Programs > Academic Programs

American Studies Seminar

Seminar leader and participants
2007 American Studies Seminar participants with leader Kevin Sweeney.

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 2007 seminar, Captive Histories: Puritan Captivity Narratives and Native Stories from the Era of the Colonial Wars, 1675-1760, was taught by Kevin Sweeney, Professor of History and American Studies at Amherst College.

seminar discussion
A seminar discussion in the Elmarion Room
of the Goddard Daniels House.

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
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
student examines collections
Kristen Barnes unfolds an 1836 hand-colored woodcut frontispiece from the Narrative of the massacre, by the savages, of the wife & children of Thomas Baldwin.
student examines collections
Jonathan Grant looks at an 1854 Massachusetts Sabbath School Society pamphlet entitled The Indian Girl.
student examines collections
Derek Heidemann with a rare Benjamin Church piece titled Entertaining passages relating to Philip's War dated 1716.

Additional Information

2007 American Studies Seminar leader Kevin Sweeney is Professor of History and American Studies at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1989. With Evan Haefeli, he has published Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Captive Histories: English, French and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), as well as articles on the Pennacook sachem Wattanummon and on the political uses of captivity narratives. He is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "The Sixty Years' War: Border Wars of the Northeast, 1688-1748."

Interested students enrolled in one of the five partisipating colleges should contact their campus representative for more information about applying for the 2008 seminar.

Campus Representatives

Assumption:
Kenneth Moynihan, History
kmoyniha[at]assumption.edu

Clark:
Meredith Neuman, English
MeNeuman[at]clarku.edu

Holy Cross:
Gwenn Miller, History
gmiller[at]holycross.edu

WPI:
David Rawson, Humanities and Arts
drawson@wpi.edu

Worcester State:
Charlotte Haller, History and Political Science
challer1[at]worcester.edu