2002 Public Lectures
The lectures described below were held at
Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester.
Thursday, October 17, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Minutemen, Transcendentalists, and the Making of New England
By
Robert Gross
Concord, Massachusetts is often imagined as the archetypal New England
town, a place of "plain living and high thinking" that embodies a Yankee
heritage of community, liberty, and order. The Boston Globe called it "an
ideal town" in 1909, ratifying a view that had been developed by local
inhabitants and admiring outsiders over the course of the previous century
and that has persisted to this day. The first Puritan settlement above
tidewater, Concord claims to be the birthplace of two American
revolutions. The first was the opening battle of the War for Independence,
when Minutemen confronted British Regulars at the North Bridge on April
19, 1775; the second was the movement for intellectual independence
associated with the Transcendentalist writers and residents Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. As home of Puritans, Minutemen, and
Transcendentalists, Concord has come to symbolize the New England
tradition at its best. Reality is, of course, more complicated, and it
took a great deal of imagination, wishful thinking, and selective memory
to produce this happy image. The Transcendentalists themselves contributed
mightily to the effort. This lecture will trace the steps by which Concord
became at once an American icon, regional symbol, and tourist site.
Robert A. Gross is the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at
AAS. One of the most influential historians of his generation, Mr. Gross
is the author of The Minutemen and their World and editor of In Debt to
Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion. He is the Forest
D. Murden, Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at the College of
William and Mary.
Thursday, October 24, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Landesdowne Portrait of George Washington
By
Ellen Miles
Tuesday, September 24, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
The Nineteenth Century's Culture War
By
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
In this program based upon her latest book, Rereading Sex: Battles over
Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America
Dr. Horowitz describes a many-voiced America in which an earthy acceptance
of desire and sexual expression collided with the prohibitions broadcast
from the pulpit and the printed page by evangelical Christian
elements. Among these voices are those of: Victoria Woodhull, the agitator
who placed sex at the center of life; Robert Owen and Frances Wright
visionaries who espoused free thought; Sylvester Graham, a food faddist
who obsessed about the dangers of masturbation; and Anthony Comstock, who
succeeded in banning sexual subject matter from the mails in an early
battle of a national cultural war that continues to this day.
Helen Horowitz is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor in American Studies
at Smith College. She was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at AAS
in 1999-2000. Rereading Sex will be published in September 2002,
by Alfred A. Knopf.
Tuesday, May 14, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Faith and Boundaries:
Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians
of Martha's Vineyard, 1600-1871
by
David J. Silverman
Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellow
What did it take for New England Indians and colonists to live alongside
one another in peace? Was it possible for native communities to maintain
distinct cultural and geographic boundaries after the English had seized
the balance of power? In this presentation, David J. Silverman answers
these questions by using Martha's Vineyard as a case study. He also
shows that some island Wampanoag communities, such as Aquinnah (or Gay
Head), lasted because their members were willing to adapt in order to
preserve their land base and community ties. The story of Martha's
Vineyard's Wampanoags raises broad questions about the lost opportunities
for Indian-white coexistence in other times and places, and challenges us
to rethink what it means to be "Indian" in America.
David J. Silverman - is an assistant professor of history at Wayne
State
University. He received his Ph. D. in history from Princeton University
and is currently revising his dissertation for publication as part of his
AAS/Mellon Fellowship.
Wednesday, May 8, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Married Advocates of "Free Love " in 1850s America: Mary Gove Nichols
and Thomas Low Nichols
By
Patricia Cline Cohen
Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence
Mary Gove Nichols was a well-known health reformer and pioneer lecturer on
women's anatomy and physiology when she married the New York journalist
Thomas Low Nichols in 1848. Together they opened a school for hydropathic
medicine, published their own newspaper, wrote medical books and articles,
a novel, and a treatise on marriage. Their writings made them the central
players in a growing "Free Love" movement that defined marriage as slavery
for women but then proposed novel solutions to the problem. This lecture
will explore what they meant by Free Love and explain how these two rather
different -but in some ways remarkably similar - people came to embrace,
indeed celebrate, their own sexual partnership while advocating for total
freedom in love relations.
Patricia Cline Cohen - is a professor of history at the University
of
California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of A Calculating
People: The
Spread of Numeracy in Early America and The Murder of Helen Jewett:
The
Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York.
A Nue Merrykin Dikshunary: Inventing an American
Language
An illustrated lecture by
Jill Lepore
Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
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"A national language is a national tie," Noah Webster declared in 1786,
"and what country wants it more than America?" From its founding, the
United States has reckoned with a vexing paradox: ours is a nation
founded
on universal principles. What, then, makes us a nation? Noah Webster
thought a national language might help tie Americans together. But many
of
his contemporaries, from the Cherokee linguist Sequoyah to the deaf
educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to the freed Muslim slave Abd al-Rahman
Ibrahima, thought differently.
