Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science

Natural Magic weaves together the stories of two nineteenth-century luminaries--Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin--whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls.

Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States

First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In this talk, Lara Langer Cohen discusses how her recent book, Going Underground, excavates the long history of this now-familiar idea, while seeking out versions of the underground that got left behind along the way.

Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

in conversation with John Stauffer

Acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha launches her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction in this hybrid program. A groundbreaking, expansive new account of Reconstruction, Sinha's research fundamentally alters our view of this formative period in American history.

Reading Children

Led by Patricia Crain

What does it mean to be a child reader in pre-1900 America? This seminar, hosted by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, will guide inquiries into the question: What does it mean to be a child reader in pre-1900 America?

The holdings of the AAS in artifacts of childhood number over 26,000 objects, and thus provide a unique laboratory for thinking about the changing ideas of childhood and the child reader from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.

Comparative Migrations and Multilingual Cultures of Print

Led by Rodrigo Lazo and Patrick Erben

Migration and print culture have long overlapped with the histories of early American communities. To meet the demands of multilingual publics, traveling printing presses produced pamphlets, books, and newspapers by and for immigrant populations in their home languages. This resulted in a substantial print archive from places such as Philadelphia in the colonial and early national eras, New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century, California during the Gold Rush, and New York in the later nineteenth century.

Historic Children's Voices

Historic Children's Voices provides an important window into how young writers in the nineteenth century chronicled their daily lives, wrote stories and poetry, expressed their beliefs and values, and commented on cultural changes of the time. Researchers can view the digital library of diaries, newspapers, and books as well as discover additional research tools and recordings of past programs to explore children's lives more deeply. Teachers will find a variety of guides and lesson plans to help bring the past to life for their students.

American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail

In popular mythology, the Overland Trail is typically a triumphant tale, with plucky easterners crossing the Plains in caravans of covered wagons. But not everyone reached Oregon and California. Some 6,600 migrants perished along the way and were buried where they fell, often on Indigenous land. As historian Sarah Keyes illuminates, their graves ultimately became the seeds of U.S. expansion.

The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters

Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. Periodicals described the Haitian revolution with sentimental and sensationalist undertones which took new life in early U.S. fiction. In The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers, Duncan Faherty demonstrates that Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the bellwether against which the prospects for the nation’s future were imagined and interrogated.

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