Join us virtually as Ben Bascom speaks on his new book Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (2024), which looks at the paradoxical nature of masculine self-promotion and individuality in the early United States. Much of U.S.
Madame Restell (1811-1878) was the most famous abortion provider and female physician in nineteenth-century America, so much so that "Restellism" became a synonym for abortion. Nicholas Syrett, author of The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America's Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime (2023), reflects on Restell's life, placing it alongside the history of the criminalization of abortion in the United States.
The American Antiquarian Society is launching a new initiative with a conference and workshop to explore critical, historical, and practical challenges of archival research and access, offering project-based development and discussion focused on the AAS’s unparalleled holdings in pre-1876 books, manuscripts, newspapers, and graphic arts. The Digital Antiquarian conference and workshop are presented by the AAS, with generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Lunsford Lane (1803-79) became a folk hero to many enslaved Southerners, as well as a generation of abolitionists, when he challenged the rules of enslavement and, later, pushed the boundaries of free citizenship in North Carolina. As the author of a unique “slave narrative” and speaking partner with some of the era’s greatest orators, including William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Highland Garnett, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Lane became a celebrity. Gradually, however, the persona he created faltered and his influence waned.
Bryan Sinche discusses his 2024 book, Published by the Author: Self-Publication and Nineteenth Century African American Literature , which focuses on a host of Black writers who bypassed white gatekeepers and editors by self-publishing their life stories. Based on extensive research and brimming with new discoveries, Published by the Author recovers a number of long-forgotten authors and shows how they capitalized on the economic and social possibilities of authorship and bookselling.
Scholars of religion have taken a material turn, delving into the study of images, objects, monuments, buildings, books, spaces, performances, and sounds. What do these inquiries look like in the context of early America, and how did religious materialities shape early American worlds? The goal of this seminar is to explore this area’s exciting archives, theories, and methods, enabling participants to bring together religion and materiality in their own work in fresh ways.
2023 CHAViC-PHBAC Summer Seminar
Scholars of religion have taken a material turn, delving into the study of images, objects, monuments, buildings, books, spaces, performances, and sounds. What do these inquiries look like in the context of early America, and how did religious materialities shape early American worlds? The goal of this seminar is to explore this area’s exciting archives, theories, and methods, enabling participants to bring together religion and materiality in their own work in fresh ways.
Join the American Antiquarian Society for a free community open house commemorating 250 years since Isaiah Thomas brought his printing press and newspaper to Worcester--a move that sparked and helped shape the American Revolution. That original eighteenth-century press, which Thomas named “No. 1,” is housed at AAS, the national research library of American history he founded in 1812.
In this virtual program, Camille Owens draws from her book, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (2024) and nineteenth-century archives to present new insights into Black childhood. Highlighting examples of Black children’s performances, cultural representations, and labor in the 1800s, Owens illustrates how Black children were used in the construction of white childhood, in the empowerment of white men, and in the measure of the human—and explores what it means for the study of American childhood to recognize Black children at its center.
This Institute is both a colloquium and a collections-based virtual workshop that will explore how media was used during the Age of the American Revolution, a critical era of change in the American news milieu, in media use, in business, politics, and community life. We will examine how news—in all its various forms—was connected to civic engagement and how media fit into the public and private lives of the American people.