The publishers, booksellers, journalists, and anonymous writers of that time were in many ways just as important in creating momentum as were great philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. A significant theme of her discussions at BU, she says, will be the paradigm in which the early modern Europeans viewed science, politics, and religion as interconnected. That kind of interplay between the moral, the human, and the natural was very much in the minds of the Europeans. Much of her work looks at the relationship between radicalism and the American, French, and Dutch revolutions. Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe explores the role of Masonic lodges of the 17th and 18th centuries in spreading such democratic ideas as the right of free assembly and representative government.
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The academic study of ordinary citizens challenging the establishment resonates for Jacob in a personal way. Her Catholic working-class parents immigrated to the United States from Northern Ireland, where they had refused to identify themselves with the British crown. During the 1960s, while earning her B.A. at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, N.Y., she worked for an underground anticlerical newspaper called The Lutheran. Jacob earned her Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 1968, at a time when few women were accepted to the doctoral program. Four years later, she participated in a floor fight at an American Historical Association convention, demanding that all academic positions be publicly advertised so as to open doors for female and minority candidates.