The Robert C. Baron Lecture, named after the past AAS chair and president of Fulcrum Publishing in Denver, invites a distinguished AAS member who has written a seminal work of history to reflect on one book and its impact on scholarship and society since its publication. Patricia Nelson Limerick will be exploring the ways in which her book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, would have been improved by spending time in the AAS archives.

Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) examines the historical origins, the geographic spread, and the cultural consequences of the rise of “gentility” in early America—a complex of ideas and behaviors that encompassed how to talk, worship, and dress, how to paint your house and furnish your parlor.

In this lecture, AAS member Robert Gross discussed his 1976 Bancroft Prize -winning book, The Minute Men and their World. Providing a provocative and compelling look at the everyday lives of New England farmers and their community as they rebelled against Great Britain, The Minute Men and the World was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. In the tradition of the Baron Lecture—named in honor of Robert C. Baron, the past chairman of the AAS Council—Gross will reflect on the conception of this ground-breaking work and its ongoing impact on scholarship and society.

When the book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic appeared in 1995, it deftly combined social history, biography, and literary analysis to explore the business and political career of James Fenimore Cooper’s father and the development of the western-New York frontier region of Otsego County. William Cooper’s Town won the Bancroft and the Pulitzer Prizes for history.

What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work.