Lecture Date: February 26, 2026
The Irene and Curry Roberts Lecture
On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, three young girls disappeared near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air. A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party took thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers. Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognized one of the captives as Jemima, daughter of Kentucky’s most influential pioneers, Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He realized she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good.
With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devised a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone’s kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America’s westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensued.
In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America’s transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.
Speaker: Matthew Pearl
Matthew Pearl is the New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club and the editor of the Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murder in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. The Dante Club has been published in more than thirty languages and forty countries. His other novels include The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, The Technologists and The Last Bookaneer – all of which stage fascinating real-life historical figures in brilliant crime narratives that earn loyal readers worldwide. His non-fiction book, The Taking of Jemima Boone, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone’s daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. Pearl is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and has taught literature at Harvard and at Emerson College.