Award-winning historian and AAS member T.H. Breen will discuss his new book, The Will of the People, which argues that without the participation of ordinary people during the colonial rebellion, there would have been no victory over Great Britain.
A Performance and Discussion Panel Commemorating the First Missionaries to Hawaiʻi”
In collaboration with the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) and sponsored by Mass Humanities
Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut, and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, will discuss the state of slavery studies with AAS Councilor Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees and Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Connecticut.
When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. During a sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Senator Charles Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery knew no bounds.
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, an inquisitive amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne began to assemble a collection of sheep wool from around the world to help advance the cause of agriculture in America.
How do stories about the past get constructed? How and why do certain historical narratives gain widespread credibility and familiarity while others are forgotten or marginalized? Why are certain historical figures honored as heroes while others are portrayed as villains or ignored completely?
Co-Sponsored by Africana Studies at the College of the Holy Cross
Scholars have explored how nineteenth-century scrapbooks and friendship albums circulated among free black women in the North to showcase their middle-class status and close networks. However, little is known about how black girls participated in this sentimental practice. In this lecture, Nazera Sadiq Wright will discuss how histories of black girlhood are often “buried” in literary genres less likely to be studied. Recovering these histories involves using types of literature that move beyond the bound book.
This five-day summer institute for school educators in social studies and language arts will take place at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In this episode of the Virtual Book Talk series, scholars Kristen Doyle Highland, Danielle Magnusson, Laura Cleaver, and Kate Ozment discuss the history of bookstores, women book collectors, and the antiquarian trade in rare books and manuscripts―topics of their recent Elements in Publishing and Book Culture monographs. Published by Cambridge University Press, each installment in the Elements series aims to fill a demand for easily accessible texts for readers interested in the diverse and dynamic fields of publishing and book culture.