Civic Engagement in the Revolutionary City, 1776 and 2026

The American Philosophical Society and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic cordially invite you to “Civic Engagement in the Revolutionary City, 1776 and 2026.” This event, which will officially launch the APS and SHEAR partnership to further civic education, will feature a discussion of the essential ideas and documents of the American Revolution and their significance and importance to our nation today.

Andrew Shankman (Rutgers University and President Elect of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) and Bayard L. Miller (American Philosophical Society) will host a conversation featuring the following historians:

Joanne Freeman (Yale University) and Nora Slominsky (Iona College and Director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies) on Civic Ideals, Public Conversation, and Historical Scholarship.

Lauren Duval (University of Oklahoma), Christina Snyder (Penn State University), and Zara Anishanslin (University of Delaware) on “Civic Documents from Philadephia, the Revolutionary City.”

About The Revolutionary City:
The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding is a central hub for students, educators, scholars, and the public to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America’s revolutionary city. Learn more here.

About SHEAR Civics Exchange:
A site to connect members of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture, and the relationship of the past to our present-day civic institutions and civic life. Learn more here.

Register  

About the speakers:

Andrew Shankman received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He has served as the editor of the Journal of the Early Republic and is at present President-Elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and President of the Executive Council of The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He is the author of Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding and Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania and of the edited collections Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for A Continent, and Rethinking America: Empire to Republic, as well as over twenty essays on the American Revolution and the founding era. 

Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, specializes in early American politics and political culture. Her interest in political violence and political polarization—dirty, nasty, politics—has made her work particularly relevant in recent years. Freeman’s award-winning first book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2001), explored political combat on the national stage in the Founding era.  Her forthcoming book (coming this September from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, focuses on physically violent clashes in the House and Senate chambers, and how they shaped and savaged the nation. Freeman has long been committed to public-minded history. Co-host of the popular American history podcast BackStory, Freeman is a frequent public speaker, commentator, and historical consultant whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. She has been featured in documentaries on PBS and the History Channel, and been a political commentator on CNN and MSNBC. Her Yale online course, The American Revolution, has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people in homes and classrooms around the world. 

Dr. Slonimsky is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Iona University, where she is also the Director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies . She is the author of the forthcoming The Engine of Free Expression: Copyright and the State in Early America and co-editor of American Revolutions in the Digital Age. 

Bayard L. Miller serves as the Associate Director of Digital Initiatives & Technology at the American Philosophical Society, where he has dedicated over a decade to advancing the APS’s digital collections and leading major digitization and digital humanities projects. He directs the Center for Digital Scholarship and sets the strategic direction for technology initiatives across the institution. Since 2020, he has led the development of The Revolutionary City (Rev City), a multi-institutional digital initiative with an ambitious mission: to build the largest known collection of digitized documents related to the Revolutionary period as it unfolded in Philadelphia. More than a digitization project, Rev City is a direct response to an information landscape saturated with content of uneven quality—offering trustworthy, accessible resources to audiences seeking credible history. Bayard earned his M.A. in Public History and Archives from Temple University’s Center for Public History.

Lauren Duval is an associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on women, gender, and families during the era of the American Revolution. She is the author of The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2025), which was awarded the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award for First Book and was a finalist for the 2026 James Kirby Martin Book Prize. She has also published an award-winning article in the William and Mary Quarterly and her work has appeared in several edited volumes on the American Revolution. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. 

Christina Snyder is the McCabe-Greer Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University. Snyder earned her A.B. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Snyder’s research focuses on North America, and especially the Southeast, from the 16th to 19th centuries. Snyder is the author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) and Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard, 2010). These books received a wide range of accolades, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the National Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware, where she also is Director of its Museum Studies and Public Engagement Program. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture and public history. Her award-winning first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. Her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025) has been featured in Smithsonian magazine, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. An avid public historian, her work has appeared in Time magazine, Mount Vernon Magazine, Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend and Tradition magazine, and The Washington Post. She often works with museums on exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Early American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is creator/cohost of the podcast Thing 4 Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens (Season 1, “The Stuff of Revolution,” streaming now wherever you listen to podcasts). But according to her children, the only cool thing on her C.V. is that she served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, Hamilton: The Exhibition.