On Tuesday, April 29, 4 students accompanied Dr. Greenwald to her French history scholars working group to see how “the sausage gets made“ by sitting around a conference table and discussing a historian's work-in-progress, asking questions, debating pieces of history, and making suggestions to improve the work. We were discussing chapter 7 of a forthcoming book which is a “microhistory of the Scotch-American merchant and financier James Swan who was Paris’s longest-serving debtor, and a cause célèbre in Restoration France. Not only did h spend twenty-two years in Sainte-Pélagie for a debt he owed to a former business associate, but his life before that was just as colorful – he wrote a pamphlet at age 17 calling for reparations to enslaved people and death for enslavers, participated in the Boston Tea Party, fought in the American Revolution, served as the official French provisioning agent in the US during the Revolution, liquidated the American Revolutionary War debt to France, and was the single largest American claimant from the Louisiana Purchase funds.”
The historians appreciated the students' informed questions (they had read the chapter beforehand) and comments.
