American Studies Seminar
Each year the Society sponsors the American Studies Seminar for a select group of undergraduates from the five four-year colleges and universities in Worcester: Assumption College, Clark University, the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State College.
The theme and leader of each year's seminar changes, but all provide a rare opportunity for undergraduates to do primary research in a major research library.
Admission to the seminar is competitive and is coordinated by faculty representatives on each of the participation campuses.
Topics under scrutiny have ranged from popular culture in colonial America to the myth of violence in the late-nineteenth-century American West.
Previous American Studies Seminars
| Year | Topic | Leader |
| 2012 | Reason, Revival, and Revolution: Religion in America's Founding, 1726-1792 | Stephen A. Marini |
| 2011 |
Dressing Democracy: Clothing and Culture in America |
Hannah Carlson |
| 2010 | History of Sexuality in Early America | Sarah Anne Carter |
| 2009 |
America's Environmental Histories |
Megan Kate Nelson |
| 2008 |
"Written by himself... Written by herself" American Life Stories: The Northern United States 1780-1860 |
Jack Larkin |
| 2007 | Captive Histories: Puritan Captivity Narratives and Native Stories from the Era of the Colonial Wars, 1675-1760 | Kevin Sweeney |
| 2006 | Personal Narratives from the Age of the American Revolution, Or Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times | Joseph Cullon |
| 2005 | Childhoods, Actual and Imagined: New England, 1790-1860 | Jack Larkin |
| 2004 | Communication in the Early Nation: Literacy and Print in America, 1750-1840 | Catherine A. Corman |
| 2003 | Imagining the Civil War: Race, Gender, and Popular Culture, 1860-1877 | Carolyn J. Lawes |
| 2002 | Private Writings: Their Uses and Value for History and Literature | Helen R. Deese |
| 2001 | Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture in Early America, 1674-1860 | Daniel A. Cohen |
| 2000 | Romanticism Confronts History: Literary and Material Culture in the United States, 1820-1876. | Harvey Green |
| 1999 | The Shaping of Historical Memory: Collecting the Artifacts of America's Past, 1790-1840 | Barnes Riznik |
| 1998 | Seeing America First: Exploration and Imagination in North America, 1500-1900 | Gregory H. Nobles |
| 1997 | Accounts of the Self: Autobiography and Personal Narrative in Antebellum America | Ann Fabian |
| 1996 | Revolutionary Narratives: Memory and Desire in Antebellum America | Wayne Franklin |
| 1995 | Wilderness Views: Nature as Other, Self, and Enterprise in American Culture c.1776-1900. | Janice Simon |
| 1994 | Children's Books and Childhood Reading in Early America | Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. |
| 1993 | The Invention of New England in the Nineteenth Century | Dona Brown |
| 1992 | Gender in the Nineteenth Century | Lee Heller |
| 1991 | Slavery and Antislavery in American Civilization, 1820-1861 | William W. Freehling |
| 1990 | Law and Society in America, 1760-1860 | Jonathan M. Chu |
| 1989 | Religion in the American Revolution | Stephen A. Marini |
| 1988 | Health and Health Care in America's Past | Philip Cash |
| 1987 | The Constitution and the Press, 1787-88: Popular Culture, Political Opinion, and the Ratification Debates | Charles E. Clark |
| 1986 | The American Landscape | John Conron |
| 1985 | Antebellum and Civil War Biography | Betty Mitchell |
| 1984 | The Lethal Imagination: Perceptions of Western Violence in American Thought, 1850-1900 | Robert R. Dykstra |
| 1983 | Ethnic America Before the Flood: the Irish and Others | Charles Fanning |
| 1982 | High Culture, Low Culture: Recreation and Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America | Donald M. Scott |
| 1981 | Individual, Family, and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England | Ross W. Beales |
| 1980 | Community Life in Preindustrial Worcester | Kenneth Moynihan and Charles Estus |
| 1979 | Popular Culture in Preindustrial America, 1650-1850 | David Hall |
| 1978 | Literature and Society in Jacksonian America: Writers Confront the Marketplace | Stephen Nissenbaum |
