The history department at UAHuntsville is pleased to announce the fall History Forum.
On October 23, 2012, Dr. Richard Godbeer from the University of Miami will share his latest research on New England witch trials and manhood in the 17th century.
Dr. Godbeer's public lecture is entitled “‘Your wife will be your biggest accuser’: Reinforcing Codes of Manhood at New England Witch Trials.”
The lecture will be at 7:00 p.m. in 419 Roberts Hall on the University Alabama in Huntsville campus.
Dr. Godbeer has made outstanding contributions in religious and gender studies. His 1994 work Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England was published in 1994 by Cambridge University Press and won the Annual Book Prize of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. In his 2005 Oxford University monograph entitled Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692, he broke down New England stereotypes while detailing the Stamford, Connecticut, witchcraft hysteria.
In 2004, Dr. Godbeer again overturned conventional wisdom, this time about the sexual values and customs of colonial Americans in his The Sexual Revolution in Early America, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This work was a Selection of the History Book Club.
More recently, Dr. Godbeer compelled readers to re-think early American gender roles and sexuality, showing how sentimental, even physically expressive, relationships between eighteenth century men provided a basis for nation building in The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic also published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
At the moment, Dr. Godbeer is working on a biography of Henry and Elizabeth Drinker, a prominent eighteenth-century Philadelphia Quaker couple.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
