Debating Democracy in the Revolutionary Age

American democracy has always been riven with tensions between inclusive and exclusionary visions of who constitutes the body politic. Dr. Winter’s talk will highlight the everyday language used by folks from across the spectrum in late 18th-century Connecticut to explore and debate who comprises the citizenry worthy of rights.

She is working on a project titled Fourteenth: Vermont’s Struggle For and Against Democracy, 1775-1875. Her research at CMCH is focused on Vermonters with roots in Connecticut: specifically, future Congressman Matthew Lyon, and African-American abolitionist Jeffrey Brace, who had been enslaved in Connecticut. She is especially interested in CMCH’s slavery and abolition collection, the “Rare Survivors” collection, and the papers of Roger Griswold, Samson Occum, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney.

We will provide coffee and dessert; bring your lunch to enjoy during the talk. Please RSVP by Tuesday, September 18 by calling (860) 236-5621 x238 or emailing rsvp@chs.org. Questions? Contact Natalie Belanger, Adult Programs Manager, at natalie_belanger@chs.org. Free for members, free with admission for non-members.

About the Speaker:
Executive Director of the Humanities Institute (interim) and Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Kari J. Winter completed her PhD in English at the University of Minnesota in 1990 and her BA in English and History at Indiana University in 1981. Her books include The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader (Race in the Atlantic World Series, University of Georgia Press, 2011), The Blind African Slave: or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-named Jeffrey Brace (scholarly edition of long-lost 1810 slave narrative, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography Series, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), and Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (University of Georgia Press, 1992, 1995, 2010).