Serena Zabin is the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. Her research focuses on families, gender, and politics in the era of the American Revolution. Professor Zabin is the author, most recently, of the prizewinning The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), which was also named an Amazon Editor’s Choice for History in 2020. She has written two other books about early America: Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings (Bedford St. Martins, 2004). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies among other grants. She currently serves as the Vice-President of the Teaching Division for the American Historical Association and was recently President of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. In 2024-2025, she was the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library.

The story of the Boston Massacre—when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death—is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political. Join us as Serena Zabin discusses her book, The Boston Massacre: A Family History, in which she draws on original sources and lively stories to follow British troops as they are dispatched from Ireland to Boston in 1768 to subdue the increasingly rebellious colonists. She will reveal a forgotten world hidden in plain sight: the many regimental wives and children who accompanied these armies. We see these families jostling with Bostonians for living space, finding common cause in the search for a lost child, trading barbs, and sponsoring baptisms. In other words, they became neighbors. When soldiers shot unarmed citizens in the street, it was these intensely human, now broken bonds that fueled what quickly became a bitterly fought American Revolution.