"Before Covid: Illness In Everyday Life In Early New England" With Ben Mutschler

"Before COVID: Illness in Everyday Life in Early New England"

with Ben Mutschler

Wednesday, December 2, 2020 - 8 pm EST

Approx. 60 minutes

This online event is free, but registration is required.
You will be sent an email with a link and instructions on how to join the event upon registration.

Register

This unique presentation will place Ben Mutschler, author of The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of Early New England, in conversation with AAS Curator of Manuscripts Ashley Cataldo about his new book and the AAS collections most relevant to researching it. The Province of Affliction explores the ways in which the routine presence of illness in daily life shaped and strained the most basic social and political institutions of eighteenth-century New England, from families and households to neighborhoods and towns, all the way to the highest reaches of government. The presentation will highlight how diaries, pension records, and other manuscripts allowed Mutschler to trace those pressures throughout early New England.

 

Ben Mutschler is associate professor of history at Oregon State University, where he teaches courses on early America, disease and disability, and public history. He earned his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and has received long-term fellowships from the Omohundro Institute and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His new book, The Province of Affliction: Illness and the Making of Early New England (Chicago, 2020), was launched with the help of several short-term fellowships, including a Peterson Fellowship at AAS.

To get 20% off your copy of the book, order from the University of Chicago Press and use the code “BEN20” at checkout