For thirty-five years, American Girl dolls have attempted to encourage girls to embrace their strength, be themselves, and engage with American history, while also, of course, providing countless hours of entertainment. For many girls—including some AAS staff members!—the historical worlds of the dolls have inspired a lifelong love of history, sometimes even a career path. But what is the real history behind these fictional characters?

In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning; often libraries clear out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not.

In this conversation, Craig Fehrman will share fresh details and behind-the-scenes stories from his groundbreaking book on our presidents as authors, Author in Chief. You'll see new sides of even well-known figures like John Adams, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. But Fehrman will also go behind the scenes on his own book, showing how and why he spent ten years working on Author in Chief. This program, which will be richly illustrated, will delight history buffs and book lovers alike.

In this conversation with historian Gregory Nobles, photographer Krista Elrick will discuss her new book project, A Country No More: Rediscovering the Landscapes of John James Audubon, which reexamines Audubon’s epic life journey and the production of his beloved tome, The Birds of America.

This video was filmed in the 1990s for West Hartford Cable TV. AAS member Jane Pomeroy and children’s book collector/founder of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection Billie M. Levy discuss the career of illustrator/engraver Alexander Anderson (1775-1870) and Anderson’s impact on nineteenth-century children’s book illustration.