Join us as David Godine discusses the most memorable books he published during his fifty-year career. From his earliest days as a letterpress printer to the present digital era, Godine managed to thrive as the reign of hot metal type that had endured for almost 500 years was coming to an end, when retailers were mostly brick-and-mortar stores, when library purchases were primarily books, and when correspondence was carried on through letters and the telephone.
Join us as Worcester poets share their responses inspired by material from the Brown Family Collections, one of the earliest and largest intact nineteenth-century Black family’s libraries in America. The collections center around William and Martha Ann Brown, who were married in Worcester in 1850, and their son, Charles F. Brown.
Join us as literary historian Tara A. Bynum discusses her new book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. In the book, Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God.
Get up close to letters, diaries, newspapers, and books that children wrote and produced in the nineteenth century. Chat with AAS curators about these materials and hear stories about how imaginative young writers recorded their daily lives, wrote stories and poetry, expressed their beliefs, and commented on serious issues of their time. Then try your hand at binding your own booklet or diary with the help of a conservator. This program is held in conjunction with the Historic Children’s Voices project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Master Slave Husband Wife tells the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave. The Crafts’ own 1860 narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, provides a powerful first-hand account of this extraordinary act of mutual self-emancipation. Yet, many mysteries remain that the Crafts would not or could not discuss.
The story of Hiram Harwood (1788-1839) is the story of an individual's struggle to achieve manhood within a family devoted to the ideal of patriarchy. In this lecture based upon his recent book, A Tale of New England, Robert E. Shalhope details how the pressure on Hiram to conform--to become a diligent farmer--was tremendous. Viewing himself as a man of pleasure rather than a man of business, Hiram struggled against the efforts of his father and grandfather to make him live up to their expectations.
In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, Mark Peterson, in his new book, The City-State of Boston, highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America.
Award-winning historian and AAS member T.H. Breen will discuss his new book, The Will of the People, which argues that without the participation of ordinary people during the colonial rebellion, there would have been no victory over Great Britain.
A Performance and Discussion Panel Commemorating the First Missionaries to Hawaiʻi”
In collaboration with the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) and sponsored by Mass Humanities
Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut, and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, will discuss the state of slavery studies with AAS Councilor Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees and Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Connecticut.