Join the celebrated author Nina Sankovitch to explore the life, influence, and impact of a very different Colonial-era opinion-leader in New England. Beyond the Hancock, Adams, Quincy, and Lowell families featured in her previous works, meet a forgotten early American renegade minister and see just how radical the American experiment could have been.

On October 10, 1776, in a small Rhode Island farming community, twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died, and the Public Universal Friend was born, claiming to be a genderless messenger of God. It was scandalous, yet something about the dynamic young minister set war-ravaged New England ablaze—the embodiment of the myriad possibilities offered by the new nation, especially the right to total self-determination. To authorities, however, the minister was “the devil in petticoats,” a threat to the men who sought to keep America’s power for themselves. Join the popular historian Nina Sankovitch and moderator Joan Ilacqua of Queer History Boston for a discussion of Not Your Founding Father and the Public Universal Friend who ventured west to create an Eden on the frontier, but was brought down by financial scams, contested wills, adultery, plagiarism, allegations of murder, and murmurs of another war with England.

Nina Sankovitch is the author of several nonfiction books, including American Rebels: How the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution and The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family, and the acclaimed memoir, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading.  She is graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Vogue.

Joan Ilacqua is the Executive Director of Queer History Boston. An award-winning public historian and community archivist, Joan has spent over a decade collecting, preserving, and sharing stories that center marginalized communities. She serves on the Boston 400th Anniversary Commemoration Commission and the Community Archives Collaborative Steering Committee.

Presented in partnership with Queer HIstory Boston