Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America

Advertising, both as form and as practice, is everywhere in contemporary America. Billboards line our highways, Internet ads are tailored to suit our every search, and "Mad Men" cleans up during award season. It is one of the key elements of modern corporate capitalism. Advertising promotes familiar brands, introduces new technologies, and seeks to promote the consumer spending that has become the cornerstone of the American economy. From its economic impact to its aesthetic significance, mass-media advertising can be seen as helping shape what we think of as modernity itself.

With a French Accent: American Lithography to 1860

This program is co-hosted by the Davis and the American Antiquarian Society and will explore transnational interconnection, particularly the impact of artistic exchange between France and the United States on American lithography through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into contemporary practice.  This daylong event features a range of talks by exhibition curators Georgia B. Barnhill and Lauren B. Hewes, and visiting scholars Marie-Stephanie Delmaire and Catherine Wilcox Titus, and lithography demonstrations by a visiting artists and a master printer.

The Visual and the Verbal: Image/Text in American Print Culture to 1900

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) and The Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) at the American Antiquarian Society conference will explore the relationship between images and words in early American printed materials. Papers will consider the rise of the image in print media not only as a result of technological developments but also cultural change.

William Charles and His World

This symposium explores the work and times of the caricaturist and book publisher William Charles (1776-1820). It features AAS members Jack and Linda Lapides, who will discuss collecting Charles imprints; Laura Wasowicz, AAS children’s literature curator, who will speak on the picture books of William Charles; and former AAS fellows Allison Stagg and Nancy Siegel who will explore Charles’s work as a political caricaturist in both Europe and America and will introduce newly discovered work attributed to Charles.

Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture to 1900

The 2015 CHAViC conference, Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture to 1900, will be held at AAS on November 20 and 21, 2015. The conference will explore the diversity of uses of the printed image in early America. Speakers will consider imagery found historically in more than one medium in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Papers will be presented from disparate disciplines, including art and architectural history, American studies, material culture studies, literature, history, graphic design, and childhood studies.

Nineteenth-Century American Photography in the World

The 2025 Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) summer seminar, led by Monica Bravo and Emily Voelker, will focus on nineteenth-century American photography, broadly conceived. Participants will learn early photographic processes, formats, and materialities; cultivate their skills in visual analysis and historical interpretation of and through photographs; and critically reconsider scholarly narratives about American photography’s place in the world.

Sex, Gender, and Print

This year's Program on the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) seminar, led by Jordan Stein and Greta LaFleur, offers an archivally-based and hands-on introduction to histories of gender and sexuality between the colonial period and 1865. Using AAS collections, participants will explore how each of these formations were shaped, negotiated, disciplined, and incentivized by print technologies and the cultures that emerged around them.

Subscribe to