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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



“Kikrevou”(kì ire aiku): Sickness, Death, and Survival in the Jamaican Smallpox Epidemic of 1768

Friday Seminar
Elise Mitchell, Princeton University
Apr 19, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Elise A. Mitchell is a historian of the Black Atlantic. She is currently an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. She is…



“Is Death Not Preferable to Slavery?”: Resistance and Diaspora in the Circum-Gulf Region, 1729-1769

Brown Bag Session
Leila K. Blackbird, University of Chicago
May 1, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center, Room 105/Zoom

Leila K. Blackbird (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache-Cherokee descent) is currently the Pozen Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of US & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago. She also serves as the…



"Freedom: A Rashomon Effect"

Friday Seminar
Scott Heerman, University of Miami and McNeil Center for Early American Studies
May 3, 2024 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Scott Heerman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Alchemy of Slavery (2018) and is at work on a manuscript that examines the international kidnapping of freed people in…

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.