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About the Book

Mostly hidden from public view, like an embarrassing family secret, scores of putative locks of George Washington’s hair are held, more than two centuries after his death, in the collections of America’s historical societies, public and academic archives, and museums. Excavating the origins of these bodily artifacts, Keith Beutler uncovers a forgotten strand of early American memory practices and emerging patriotic identity.

Between 1790 and 1840, popular memory took a turn toward the physical, as exemplified by the craze for collecting locks of Washington’s hair. These new, sensory views of memory enabled African American Revolutionary War veterans, women, evangelicals, and other politically marginalized groups to enter the public square as both conveyors of these material relics of the Revolution and living relics themselves.

George Washington’s Hair introduces us to a taxidermist who sought to stuff Benjamin Franklin’s body, an African American storyteller brandishing a lock of Washington’s hair, an evangelical preacher burned in effigy, and a schoolmistress who politicized patriotic memory by privileging women as its primary bearers. As Beutler recounts in vivid prose, these and other ordinary Americans successfully enlisted memory practices rooted in the physical to demand a place in the body politic, powerfully contributing to antebellum political democratization.

About the Author

Keith Beutler is professor of History at Missouri Baptist University. He received his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. 

His research into memory of the American Revolution and Founding has been published as a chapter in a University of Massachusetts Press anthology.

He has received numerous research fellowships, including from the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Virginia Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Dr. Beutler was a member of the Washington Library's 2020-21 class of research fellows.