American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Scott Casper will return to Antiquarian Hall to describe the process of researching and writing his latest book, Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon (Macmillan, 2008) It is a process that began in the collections of the Society ten years ago. In this work Casper recovers the remarkable history of former slave Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, before and after emancipation. Through her life and the lives of her family and friends, Casper provides an intimate picture of Mount Vernon's operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon recounts the experience of the hundreds of African Americans who are forgotten in the narrative of one of our nation's most famous shrines.
Scott Casper, professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, and (for 2008-2009) visiting editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, studies and teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history, American cultural history, and the history of the book. With Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, he edited A History of the Book in America: Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (2007). His first book, Constructing American Lives (1999), looked at biography and culture in nineteenth-century America. He has taught in K-12 teacher institutes across the United States, including Mount Vernon’s residential summer institutes since 2000, and edits the Journal of American History’s annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section.
