Joanne Freeman: John Jay Lectures, Joanne Freeman, Dissent in our Democracy: Yale Professor fo History and American Studies, Joanne Freeman kicks off the Friends of John Jay Homestead’s 2020’s Scholar’s Lectures. Freeman will discuss her new book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. The book’s foundation rests on the famed 1856 Senate floor altercation wherein Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was caned nearly to death by Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Freeman goes on to cite 70 more examples beginning in the 1830s of increasing physical violence, sectional intensity, and paralyzing effect on Congress.

Freeman is one of the country’s foremost scholars on Alexander Hamilton, having studies his life for forty years. Her interest in violence in Congress, it would seem, is a spinoff of her studies on Hamilton and his even more famous duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804.

Field of Blood was named a finalist for the Lincoln Prize, and has been included on many notables lists, including the New York Times and Smithsonian.

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