Colonial Comics, and a Panel about History in Panels

This blog entry is brought to you in part by Colonial Comics: New England, 1620-1750, a new anthology of historical comics edited by Jason Rodriguez with assistance from A. Dave Lewis and myself.

As yesterday’s Boston Globe reported, this book will be published by Fulcrum next month, and the first copies will debut at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (M.I.C.E.) in Cambridge on Saturday.

What’s more, Colonial Comics is in part brought to you by this blog. Boston 1775 readers know my interest in how the Revolution has been portrayed in comics, including these complaints about schoolbooks on the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s ride. Those essays caught the eye of a local comics creator named Dave Marshall. His website clued me in to the Boston Comics Roundtable. And because I became active in that group, Jason Rodriguez invited me to join his editing team.

The first volume of Colonial Comics covers the British settlement of New England and how those colonies developed. I helped to vet story ideas, identify historians to collaborate with, and collect sources and visual references for some of the contributors.

As a writer I collaborated with artist Joel Christian Gill on this story of the first Samuel Maverick introducing chattel slavery to Massachusetts, based on the account I quoted way back here.

I also got to work closely with three writer-artists and see them bring their stories to life:

• E. J. Barnes on Thomas Morton’s colony at “Merry Mount,” a short-lived alternative to the Puritans.
• Sarah Winifred Searle on Mary Huntress, a New Hampshire woman caught up in a court battle over cheese.
• Dan Mazur on the Rev. John Williams and his daughter Eunice, captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield.

Other stories in the book cover the Pilgrims, John Winthrop of New London, the bloody Pequot War, Newport’s early Jewish population, and much more.

The team is now working on further volumes, one covering New England from 1750 to the start of the Revolutionary War (which is of course my favorite period) and another on early Virginia and the mid-Atlantic. The goal is to create entertaining, eye-opening stories that are historically solid enough to introduce students to important themes in this period of American history.

To launch the first volume of Colonial Comics, there will be a panel discussion at M.I.C.E. about history comics. The panelists will be E. J. Barnes, Ellen Crenshaw, Eleri Harris, Dave Ortega, and Jason Rodriguez, and I’ll moderate. That hour-long discussion will start at 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, 4 October, in Lesley’s University Hall, near Porter Square, Cambridge. All of M.I.C.E. is free and open to the public, so please check it out!

Upcoming Lectures at the A.A.S.

The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has three upcoming public lectures on different aspects of eighteenth-century American history.

Thursday, 20 October, 7:30 P.M.
John P. Demos
“The Unredeemed Captive: Her Journey, and My Own”
The Eighth Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America was published in 1994, and won the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington prizes in American history. It offered a striking retelling of the aftermath of the 1704 French and Native American raid on the Puritan settlement in Deerfield, Massachusetts. One captured child, Eunice, converted to Catholicism and married a Native American in Canada. Despite the ongoing attempts of Eunice’s family to persuade her to return to Massachusetts, she chose her new life, and her new family, thus remaining “unredeemed.” In this lecture, Demos will reflect on the book’s career, as well as its impact on his own career as a scholar and teacher of generations of early Americanists at Brandeis and Yale.

Tuesday, 25 October, 7:30 P.M.
Joseph J. Ellis
“American Love Story: Abigail and John”

In this lecture, Joseph J. Ellis will recount one of the most remarkable partnerships in all of American history. The friendship and love of John and Abigail Adams is contained in the letters they left behind, nearly twelve hundred of which still exist today. Together, John and Abigail also illustrate the challenges of effecting and winning a Revolution, negotiating peace, and instituting and implementing a federal Constitution—all while trying to keep their marriage strong and their family united. Based on his latest book, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, Ellis will draw upon these sources to study the relationship of this dynamic couple, analyzing how and why their friendship prevailed even in times of doubt and distress.

Tuesday, 15 November, 7:30 P.M.
Carolyn Eastman
“‘Grandeurs wch. I had heard of’: Books and the Imagined World of Travel in the Eighteenth Century”

In the eighteenth century, lavishly illustrated travel narratives became one of the most popular book genres for American readers. These books told the tales of adventurers whose experiences were so dramatic they could seem better than fiction. Better yet, their pages were interleaved with elaborately detailed copperplate engravings that offered still more insights into a world full of strange peoples. This talk will examine not just how those books taught Americans how to think about a larger world, but how men and women in remote American towns and villages learned to consider travel to be an educational and potentially life-changing experience. This lecture is based upon Eastman’s current research on the changing views of gender and sexuality in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. She is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and a 2011-12 A.A.S.-N.E.H. Fellow.