History is a social science that demands evidence for its claims, but what happens when the evidence itself is unstable? Adah Isaacs Menken was a Civil War era celebrity who relied on rumor and hearsay to keep her popularity alive. Indeed, one can say that hearsay from the nineteenth-century has led to a resurgence of interest in her in the twenty-first.
This two-day hybrid Historic Children’s Voices symposium convened fifteen emerging and established scholars whose work amplifies the voices of some nineteenth-century American children or explores the archival silences of underrepresented children.
Kenneth W. Rendell―unrivaled forgery expert and trailblazing dealer of original source materials―has traveled the world to track down, buy, and sell the most significant, iconic historical letters and documents from the Renaissance to the present day. His new book Safeguarding History chronicles his adventures over the course of seventy years, which began with collecting and dealing in rare coins at age 11, searching for out-of-date coins in the Caribbean as a teenager, and then discovering the world of historical letters and documents, which he went on to revolutionize.
Renowned British historian Jeremy Black examines the established interpretations of the War of Independence and places the conflict in the context of military history. By focusing on British strengths and American weaknesses, he clarifies the reasons for American success and the extent of the American achievement. Black chairs the History Department at the University of Exeter, England.
What did it take for New England Indians and colonists to live alongside one another in peace? Was it possible for native communities to maintain distinct cultural and geographic boundaries after the English had seized the balance of power? In this presentation, David J. Silverman answers these questions by using Martha's Vineyard as a case study. He also shows that some island Wampanoag communities, such as Aquinnah (or Gay Head), lasted because their members were willing to adapt in order to preserve their land base and community ties.
Everyone knows that the American Revolution started at Lexington Green with the "shot heard 'round the world." Or did it? In his latest book, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, researched at AAS, Ray Raphael makes the claim that the American Revolution actually began seven months earlier in rural towns such as Worcester, when thousands of farmers and artisans overthrew the established government by forcing resignations and recantations from all Crown-appointed officials in rural Massachsetts.
Join historical performance specialist Shirley Hunt as she discusses her recent musical research as a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Hunt's research examines performance traditions and cultural contexts surrounding bowed string instruments in early nineteenth-century New England, with a specific focus on the early New England bass viols and violins housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As a result of her research at AAS, Hunt performed and video-recorded numerous musical selections on the instruments housed in MFA collection.
Sharing readings from their recently published books, scholars and creative writers Juliana Chow and Gillian Osborne will discuss the languages used in 19th-century American natural history to account for individual, species, and cultural loss.
At first glance, camping out appears to be a simple and seemingly timeless proposition: pack up the car and put up a tent in the great outdoors, get back to nature and get away from it all. A closer look at the 19th-century roots of this recreational habit reveals a more complex landscape. Before camping became a widely popular, and federally supported, modern vacation choice, we can trace the crisscrossing paths and varied encampments of elite tourists, Civil War veterans, freedpeople, transient workers, naturalists, and Indigenous peoples.
Join artist Brece Honeycutt as she discusses her project “A Bird to overhear-” an audio-visual essay drawn from her research as a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2019. During her fellowship at AAS, Honeycutt examined over 140 books and collections, yet it was the unexpected viewing of the book Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio (1886) that intertwined her appreciation of plants deemed useless, such as weeds, with the magnificent nests of birds.