When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. During a sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Senator Charles Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery knew no bounds.
During the early decades of the nineteenth century, an inquisitive amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne began to assemble a collection of sheep wool from around the world to help advance the cause of agriculture in America.
How do stories about the past get constructed? How and why do certain historical narratives gain widespread credibility and familiarity while others are forgotten or marginalized? Why are certain historical figures honored as heroes while others are portrayed as villains or ignored completely?
Co-Sponsored by Africana Studies at the College of the Holy Cross
Scholars have explored how nineteenth-century scrapbooks and friendship albums circulated among free black women in the North to showcase their middle-class status and close networks. However, little is known about how black girls participated in this sentimental practice. In this lecture, Nazera Sadiq Wright will discuss how histories of black girlhood are often “buried” in literary genres less likely to be studied. Recovering these histories involves using types of literature that move beyond the bound book.
This five-day summer institute for school educators in social studies and language arts will take place at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In this episode of the Virtual Book Talk series, scholars Kristen Doyle Highland, Danielle Magnusson, Laura Cleaver, and Kate Ozment discuss the history of bookstores, women book collectors, and the antiquarian trade in rare books and manuscripts―topics of their recent Elements in Publishing and Book Culture monographs. Published by Cambridge University Press, each installment in the Elements series aims to fill a demand for easily accessible texts for readers interested in the diverse and dynamic fields of publishing and book culture.
Historian Stephen Kantrowitz reconsiders the Civil War era by focusing on one Native American tribe's encounter with citizenship. In 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin's admission as a state, representatives of the Ho-Chunk people yielded under immense duress and signed a treaty that ceded their remaining ancestral lands to the U.S. government. Over the four decades that followed, "free soil" settlement repeatedly demanded the further expulsion of the Ho-Chunk people. Many lived under the U.S. government's policies of "civilization," allotment, and citizenship.
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.
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.