The Legend of Deborah Sampson: America's Revolutionary Secret - Virtual

Wearing a homemade uniform, 21-year-old Robert Shurtliff, born Deborah Sampson, enlisted in the Continental Army’s 4th Massachusetts Regiment in New York in 1782 and served for around 17 months.

Join award-winning author Jen Manion, Professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, and Isabelle Held, Mellon Foundation Gender and LGBTQ+ History Postdoctoral Fellow, in conversation as they explore how Sampson/Shurtliff was part of a longer transatlantic tradition of female soldiers, sailors, and husbands who challenged established gender norms.

Isabelle Held is the Mellon Foundation Gender and LGBTQ+ History Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York Historical's Jean Margo Reid Center for Women's History. Held received her doctorate in History of Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. She has been awarded fellowships at museums including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Science History Institute. Held has taught at London College of Fashion, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Pratt Institute. She is the author of the book Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies.

Jen Manion is a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Manion is the Winkley Professor of History at Amherst College and Department Chair of Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies. Manion has written two award winning books—Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America and Female Husbands: A Trans History—and dozens of essays, including a New England Journal of Medicine  article about historic injustices toward LGBTQ people, a reflection on transgender history as a form of resistance in The New Republic, and a celebration of queer possibilities in revolutionary America in Ms. Magazine.