Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nation wrestled with its identity. During the colonial period, hair was usually seen as bodily discharge, even “excrement.” But as Sarah Gold McBride shows, hair gradually came to be understood as an integral part of the body, capable of exposing truths about the individuals from whom it grew—even truths they wanted to hide.

Join us in person or virtually to hear biographer Richard Kopley present on on his new book Edgar Allan Poe--A Life, followed by a discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall.

Join us virtually or in person for a conversation between visual artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson and AAS Councilmember Deborah Hall. 

Popular accounts of the American Revolution often emphasize the contributions of New England. When they invoke the region, they frequently mean Massachusetts, more specifically Boston, and often a set of fifteen to twenty men in particular—occasionally narrowed down simply to two Adamses, a Hancock, perhaps an Otis and Cushing, and maybe a Benjamin Edes or Paul Revere. This course will expand that perspective. New England encompassed a broad geography and range of experiences during the second half of the eighteenth century.