Harvard Club of Washington, DC

For decades, historians reconstructed the American revolutionary struggle as an exclusively male endeavor. Yet the years of fighting took place on farms, in towns and cities where women worked and lived.
 

In this talk, Professor Carol Berkin repopulates the revolutionary stage, adding women of all races and social classes, telling the stories of white women's participation in the prewar protests and their roles as propagandists, boycotters, spies, messengers, saboteurs, and even soldiers. She also looks at the choice of loyalties by Native Americans and African Americans who interpreted the ideals of the revolution-- liberty, freedom, and independence-- and pondered whether the British offered them a better opportunity to achieve these ideals than the Patriots' cause. And finally she examines the impact of white women's participation in the war on the long-held gender assumptions of 17th and 18th century America.
 

Time will be allocated for Q&A.

Carol Berkin is the Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, at Baruch College & The Graduate Center, CUNY. Born in Mobile, Alabama, she graduated from Barnard College in 1964 where she was a Barnard Scholar and received her M.A. and PhD from Columbia University where she was a President’s Fellow. Her dissertation, written under the direction of Richard Morris, won Columbia’s Bancroft Dissertation Award and was published by Columbia University Press in 1794 under the title Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
 

Before receiving her PhD, Carol was a member of the editorial staff of both the Papers of Alexander Hamilton and the Papers of John Jay. During her forty years of teaching undergraduates and graduate students at CUNY, she also served as Baruch’s Associate Provost from 1985 to1988. She was awarded Baruch’s Presidential Excellence Award for Scholarship in 1998 and the CUNY Lifetime Performance Award in 1999.
 

Professor Berkin was elected to the Society of American Historians, an organization that honors excellence in writing, in 1996, and became a Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society in 2005. She has received grants from The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Association of University Women, and was included in the Who’s Who in Teaching in 2004, 2005, and 2006. She has also served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
 

For questions, please conact Miyako Yerick at Programs@ColumbiaDC.org.