In a slide lecture, Jill Lepore will tell
the story of how early Americans wrestled with the problem of a national
language. This lecture is based upon Jill Lepore's latest book, A is
for American, published this past February by Alfred A. Knopf.
A native of Worcester, Jill Lepore is currently an assistant professor of
history at Boston University. She is the author of The Name of
War: King
Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, which won the
Bancroft
Prize, Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, and the New England
Historical Association's Book Award. With Jane Kamensky she founded
Common-place, an online history magazine sponsored by AAS and the Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History.
This lecture will take place in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street,
Worcester, and is open to the public free of charge.
The American Antiquarian Society is funded in part by the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, a state agency that supports public programs in the
arts, humanities, and sciences.
The American Antiquarian Society presents
Ray
Raphael
speaking on The First American Revolution Wednesday, April
10, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Everyone knows that the American Revolution started
at Lexington Green with the "shot heard 'round the world." Or did
it? In his latest book, researched at AAS, Ray Raphael makes the claim
that the American Revolution actually began seven months earlier in rural
towns such as Worcester, when thousands of farmers and artisans overthrew
the established government by forcing resignations and recantations from
all Crown-appointed officals in rural Massachsetts. When the British
stafed a counter-revolutionary attack on Lexington and Concord on April
19, 1775, they were actually trying to reclaim a counrtyside they had lost
the previous summer. Join us for a provocative new look at the birth of
our country and the spirit of democracy.
Ray Raphael, is the author of The First
American
Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, which will be published on
April 1, 2002, by the New Press. His other books include: A People's
History of the American Revolution, An Everyday History of Somewhere, Men
From the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America, and Tree Talk: The
People and Politics of Timber. He lives in northern California.
In honor of the reopening of
the Reading Room
to
researchers
The American Antiquarian Society
presents
Nicholas Basbanes
Speaking on his latest book, Patience and Fortitude
Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 7:30 p.m.
Come help celebrate the reopening of the American Antiquarian Society's
reading room by hearing Nicholas Basbanes discuss his new book Patience
and Fortitude. Continuing his study of bibliomania that he made
famous in
his best-selling book, A Gentle Madness, Nick Basbanes expands his
field
of inquiry in his latest work to include the whole world of book
culture. Join us for a lively talk on the changing nature of books over
the centuries, the evolution of institutions to preserve them, and
fascinating profiles of people - librarians, bookmakers, booksellers,
preservationists, collectors, writers, and readers -who are all afflicted
with the same enduring obsession for the printed word.
AAS member Nicholas Basbanes was an award winning investigative reporter
before he became the literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram, a
position he held from 1978 to 1991. For the next eight years, he wrote a
nationally syndicated column on books and authors. His first book, A
Gentle Madness, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
in nonfiction and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
This program will take place in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street,
Worcester, and is open to the public free of charge.
The American Antiquarian Society is funded in part by the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, a state agency, that supports public programs in the
arts, humanities, and sciences.
AAS Co-sponsors Jill Lepore Talk at
Library of Congress Feb. 26
The American Antiquarian Society is co-sponsor of a talk by prize-winning
historian Jill Lepore at the Library of Congress at 6:45 p.m., Tuesday,
February 26, in the Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Memorial
Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. in Washington. Members, former
fellows, and friends of AAS are cordially invited to attend. An AAS
member and former AAS fellow herself, Jill Lepore will discuss her latest
book, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly
United States (Knopf, 2002). Part of the Center for the Book's
"Books & Beyond" author series, the program is free and open to the
public. No tickets are required. The event is hosted by the Center for
the Book in the Library of Congress and co-sponsored also with the
library's Manuscript Division. AAS president Ellen Dunlap will attend the
event.
A Is for American is a fascinating, well-illustrated account of
how language was used in the early American republic to define national
character and shape national boundaries. An Alternate Selection of the
History Book Club, its official publication date is February
14. Professor Lepore did some of her research for the book at AAS, in the
collections of 18th- and 19th-century primers and spellers generally, with
special emphasis on the spellers, dictionaries, political writings, and
newspapers of Noah Webster. A number of the illustrations are of AAS-held
items.
Professor Lepore is associate professor of history at Boston
University and the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the
Origins of American Identity (Knopf, 1998), which she researched in
part on her AAS fellowship and which won the Bancroft and Ralph Waldo
Emerson Prizes and other awards. She is cofounder and coeditor of
Common-place, an online history magazine (sponsored by the American
Antiquarian Society and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History).
AAS has long had close ties with LC's Center for the Book, and is a
founding partner of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, an affiliate of
the LC center. The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress was
established in 1977 to stimulate public interest in books, reading, and
libraries. For information about its program and the activities of its
affiliated centers in 43 states and the District of Columbia, visit its
website at www.loc.gov.
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