The American Antiquarian Society is one the nation's chief repositories for newspapers published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in what is now considered the United States, portions of Canada, and the British West Indies. The collection contains more than two million issues and takes up nearly seven miles of shelving. While recently searching through a backlog of unprocessed newspapers held in the library’s stacks, AAS staff discovered two previously un-recorded issues of Peter H. Clark’s paper Herald of Freedom.

The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.

A common refrain is that Americans dislike cities, favoring places at some distance from the buzz and complexities of urban life. But what if Americans have instead been intrigued by cities of their imagination, rather than those at their feet? The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community.

Join artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson as she discusses her project Contraband, an ongoing body of work drawn from her research as a Creative Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship, 2019).

Join us virtually as Dr. Abby Goode discusses the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere.