Public Programs
2009 Public Programs
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Tuesday, March 31 - 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Second Annual Adopt-A-Book Evening
See books, pamphlets, newspapers, prints and other items that have found
a home at AAS and make a contribution to help the library take in other
waifs and strays. AAS curators will give a brief overview of what they
buy and why. 2009 Adopt-A-Book Catalog
The $30 entrance fee includes drinks and hors d'oeuvres.
All proceeds will benefit the AAS acquisitions program for purchases in
the
coming year.
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Tuesday, April 7 - 7:30 p.m.
Behind Blindspot
by Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky
Accomplished historians Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky have turned their
talents to writing a novel, entitled Blindspot. Set in boisterous,
rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution,
Blindspot is
at
once fiction and history, mystery and love story, tragedy and farce.
Peopled not only with the celebrated Sons of Liberty but also with
revolutionary Boston's unsung inhabitants—women and servants,
hawkers
and rogues and pickpockets—Blindspot restores the humanity,
the
humor,
and the sex to the story of the American Revolution. In this program
Lepore and Kamensky will share both the novel and the process by which
it was created.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American
History at Harvard University and chair of Harvard's History and
Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Her
most recent book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy
in
Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize in History; winner of the New York City Book Prize and the
Anisfield-Wolf Award; and an ALA Notable Book. She is also the author of
A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United
States (2002); Encounters in the New World: A History in
Documents
(1999); and The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of
American Identity (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph
Waldo
Emerson Award, and the Berkshire Prize.
Jane Kamensky is Chair of the Department of History at Brandeis
University. She is the author, most recently, of The Exchange Artist:
A
Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse
(Viking, 2008). Her other major publications include Governing the
Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford
University
Press, 1997); and The Colonial Mosaic: American Women, 1600-1760
(Oxford
University Press, 1995). A member of the editorial boards of the
Journal
of American History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and
the
Massachusetts Historical Review, Kamensky co-founded
Common-place, an
award-winning online journal sponsored by the American Antiquarian
Society that she and Jill Lepore created and co-edited from 2000 to
2004.
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Tuesday, April 21 - 7:30 p.m.
Why Samuel Adams Matters
by Ira Stoll
When the top British general in America, Thomas Gage offered a general
amnesty in June 1775 to all revolutionaries who would lay down their
arms, he excepted only two men: John Hancock and Sam Adams. These two
would hang. Speaking about his new book Samuel Adams: A Life,
Worcester
native, historian and journalist Ira Stoll will describe the pivotal
role that Adams played in the fight for our nation.s formation and the
vital role religion played in the American Revolution. In doing so Stoll
also restores Adams to the first tier of the founding fathers. As
Jefferson later observed Samuel Adams was "truly the man of the
Revolution."
Ira Stoll was a founder and managing editor of The New York
Sun.
He has been a consultant to the editorial page of The Wall Street
Journal, an editor of the Jerusalem Post, managing editor and
Washington
correspondent of the Forward, editor of Smartertimes.com, and a
reporter
for the Los Angeles Times.
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Wednesday, May 6 - 7:30 p.m.
Passing Strange
By Martha A. Sandweiss
Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth century Western history; a
brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and
architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War.
Secretary of State John Hay named King "the best and brightest of his
generation." But King had a secret: for thirteen years he lived a double
life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist and writer
Clarence
King and as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd. In
this lecture, based upon her latest book, Sandweiss reveals how she
uncovered the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public
eye.
Martha A. Sandweiss is professor of history at Princeton
University. She previously taught for twenty years at Amherst College.
She is the author or editor of numerous books on American history and
photography including Print the Legend: Photography and the American
West (2002), winner of the Organization of American Historians' Ray
Allen Billington Award for the best book in American frontier history
and the William P. Clements Award. Her other works include Laura
Gilpin:
An Enduring Grace, winner of the George Wittenborn Award for
outstanding
art book of 1987. She has also co-edited The Oxford History of the
American West (1994), recipient of the Western Heritage Award and
the
Caughey Western History Association prize for the year's outstanding
book in Western history.
When the AAS was founded in 1812, and for much of the nineteenth
century,
most educated men and women took an interest in history as one of the
obligations of being citizens in the American republic. As the writing and
teaching of history became increasingly professionalized and specialized
in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gaps developed between
academic historians and the general public.
As one of the few American
learned societies whose membership rolls include a substantial proportion
of lay people as well as scholars, AAS is committed to help bring the work
of American historians before the general public--to connect scholars and
citizens, in other words. AAS public programs spotlight the work not only
of historians but also of creative and performing artists and writers who
have performed
research at the Society.
Programs include a wide variety of events,
including lectures, book discussions,
theatrical and musical
presentations, and film showings. Some of these public programs reach
wider
audiences by being taped for presentation of National Public Radio and on
the weekend Book TV programming of the national cable network C-SPAN 2.
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All programs take place in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street,
Worcester, Massachusetts.
For a complete listing of upcoming events at AAS, please view our
calendar
For further information about our public programs, contact James David
Moran at jmoran[at]mwa.org or call our main number at 508-755-5221
Directions to Antiquarian Hall
The American Antiquarian Society is funded in part by the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, a state agency that supports public programs in the
arts, humanities, and sciences.
2006 Public Programs
2007 Public Programs
2008 Public Programs
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