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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. 

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Upcoming Events



“But not citizens” - The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship Under the Constitution

Friday Seminar
Derek Litvak, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Nov 17, 2023 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Derek Litvak is a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, where he works at the intersections of African-American, constitutional, and intellectual histories. His current project,…



“110 Noirs Plus ou Moins Librement Engagés”: the Appropriation of Freedom and the Legacies of the Abolition of the Slave Trade

Brown Bag Session
Kathryn Angelica, University of Connecticut
Nov 29, 2023 at - | Location: Zoom only

Papers are circulated in advance. For copies, please contact the McNeil Center office.  -- Ana Paula Nadalini Mendes is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her studies focus on…



“She says she will leave him… but will go first to his father”: Private Resolutions to Marital Dysfunction

Friday Seminar
Lindsay Keiter, Pennsylvania State University-Altoona
Dec 1, 2023 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Lindsay Keiter is an assistant professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona campus. Her current research focuses on the economic functions of marriage in the late eighteenth through early…

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.

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