Education
In the mid-1970s, the Society's Council appointed an ad hoc
planning committee to study ways in which the Society could become
more useful to various constituencies. It recommended, among other
things, the establishment of formal educational activities for
professional scholars, graduate students, Worcester-area
undergraduates, and the general, lay public. A five-year grant from
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided the funds for a part-time
educational officer and seed money to experiment with a variety of
educational initiatives.
The first major undertaking was the establishment of an
American Studies seminar for a select group of undergraduates from
the five four-year colleges and universities in Worcester:
Assumption College, Clark University, the College of the Holy
Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State
College. A committee made up of representatives from each of the
participating institutions was formed to advise the AAS staff and
to select the students who matriculate in the seminar. Thus, the
Society is able to make the library collections available on a
controlled basis to college undergraduates, a constituency that the
Society does not ordinarily serve. The first seminar met in the
fall of 1978. Stephen Nissenbaum, a University of Massachusetts
historian, led that inaugural seminar the theme of which was
"Writers Confront the Marketplace: Literature and Society in
Jacksonian America." A renewal of the seminar has taken place
every fall since, each led by a different teacher in charge.
Topics under scrutiny have ranged from popular culture in colonial
America to the myth of violence in the late-nineteenth-century
American West. The seminars have been successful educational
activities for the students involved, have enriched the curricular
offerings of the participating colleges, and have been both a
challenge and great fun to the members of the library staff, who
relish their role in initiating talented and eager students into
the mysteries of research in a major library.
A number of activities provide opportunities for scholarly
discussion and collegiality among faculty members and advanced
graduate students within the region surrounding AAS. The earliest
of these predated the actual establishment of the Society's
education office. Two historians from nearby institutions, David
Hackett Fischer of Brandeis University and Ronald P. Formisano of
Clark University, asked AAS to serve as host and meeting place for
periodical gatherings of scholars in the region active in research
areas akin to their own. As a result, the Seminar in American
Political and Social History has met at AAS some five or six times
a year ever since. Seminars are held at the Goddard-Daniels House
and followed by catered dinners (at moderate cost) in its elegant
dining room. In 1990-91, the history departments of Clark
University and the University of Connecticut joined AAS in the
sponsorship of this on-going seminar, now renamed the New England
Seminar in American History. Several years ago, AAS established a
similar Seminar in American Literary History, which draws
participants from much the same geographical region. More
recently, the Society has added two more: the Seminar in American
Bibliography and Book Trade History and the Seminar in American Art
History. Over the years, many distinguished scholars have given
papers, mostly describing work in progress, at one or another of
these seminar gatherings. They include Gordon Wood, J.R. Pole,
John Murrin, Stephen Botein, Karen Kupperman, Alden Vaughan, Mary
Beth Norton, Sacvan Bercovitch, Leo Marx, Robert A. Gross, Hugh
Amory, Richard D. Brown, Richard S. Dunn, and Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich. These seminar series all in all have allowed AAS to serve
as a vital gathering place for scholars in the region and has
helped to introduce the Society's collections and programs to them.
In addition to the seminar series, other AAS activities
provide opportunities for professional scholars and graduate
students in the area. These include informal brown-bag, lunchtime
colloquia as well as occasional evening lectures on scholarly
topics.
Within the last decade and a half, AAS has also devised
educational activities to serve the general lay public in the
greater Worcester area. These have more often than not taken the
form of a series of public lectures on a given theme, but have also
included such exotic events as a series of poetry readings and the
production of operas. Most of these events have been funded by
grants to AAS from such funding agencies as the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the
Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities, and the Worcester Cultural
Commission. Although these offerings have been wonderfully
diverse, ranging from a lecture series on the social impact on New
England of the American Revolution to one explicating the histories
of food, drink, and sex in America's past, all are united by their
origin in the Society's desire to interpret its collections and the
kinds of scholarly research taking place there to audiences of lay
people in Worcester and environs.
-John B. Hench, Vice-President for Collections and Programs
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More information on the Society's educational
programs is available under the heading of "Academic Programs" in the
"Programs" section of this website |
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