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March 18, 2025 at 5:00 pm ET
Nicole Breault, University of Texas at El Paso
“The Work of Boston’s Watch”

The paper examines the contours of night watch duties and early policing practice. In examining the range of duties attended to by the night watch, such as fire prevention, protection of property, and communal care, along with policing disorder, it focuses on the intersections of governance, carcerality, criminality, and welfare. Drawing on the reports written by Boston’s night constables, the chapter illuminates the everyday rituals that animated watchkeeping and how police practice operated both against and in harmony with the ways people moved, lived, and survived in the urban environment.

Nicole Breault is an assistant professor of History at the University of Texas El Paso. She received her doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 2022. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, American Philosophical Society, Boston Athenæum, Huntington Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Early Republic, with forthcoming pieces in the New England Quarterly and The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History. In 2024-2025, she was named a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Fellow and a UTEP-EPCC Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellow. Dr. Breault’s book manuscript-in-progress “Set the Watch: Policing and Governance in Early America” is an account of how nightly watches, a form of early policing, reflected and embodied changes in the meaning and methods of governance in colonial, revolutionary, and immediate post-revolutionary Boston.