Before Facebook, the students of the Litchfield Law School and Female Academy depended on mingling with the town’s influential residents to expand their social networks. Mark Boonshoft will explore the dynamic political culture of the Early Republic in his lecture at the Litchfield History Museum on Sunday, March 25 at 3:00 pm.
Boonshoft will recreate the social lives of these students, whose interactions with each other and with some of Litchfield’s most important citizens during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to the creation of a nationally expansive network of information and patronage. This network helped to jumpstart the political careers of many Law School alumni. The Historical Society’s online database of Law School and Female Academy students, The Ledger, was a key component in the research for this talk.
Mark Boonshoft is a PhD student in the history department at The Ohio State University. He is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo, where he won the John T. Horton Research Paper Prize for best undergraduate research essay in history.
This lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is required. To register, please email registration@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org or call (860) 567-4501.
The Litchfield History Museum is located at 7 South Street in Litchfield, CT. For more information about this or other programs, please call or see www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org.