Lectures and Performances

Thursday, May 23, at 7:00 p.m.
“Hidden Histories in Nineteenth-Century Scrapbooks”
By Ellen Gruber Garvey

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks --- the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Mark Twain to Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Their scrapbooks -- some of them at AAS -- left us a rarely examined record of what they read and how they read it. This talk, based on Ellen Gruber Garvey's new book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans.

Ellen Gruber Garvey is a professor in the English Department of New Jersey City University, where she also teaches Women's and Gender Studies. Her book on American magazines, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture won the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing’s prize for the best book of 1996 on the history of the book. She has written and lectured in Europe and the U.S. on scrapbooks and on women’s bicycling, as well as on magazines, billboards, women editors, and stories about slave ships. She co-edits the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. In 2009, Garvey researched Writing with Scissors at AAS as a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson fellow.

Thursday, June 6, at 7:00 p.m.
“Parallel Lives of a Patriotic Heroine and a Spy”
by Nancy Rubin Stuart

Ever wonder why the rights of women are still endangered today? Or how marriage can change the destiny of those who marry powerful men? Award-winning author Nancy Rubin Stuart’s presentation from her double biography, Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women Who Married Political Radicals illustrates how two teenage brides managed long, happy marriages to famous Revolutionary-era men. Their husbands were the handsome traitor Benedict Arnold and the patriotic General Henry Knox.

Defiant Brides captures how passion and marriage changed the lives of both young women: – Peggy Shippen who assisted Arnold in his betrayal of America, – and Lucy Flucker, who faithfully followed General Henry Knox through the army camps of the Revolution, bearing and losing ten children along the way.

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author and journalist whose books include The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation; The Reluctant Spiritualist: the Life of Maggie Fox; American Empress: the Life and Times of Marjorie Meriweather Fox; and Isabella of Castile. She has written for The New York Times and many national magazines. Stuart currently serves as Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, and is a board member of the Women Writing Women's Lives Seminar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Stuart received a William Randolph Hearst Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society in 2005 to research The Muse of the Revolution.

Date to be Announced
“Emancipating Lincoln: How the Great Emancipator Led---and Misled---America to Freedom,”
By Harold Holzer
Co-sponsored by the Franklin M. Loew Lecture Series at Becker College

In its own time, the Emancipation Proclamation was considered a politically risky, even revolutionary act. In more recent years, many Americans have been taught that it was cautious, insincere, and ineffective. What was the true impact and intent of Lincoln's most famous executive order? And what did he do to prepare the public for its announcement--sometimes to the detriment of his own reputation? This lecture will examine the weeks leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, and explore the occasional differences between what Lincoln said and what he did on the issue of slavery.

Harold Holzer is one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, and frequent guest on television, Holzer serves as chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization to the U. S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), to which he was appointed by President Clinton in 2000, and co-chaired from 2001–2010. President Bush, in turn, awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008.

Harold Holzer has authored, co-authored, and edited 43 books. His latest books are How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America, the official young adult companion book to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln film; and Emancipating Lincoln: The Emancipation Proclamation In Text, Context, and Memory (Harvard University Press).

Previous 2013 Lectures and Performances

Wednesday, April 24, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at the Hanover Theatre, 2 Southbridge St., Worcester MA 01608
“Creating Historical Theater: A Dramatic Reading of Sockdology”
With Jeffrey Hatcher
In partnership with the Hanover Theatre
Cost: $10 for the general public, free for Hanover and AAS members
Reserve tickets by calling: 508-471-1781

This program will feature a reading of the play Sockdology by Jeffrey Hatcher and a discussion about creating historical theater. "Sockdology" is a nineteenth-century boxing term that means a “finishing blow” or the “brutal end of everything.” It is part of the dialogue of the play Our American Cousin and was likely the last word Abraham Lincoln heard before he was assassinated while watching this play at Ford’s Theater. Hatcher used this historical footnote to create a play about the acting troupe performing Our American Cousin and the impact Lincoln’s death had on them and the nation.

Jeffrey Hatcher is a playwright and screenwriter whose work has appeared on Broadway, off-Broadway and in theaters across the country and internationally. He wrote the play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which he later adapted into the screenplay Stage Beauty. He also co-wrote the stage adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie with Mitch Albom. Hatcher wrote the screenplays for the films Casanova and The Duchess and has also written for the Peter Falk TV series Columbo. His other plays include Scotland Road, Three Viewings, A Picasso, and such adaptations as The Turn of the Screw, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, and The Good Soldier. Hatcher researched Sockdology as one of the first AAS Creative and Performing Artist and Writers fellows in 1995, when the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund supported the program.

