WC’s 2018-19 Goodfellow Memorial Lecture Presents “In the Kingdom of Devils”

CHESTERTOWN, MD — Washington College welcomes Katherine Grandjean, associate professor of history at Wellesley College, for the 2018-2019 Guy F. Goodfellow Memorial Lecture, “In the Kingdom of Devils: The Harpe Murders and the Legacies of the American Revolution.”

Sponsored by the Department of History, the March 21, 2019 talk begins at 5 p.m. in Hynson Lounge and is free and open to the public.

Grandjean, who holds a B.A. in history from Yale University and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, researches early English colonization and the encounter with Native peoples, as well as the origins of American violence. In this talk, she discusses how on paper, the American Revolution ended in 1783, but for some, it continued. She investigates the violent legacies of the revolution, especially in the southern borderlands of the early republic. Following the lives of two brothers from North Carolina, who experienced some of the worst violence of the war as boys and, later in life, became killers, Grandjean will explore how the United States’s founding moment left behind so many violent, alienated men.

Grandjean’s work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Historical Association, and the Charles Warren Center for American History, and has appeared in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Early American Studies. A recent essay, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War,” won the American Society for Environmental History’s 2012 Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article and the William and Mary Quarterly’s 2014 Douglass Adair Memorial Award.

She recently published her first book, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England.

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