May 22: Defying the Crown in Early Cambridge

Defying the Crown in Early Cambridge: The 1664 Petition Campaign and Grassroots Constitutionalism 

Thursday, May 22, 2025
6:30 – 8:00pm
Cambridge Room of the Cambridge Public Library Main Branch
449 Broadway
Free, registration required

Join us for this event in collaboration with our friends at the Cambridge Public Library.

The new king Charles II sent royal commissioners to New England in 1664 in order to pressure colonists into compliance with his metropolitan agenda. When these royal commissioners tried to claim full authority over local courts and militias, Cambridge inhabitants were among the first to act in defiance. Their grassroots petition campaign drew on the experience of the English civil wars and pointed the way forward to the American Revolution.

Adrian Chastain Weimer is a Professor of History at Providence College and is currently a Long-term Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library. She is the author of A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 2011).