Traveling Through History

Adrian Finucane, Ph.D., said she fell in love with history when growing up surrounded by historic buildings in Boston. "Buildings are a connection to the place and its history," she said.

Finucane, now an associate professor of history in Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, recently received a $6,000 summer stipend to enhance research in the historical connections between people and the places they lived during the 18th century.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports her second book "Captive Exchanges: Prisoners of War and the Trade in Secrets, 1700-1760," which addresses themes of warfare and imprisonment in the Atlantic world, specifically people who lived and traveled during the 18th century in the Americas, Africa and Europe. In addition, the book aims to uncover the experiences of prisoners of war before international laws were made about the capturing and confinement of captives. "The most interesting part about the research is how certain people can come into play and change the larger forces (the empire and cultural contact in the Atlantic world)," said Finucane, adding she intends to show how prisoners of war acted as a crucial part in developing military and commercial intelligence for the conflict between the southeastern British colonies and Spanish Florida.

With the summer stipend, Finucane planned to travel to different countries to carry out more of her research for the book but, "due to COVID, it has been a slow process in writing the book because all of my research is from digital archives from London and Madrid," she said.

"Follow the stories that really interest you and be open to following historical figures that travel around," Finucane suggests to others interested in historical events.