John Wood Sweet (NHC Fellow, 2011–12; 2024–25)

John Wood Sweet is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specializes in Early American history—a field that encompasses the intertwined histories of European settlers, Native peoples, and Africans in North America from the earliest colonial encounters through the Age of Revolution. He is also interested in the history of gender and sexuality and served as the director of UNC’s interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. In his first book, Bodies Politic, Sweet explored how settler colonialism, slavery, and racialism shaped the society, politics, and culture of the American North. 

More recently, Sweet has explored ways to use life stories of marginalized people who didn’t leave much of a trace in the documentary record to reframe our understanding of Early America and the Atlantic world. His most recent book, The Sewing Girl’s Tale, was an experiment in writing character-driven narrative history. At the National Humanities Center, Sweet will be working on a contextual biography of Venture Smith, a West African who was taken captive as a child, survived the Middle Passage, was enslaved for decades in colonial North America, and published a searing account of his experiences in the era of the American Revolution.

Selected Publications

• Sweet, John Wood. The Sewing-Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2022.
• Sweet, John Wood. “The Story the Torn Gown Told: Forensic Evidence and Lanah Sawyer’s Prosecution of Henry Bedlow for Rape, New York, 1793.” Commonplace: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life (July 19, 2022).
• Browne, Randy M., Lisa A. Lindsay, and John Wood Sweet. “Rebecca’s Ordeal, from Africa to the Caribbean: Sexual Exploitation, Freedom Struggles, and Black Atlantic Biography.” Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 1 (2022): 40–67.
• Lindsay, Lisa A., and John Wood Sweet, eds. Biography and the Black Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
• Sweet, John Wood. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Fellowship Work Summary, 2011–12

John Wood Sweet spent the year working on his book The Captive’s Tale: Venture Smith and the Roots of the American Republic. He also coedited, with Lisa Lindsay, a volume of essays based on a symposium held at the Center, The Black Atlantic and the Biographical Turn, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013.