The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America was published by Knopf in 1994, and won the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington prizes in American history. Since then, it has become a model for new approaches to writing narrative history. In The Unredeemed Captive, Demos offers a striking retelling of the aftermath of the 1704 French and Native American raid on the Puritan settlement in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
The Robert C. Baron Lecture, named after the past AAS chair and president of Fulcrum Publishing in Denver, invites a distinguished AAS member who has written a seminal work of history to reflect on one book and its impact on scholarship and society since its publication. Patricia Nelson Limerick will be exploring the ways in which her book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, would have been improved by spending time in the AAS archives.
This year Linda Kerber will discuss her 1980 book, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, which is a landmark study of American political thought and has transformed our understanding of the Revolutionary period.
Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) examines the historical origins, the geographic spread, and the cultural consequences of the rise of “gentility” in early America—a complex of ideas and behaviors that encompassed how to talk, worship, and dress, how to paint your house and furnish your parlor.
Columbia University professor and AAS member Eric Foner (elected 1989) will discuss his groundbreaking and definitive 1988 book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. This work won the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize.
In this lecture, AAS member Robert Gross discussed his 1976 Bancroft Prize -winning book, The Minute Men and their World. Providing a provocative and compelling look at the everyday lives of New England farmers and their community as they rebelled against Great Britain, The Minute Men and the World was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. In the tradition of the Baron Lecture—named in honor of Robert C. Baron, the past chairman of the AAS Council—Gross will reflect on the conception of this ground-breaking work and its ongoing impact on scholarship and society.
Breaking with the standard pattern of Baron Lectures, Mary Beth Norton (with the concurrence of AAS) will discuss not one book but the four related works in which she examined aspects of the same theme: the relationship of women and the public sphere in Early America, from the beginnings of English settlement through 1800. The talk will examine the trajectory of her work and describe the surprises she encountered along the way.
The four books Norton will discuss include:
When the book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic appeared in 1995, it deftly combined social history, biography, and literary analysis to explore the business and political career of James Fenimore Cooper’s father and the development of the western-New York frontier region of Otsego County. William Cooper’s Town won the Bancroft and the Pulitzer Prizes for history.
James H. Merrell will recount how he found his way into, or, as he puts it, “more accurately, stumbled upon,” The Indians’ New World and how this Bancroft Prize-winning book and the field have fared in the decades since the work appeared.
What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work.