Winter Speaker Series: Rachel Hope Cleves
Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were commonly recognized as a married couple by their kin and community in Weybridge, Vermont, where they lived together from 1807 to 1851. Drawing from the extensive archive of Bryant and Drake’s personal papers at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, as well as from archival sources discovered throughout the United States, this talk will explore the roles that family, work, religion, love, and sexuality played in the women’s lives.
Rachel Hope Cleves is a professor of history at the University of Victoria and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of three books of history, Charity and Sylvia (2014), Unspeakable (2020), and The Reign of Terror in America (2020). She is also the author of a science-fiction novel that will be published in the summer of 2023. She is now at work on a history of food and sex from the late eighteenth century through the present day.
