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.

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 importance of New Year's Day in American culture is reflected in a variety of pre-1900 ephemera collections at AAS, including broadsides from the 1700s, party invitations from the early nineteenth century, and chromolithographed greeting cards from the post Civil War era.

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.

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.