The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America
Wednesday, March 27 | 4:30pm | Auditorium
John Wood Sweet American Historian and Author
John Wood Sweet joins us to speak on his book The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequence in Revolutionary America. A riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, reveals how much has changed over two centuries—and how much has not. Based on rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a chance encounter in the street, into the sanctuaries of the city’s elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors’ prison. The Sewing Girl’s Tale shows that if our laws and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former director of UNC’s Program in Sexuality Studies. He graduated from Amherst College (summa cum laude) and earned his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University. His first book, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and his work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the McNeil Center at Penn, and the Center for Global Studies in Culture, Power, and History at Johns Hopkins. He lives in Chapel Hill with his husband, son, daughter, and a new baby.
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$190
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