On Friday, June 8, Will Mackintosh, assistant professor of history and American studies, presented a paper entitled “The Loomis Gang and the Funhouse Mirror of Nineteenth-Century Economic Modernity” at the “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America” conference in Philadelphia, Pa. The conference was jointly hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and was organized in conjunction with a special exhibit at the Library Company on the topic of illegitimate and semi-legitimate economies in American history.
In addition to his work at the June event, Dr. Mackintosh also presented a second paper entitled “Mechanical Aesthetics: Picturesque Tourism and the Transportation Revolution ” at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Conference in Baltimore this past July. This paper was presented as part of a panel about rethinking 19th-century US transportation technology from a cultural and experiential perspective.