Litigating and Lawyering while Black in Late 18th-Century Massachusetts
Cornelia Dayton (Professor of History, UConn)
with a response by Yuhan Liang (Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, UConn)
Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
The talk presents an overview of new research findings on the legal activities of John Peters of Boston (ca. 1745–1801). His multi-faceted entwinement with the law may have been the most extensive for any Black person in the Northeast in the 1700s. Peters was a savvy litigator who employed eminent lawyers and called himself a lawyer at one point. As a Black man who aspired to gentility and who married a celebrated Black woman of letters, the poet Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), Peters drew some Whites’ ire and condescension. My larger aim is to produce a biography of Peters framed for academic, classroom, and general audiences.
Cornelia H. Dayton is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. Her research and teaching interests include law and society; women, gender, and sexuality; Black lives in the northeast and Atlantic world; Revolutionary-era Boston; marital elopement notices; the poor relief practice of warning newcomers; and New Englanders’ responses to mental health challenges prior to 1840. She is a co-editor of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, heading into its 10th edition; author of Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789; Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (with Sharon V. Salinger); “Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an 18th-Century New England Village” (William and Mary Quarterly); and, most recently, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton,” in The New England Quarterly.
Yuhan Liang is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research is interdisciplinary and involves Chinese philosophy, virtue epistemology, and moral psychology. At UCHI, she works on the dissertation “Confucian exemplars and Moral Diversity.” This dissertation aims to reconcile moral diversity and consistency via exemplarism approaches. Unlike most Anglo-American philosophies that adopt a top-down approach to studying moral questions in the frame of normative ethics and metaethics, Confucian exemplarism provides a bottom-up pragmatic approach: through reverse engineer exemplars’ everyday practices or instructions, we reconstruct the theoretical commitments based on their moral excellency.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
