Please join us for a webinar on May 9 at 11:30 a.m. EDT, featuring Mary Babson Fuhrer and Richard Smith on Entering the Past, part of the Princeton University Class of ’79 Authors & Artists series. Mary and Richard are both award-winning authors of, respectively, nonfiction history and historical fiction. They will discuss the challenges of researching and recreating the worlds – physical, mental, emotional – of times dramatically different from our own. Their 1-hour discussion will be followed by a half-hour Q&A.
Mary Fuhrer’s book, A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town (UNC Press, 2014), traces the economic, social, and religious upheavals of the early 19th century. Using diaries and letters, Mary examines how various individuals in a Massachusetts village might have coped with the strife and instability of this period. More recently, in “Accompanying the Sick Poor in the ‘New’ City of Boston” (New England Quarterly, 2025), Mary examines the impact of tuberculosis on impoverished Bostonians in the early 1800s. Many were isolated newcomers to the city, and relied on communities of volunteers to care for them. Mary is a social historian and writes for academic and popular journals as well as state historical, humanities, and heritage organizations.
Richard Smith’s most recent book, Beyond Where Words Can Go (Bauhan Publishing), traces a group of Tudor-era monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and England’s zigzags into Protestantism. His first book, Not a Soul but Us (Bauhan, 2022), tells the story of a 12-year-old boy orphaned and abandoned during the plague pandemic in mid-14th-century Yorkshire. Both these historical novels are narrated as sequences of sonnets. Richard is a psychologist with a clinical practice in Washington, D.C.