History Camp Boston 2023—Time to Propose Your Presentation!

History Camp Boston 2023 has been scheduled for Saturday, 12 August, at Suffolk University.

Now’s the time to submit proposals for presentations. Slots get filled in as qualifying presentations arrive, so while the final submission deadline is 12 June it’s likely that all the spaces will be reserved before then.

If, therefore, you have a historical topic you want to share with fellow history buffs, public historians, reenactors, educators, students, and others in the field, visit History Camp’s call for presentations page. That explains the process in great detail and what organizers need to hear from you before they can assign a slot.

When I say spaces might fill up early, I’m thinking about the first History Camp Valley Forge, which will take place on Saturday, 20 May. The announced final deadline for presentations was 10 April. However, all the slots were filled by 15 February, or almost two months ahead of time!

Check out the current lineup on the History Camp Valley Forge webpage.

Among those scheduled sessions is mine:

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”: Franklin’s Warning and How It’s Been Misused

According to an oft-retold anecdote, at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what the result was. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” This talk looks at the evidence for that exchange, as recorded by another convention delegate in Philadelphia. It then traces how that anecdote has been distorted in the retelling, starting with that delegate’s own newspaper essays in the early republic and blossoming in the twentieth century. As a result, we have lost sight of the circumstances of the conversation, the accomplished woman Franklin spoke with, and the real political concern they shared.

Yes, in May I’m taking Boston 1775 on the road to Pennsylvania.