As the United States and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent nations—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. These settler-colonial understandings of North America’s past deliberately misappropriated Indigenous histories and repurposed them and their material objects as "American antiquities," thereby writing Indigenous pasts out of U.S. and Mexican national histories and national lands and erasing and denigrating Native peoples living in both nascent republics.

In Prints of a New Kind, Dr. Allison M. Stagg details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists in the country’s transformative early years between 1789 and 1828. She examines the caricatures that mocked politicians and events reported in newspapers, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them.

Led by Derrick R. Spires and Benjamin Fagan

After years of studying piano as a young woman in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson had her large collection of published sheet music bound into a keepsake book, a common practice at the time. Now part of the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, this bound volume of 107 pieces includes the poet’s favorite instrumental piano music and vocal music, ranging from theme and variation sets to vernacular music.