Nicole Breault is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. Her dissertation “The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America” undertakes the first comprehensive study of watch-keeping in early America. The project assembles and analyzes nearly three hundred reports written by night watch constables in colonial and revolutionary Boston to examine the legal, social, and cultural dimensions of setting a watch. She argues that watch-keeping was a multi-dimensional method of governance and surveillance fundamental to authority and state formation at the local level, and essential to the administration and economies of early American cities. This study deepens our understanding of how crisis and revolution affected local structures and offers new insights on the long trajectory of how policing was conducted and delimited. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the American Historical Association, the Boston Athenæum, the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, and the Huntington Library.
Research Project: “The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America”