American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
The American Antiquarian Society is one the nation's chief repositories for newspapers published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in what is now considered the United States, portions of Canada, and the British West Indies. The collection contains more than two million issues and takes up nearly seven miles of shelving. While recently searching through a backlog of unprocessed newspapers held in the library’s stacks, AAS staff discovered two previously un-recorded issues of Peter H. Clark’s paper Herald of Freedom. These issues were published on June 2 (Volume 1, Number 1) and June 23 (Volume 1, Number 3), 1855.
Peter H. Clark, a prominent African American activist and socialist from Cincinnati, Ohio, was most well-known for his abolitionist speaking and writing. In 1855, he began a weekly abolitionist journal known as the Herald of Freedom. In the first issue published on June 2, 1855, Clark proclaimed, “As might be expected from the proprietorship, a large part of the paper will be devoted to the examination and exposure of the injustice done the FREE COLORED PEOPLE of the United States, and the energetic advocacy of all measure conducive to their political, mental, and moral elevation.” Unfortunately, the paper discontinued after only five months of publication, and Clark later moved to New York to work as an assistant editor of Frederick Douglass' Paper.
During this virtual program, historian Derrick R. Spires and AAS curator of newspapers and periodicals Vincent Golden will discuss the historical significance of the Herald of Freedom and how AAS came to acquire two issues of the short-lived publication. Eclair Morton, the 2022 AAS Conservation Intern, will discuss the significant efforts taken to conserve the nineteenth-century newspaper issues and will provide a live demonstration of some conservation techniques.
Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English and affiliate faculty in American Studies, Visual Studies, and Media Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. His work on early African American politics and print culture appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, and edited collections on early African American print culture, American literature, and the Colored Conventions movement. Spires’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon/Mays Initiatives.