"Pursuing Happiness in the Revolutionary Atlantic" was the 2024 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Lecture given by historian Sarah Pearsall on May 13, 2024 at the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in Charlottesville, VA. 

About this event

Happiness was a preoccupation for many in the Anglophone world of the 1770s. However, what did it mean for the individuals—from noted authors such as Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley to far more obscure debaters, voyagers, and letter-writers of this era—who used it? This question, deceptively simple, opens up new ways of approaching this era. This lecture will grapple with the concept of happiness, puzzling out what it meant to a wide range of people across a broader landscape.

About Sarah Pearsall

Sarah Pearsall is an American historian specialized in the history of North America in the early modern era, especially the colonial and revolutionary periods of what is now the United States. Her scholarship probes the intersection of intimate lives with the larger development, maintenance, and end of formal colonies in North American settings. She is a professor in the department of history, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.