Carleton Connects: Professor Serena Zabin

The most famous picture from eighteenth-century America is Paul Revere’s striking engraving of the “Bloody Massacre,” when British troops shot into a crowd of Bostonians, killing five. But that picture tells much less than half of the story.  Join Carleton Connects as we learn about Professor of History Serena Zabin's new research on the Boston Massacre.  Using digital mapping and social network software, Zabin’s research shows that soldiers and townspeople were intimately bound together through ties of sex, friendship, and family. Far from being strangers, on the eve of the American Revolution, soldiers and townspeople were neighbors who knew each other all too well. About the Speaker Professor Zabin is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. She is particularly interested in the ways that ordinary people had an impact on such immense and invisible institutions as empire, early capitalism, and Atlantic networks. Her current research project is a cultural and social study of the occupation of Boston that led to the Boston Massacre in 1770.  Both this project and her previous work on New York grew out of her first-year seminar entitled “Trials in Early America.” Professor Zabin came to Carleton in 2000 as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in early American history. In 2002 she accepted our very first full-time position in early American history.  Professor Zabin teaches classes on British colonial America, the American Revolution, the early republic, and the Atlantic World. A former classicist, she has also published scholarly and pedagogical materials on the ancient Mediterranean.