary rights have reverberated throughout the Atlantic world and influenced our understanding of liberty and equality from the eighteenth century to the present.

Tuesday, 11 October, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“The Other Fourth of July: The American War of Independence in the Southern Caribbean”
Tessa Murphy, Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University, considers what the American Revolution meant to British colonial subjects in some lesser-studied parts of the Americas. Indigenous, enslaved, and free people all seized the opportunity to ally with Great Britain’s chief rival, France, and many used this moment of disruption to seek freedom, sovereignty, or autonomy.

Tuesday, 25 October, 6:30–7:45 P.M.
“Slavery and Smallpox Inoculation”
Elise A. Mitchell, Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University, looks at the rich African Atlantic history of smallpox inoculation. Her lecture contextualizes the more familiar history of Onesimus and Cotton Mather in early eighteenth-century Boston within the broader history of Africans performing inoculations in West Africa, Jamaica, and Saint Domingue (Haiti) in the Revolutionary Era.

All these talks will be held in the Commons of Sargent Hall, Suffolk University, at 120 Tremont Street. They will also be streamed and recorded for later viewing via GBH’s Forum Network.

The Paul Revere House also has special offerings each Saturday—music, crafts demonstrations, first-person interpreters, and so on. Check its website for details.