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Archives of Revolution: A Conference About How We Make the Past | 20-22 June 2024

As we approach a series of 250th anniversaries, the histories of the American Founding have never been more hotly contested.  In the United States, historians regard 2026 with some trepidation and a lot of determination to educate a wary public about the importance of evidence to the interpretation of the past. 

Upcoming Events



“Of virtue becoming their situation”: The Making of Refugee Women's Religious Communities in the 19th-Century Mid-Atlantic

Brown Bag Session
Taneil Ruffin, Princeton University
Mar 20, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center, Room 105/Zoom

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office. -- Taneil Ruffin is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and a certificate student in the Department of African American…



1758: War and Trade on the West African Coast

Friday Seminar
Christopher L. Brown, Columbia University
Mar 22, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Dr. Christopher Leslie Brown is a historian of Britain and the British empire, principally in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with special emphasis on the comparative history of slavery and abolition, and with…



“American and British Indians": Inventing National Citizens in the Post-1812 Great Lakes

Brown Bag Session
Elena Ryan, Princeton University
Apr 3, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center, Room 105/Zoom

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office. -- Elena Telles Ryan is a doctoral candidate in history at Princeton University where she arrived after a previous life as a…

About the McNeil Center

Established as the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies in 1978, and renamed in honor of its benefactor Robert L. McNeil, Jr., in 1998, the McNeil Center facilitates scholarly inquiry into the histories and cultures of North America in the Atlantic world before 1850, with a particular but by no means exclusive emphasis on the mid-Atlantic region.