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The McNeil Center
Where is Early America?| 1-3 May 2025

The McNeil Center for Early American Studies is pleased to announce a state of the field conference, to be held in May of 2025. 

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Upcoming Events



Empire of the Senses: The Creole Sensorium in Georgian London

Seminar
Natalie Zacek, University of Manchester
Apr 10, 2025 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Natalie Zacek is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, where she has taught since she received her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University. Her first monograph, Settler Society in the…



"Work and Be Happy": Craft, Slavery, and Social Reform in Philadelphia, 1783-1840

Brown Bag Session
Bethany McGlyn, University of Virginia
Apr 23, 2025 at - | Location: McNeil Center, Room 105/Zoom

Bethany McGlyn is a PhD candidate and Jefferson Scholars Foundation Fellow at the University of Virginia studying craft labor and material culture in early national Philadelphia. In spring and summer 2025, Bethany will…



Counterrevolution in Favor of Liberty: Abolishing Slavery in Loyalist Upper Canada

Seminar
Michael Blaakman, Princeton University
Apr 25, 2025 at - | Location: McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 3355 Woodland Walk/Zoom

Michael A. Blaakman is an associate professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. A scholar of the revolutionary and early national eras, he focuses on the histories of politics, political economy,…

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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