The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence

Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, she composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, praised warriors, and used her verse to variously lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition.

Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America

Join us as historian Margaretta Lovell discusses her new publication, Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz Henry Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America. During the program, Lovell will explore the paintings of Gloucester native Fitz H. Lane and the community and the patrons that supported his career with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities.

Indigenuity: Native Craftwork and the Art of American Literatures

For hundreds of years, American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Books, like other objects, were multisensory items all North American communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created objects for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes.

The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860

During the antebellum period, British publishers increasingly brought out their own authorized and unauthorized editions of American literary works as the popularity of print exploded and literacy rates grew. American fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiographies appeared in a wide variety of material forms and print genres, from prestigious three-volume novels, to illustrated Christmas books, and weekly periodicals.

Removal in the Archive: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession

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.

Sojourner Truth Was A New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That

Sojourner Truth Was A New Yorker. Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker from the Hudson Valley, a fact of great importance in her own life but ordinarily overlooked in her historical persona. Even though American culture has become more attuned to Black history and more understanding of the complexities of Black identity, Truth is still unwittingly confused with Harriet Tubman, another figure of enormous historical importance who was from the South, from Maryland.

Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828

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.

Pirates in Early America

The representations of pirates in early America reveal deep truths about class, gender, and race in this place and time. Using scholarly work as well as the vast resources of the American Antiquarian Society, this course will examine how scholars and popularizers have approached this topic from various angles. Some focus on the individuals, famous or infamous, that dominate surviving documents. Some look at the young-male world of the pirate, focusing on sexuality, drinking, and political organization. For example, was there more equality on a pirate ship than on dry land?

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