Join the American Antiquarian Society for a free community open house commemorating 250 years since Isaiah Thomas brought his printing press and newspaper to Worcester--a move that helped shape the American Revolution.
In this virtual program, Camille Owens draws from her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (2024) and nineteenth-century archives to present new insights into Black childhood. Highlighting examples of Black children’s performances, cultural representations, and labor in the 1800s, Owens illustrates how Black children were used in the construction of white childhood, in the empowerment of white men, and in the measure of the human—and explores what it means for the study of American childhood to recognize Black children at its center.
This Institute is both a colloquium and a collections-based virtual workshop that will explore how media was used during the Age of the American Revolution, a critical era of change in the American news milieu, in media use, in business, politics, and community life. We will examine how news—in all its various forms—was connected to civic engagement and how media fit into the public and private lives of the American people.
Today, mass media and social media infuse every aspect of our lives. New digital technologies have disrupted traditional forms of print, radio, and television and transformed not only how we communicate with one another, but how we participate in the economy, community, and civic life. The internet has dramatically changed how we produce, share, and consume media content. One form of media content especially important for public life and civic participation is news. And news has been revolutionized as well.
This virtual forum features Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, Trinity Rogers, and Brigitte Fielder of Taught by Literature, a collaborative digital humanities project that re-centers Black women writers, beginning with the work of African American author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
Keynote address for the Historic Children's Voices Symposium.
In this talk, Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (November 2024), reveals the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear.
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color.
During LGBTQ History Month, we are pleased to host scholars Jen Manion and KJ Rawson at AAS for a conversation about the history of gender and sexuality. Manion and Rawson will discuss the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.
In this virtual program Whitney Barlow Robles discusses her recent book, a compelling and innovative exploration of how animals shaped the field of natural history and its ecological afterlives. Part history of science, part modern voyage tale, and part personal journey, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History poses questions such as: Can corals build worlds? Do rattlesnakes enchant? What is a raccoon, and what might it know?