Episode 198: A Sewing’s Girl’s Tale with Author John Wood Sweet

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by John Wood Sweet, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and author.

The two discuss his book The Sewing Girls Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America and how narrative nonfiction helps us, the reader, get a glimpse into the past in ways we may have never thought were possible.

Please note/content warning: this episode discusses a historical sexual assault case. 

Episode 191: Mathew Pearl on Narrative Non-Fiction and The Taking of Jemima Boone

Episode 166: Picturing Frederick Douglass

About My Guest:

John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and former director of UNC’s Program in Sexuality Studies. He graduated from Amherst College (summa cum laude) and earned his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University. His first book, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and his work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the McNeil Center at Penn, and the Center for Global Studies in Culture, Power, and History at Johns Hopkins. 

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London, and Canada.  She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website, and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles, and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

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