Thursday, May 2, at 7:00 p.m.
“Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution”
By Nathaniel Philbrick

For most of us the American Revolution is about the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and how George Washington led the colonies through the decade-long struggle that ultimately led to the formation of the United States. Lost in this account toward liberty is the truly cataclysmic nature of how the revolution began: the interplay of ideologies and personalities that provoked a group of merchants, farmers, artisans, and sailors to take up arms against their own country. In this lecture, based upon his forthcoming book Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution, award-winning and bestselling author, Nathaniel Philbrick, describes pre-Revolutionary Boston—a city of 15,000 inhabitants packed onto a land-connected island of just 1.2 square miles—and the gradual up-tick of tension that climaxed in June 1775 with the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major and decisive battle of what became the American Revolution.

In Bunker Hill, which will be published by Viking Press on April 30, 2013, Philbrick brings a fresh perspective to every aspect of the story. As it turns out, the triumvirate of Founding Fathers generally associated with revolutionary Boston—John Adams, Sam Adams, and John Hancock—was nowhere to be found when it came to the real work of choreographing its outbreak. Thirty-three-year-old physician, Joseph Warren emerged as the on-the-ground leader of the Patriot cause. Warren gave William Dawes and Paul Revere the orders to send out the alarm that British troops were headed to Concord; Warren remained in the city until the last possible moment, and was then elected President of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress even as he supervised the organization of the nascent Continental Army.

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (2006), which was a finalist for both the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Award and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. Philbrick is also the author of the acclaimed international bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Among the other books he has written are The Last Stand; Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition, 1838–42; Revenge of the Whale, an account of the Essex disaster for young readers; and The Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ New World: The Story of Plymouth Colony for Young Readers. He is founding director of the Egan Maritime Institute on Nantucket Island and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association. A champion sailboat racer, he has also written extensively about sailing.

Thursday, May 9, at 7:00 p.m.
“Spectacle and Reform in Nineteenth-Century America”
By Amy E. Hughes

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television arrived to electrify audiences with explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that offered audiences such thrills, with "sensation scenes" of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. Based upon her latest book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America, Hughes program scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing that spectacle plays a crucial role in American activism. Engaging evidence from lithographs to children's books to typography catalogs, she will trace the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard suffering from the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—and argues that spectacle was central to the dramaturgy of reform. Ultimately, she suggests that today’s producers and advertisers still exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through electronic media and the Internet.

Amy Hughes is an assistant professor of theater at Brooklyn College. Her scholarly expertise is in United States theater, visual, and material culture during the nineteenth century. Additionally she studies theater and performance in the Republic of Turkey and specializes in collaborative learning and other nontraditional pedagogical methods. In 2009, Hughes was awarded by AAS a Deborah and Jay Last Fellowship to research Spectacles of Reform in the Society’s collections.

Tuesday, May 14, at 7:00 p.m.
“Factual Flights and Fictional Worlds: Historical Truth and Narrative Invention in The Movement of Stars”
By Amy Brill

Amy Brill’s debut novel The Movement of Stars was researched at the American Antiquarian Society and is inspired by the work of Maria Mitchell, the first professional female astronomer in America. The novel tells the story of Hannah Gardner Price, a young woman living on Nantucket in 1845 whose passion for astronomy and her relationships with a whaler from the Azores put her in direct conflict with the mores and conventions of the Nantucket Quaker community in which she was raised, where simplicity and restraint are valued above all, and a woman’s path is expected to lead to marriage and motherhood. During this presentation, Brill will read selections from her novel and comment on the journey of research and writing that led to its creation.

Amy Brill is a writer and producer. Her articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous publications including Salon, Guernica, and Time Out New York, and have been anthologized in Before and After: Stories from New York and Lost and Found. As a broadcast journalist, she received a George Foster Peabody Award for writing MTV’s The Social History of HIV, and she researched, wrote, or produced over a dozen other projects for the network’s pro-social initiatives. She was an AAS Robert and Charlotte Baron Creative Artist Fellow in 2005.