Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893) was a trailblazing Black feminist, abolitionist, educator, activist, newspaper editor, and lawyer. Her many achievements include becoming the first Black woman to edit a newspaper in North America when she founded the anti-slavery newspaper, The Provincial Freeman in 1853.
Join us as we explore the intriguing history of The Whole Book of Psalms, the earliest edition of which dates to 1640. Known as the Bay Psalm Book, it was the first book printed in British North America and an early acquisition made by AAS's founder Isaiah Thomas. This modest volume of metered psalms, meant to be sung during worship services, had many subsequent editions. In 2014, the Society was able to acquire a copy of the also exceedingly rare fourteenth edition, printed in 1709.
Join us as we launch the newly published book, Living at the City’s Green Edge: Bancroft Heights, A Planned Neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Susan McDaniel Ceccacci. This book describes the neighborhood surrounding Antiquarian Hall as it explores the architecture, land use, and social history of the people who have lived in in the area. This program will feature those who first planted the seed for this publication and from those who made it a reality.
Graphic arts historian John Bidwell discusses his new book The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document (2024), which traces the fascinating history of the Declaration of Independence as both a work of art and a mass-market commodity during the nineteenth century.
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe, hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression. Drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most consequential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.
A joke is never just a joke, not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury, Eran Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally.
Join us for this Virtual Program as Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth.
In the course of her work at AAS, Laura Wasowicz, the Society's curator of children's literature, recovered the identities of the translator and illustrator of Good Wishes for the Children, a compilation of Hans Christian Andersen stories published in a limited, high-end edition by the Riverside Press in 1873 as a fundraiser for Boston Children’s Hospital. The illustrator was Sarah Gooll Putnam (1851–1912), an upper-class Bostonian who eventually enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist. This ambitious project was spearheaded by Putnam’s friend Adeline A.
Join us for a presentation by Wendy Bellion, Professor and Sewell C. Biggs Chair of American Art History and Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. Bellion will discuss the research she undertook using AAS collections for her recent book Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (fall 2019, out in paperback May 2020), which explores a history of material violence in Revolutionary New York. Bellion’s work traces acts of political iconoclasm and the return of destroyed things in visual representations and civic performances.