Central to Nobles’s discussion will be John James Audubon’s double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America (4 vols., 1827-38), a work that still stands as one of the most remarkable artistic and scientific achievements in the history of the book. It is a massive work of natural history that offers the reader an innovative interplay between image and text. For Audubon, though, producing this “Great Work” proved to be as much about enterprise as ornithology, and The Birds of America became the family business for more than three decades.

In this lecture, Professor Gardner asked how careful consideration of nineteenth-century African American experiences can and should reshape our discussions of early Black print. His talk drew on diverse print material that was produced by, for, or via the African Methodist Episcopal Church between 1840 and 1870. He focused on how and why diverse African Americans came to, conceived of, and used print, with emphasis on the ways such exploration challenges dominant senses of terms like “writer,” “editor,” “reader,” and especially “print,” “history,” and “American culture.”

One of the world's leading scholars of slavery and abolitionism, David Brion Davis reflected upon the influences and impact of his 1966 work The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. This study examined the various ways that different cultures responded to the contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770s.

The book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 quickly became a model of social history when it was published in 1990. The book examines the life of one Maine midwife and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage, sexual relations, family life, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of crime and violence. The book won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize.