2003 Public Lectures
The lectures described below were held at
Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester.
Tuesday, December 2, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
When Hype Becomes History: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Virtue of an
Ambiguous Past , by Renée Sentilles
History is a social science that demands evidence for its claims, but what
happens when the evidence itself is unstable? Adah Isaacs Menken was a
Civil War era celebrity who relied on rumor and hearsay to keep her
popularity alive. Indeed, one can say that hearsay from the
nineteenth-century has led to a resurgence of interest in her in the
twenty-first. If one looks Adah Isaacs Menken up on the Internet, she
will appear as an African-American poet, a Jewish poet, a lesbian
cross-dresser, and a salacious nineteenth- century sex symbol, but only
one of those images was familiar to Menken's own public. Can rumor be
historicized? Does examining hearsay undermine what history purports to
do, or does it allow us to address topics otherwise left in the
margins? This program will address these questions while examining the
life of one of the most fascinating people in American history.
Renée Sentilles is assistant professor of history and director of
American
studies at Case Western Reserve University. She was a visiting assistant
professor of history at Clark University during the 1999-2000 academic
year. Sentilles was the Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellow at AAS in
1988-99, during which time she revised her dissertation into the book
Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American
Celebrity,
which was published by Cambridge University Press in association with AAS
in April 2003.
Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American
Culture
Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's
The
Birds of America ,
By Gregory H. Nobles
This illustrated lecture will focus on John James Audubon's double
elephant folio edition of The Birds of America a work that still
stands as
one of the most remarkable artistic and scientific achievements in the
history of the book. It is a massive work of natural history that offers
the reader an innovative interplay between image and text. For Audubon,
though, producing this "Great Work" proved to be as much about enterprise
as ornithology, and The Birds of America became the family business
for
more than three decades. Nobles will consider the popular perception of
Audubon's birds from his time to our own, exploring the connection between
the cultural and commercial significance of this big book about birds that
represents both an investigation of nature and an investment in art. The
various ways people have valued Audubon's work leads to the question of
whether The Birds of America is--or should be--a book at all.
This is the twenty-first annual Wiggins Lecture named for James Russell
Wiggins (1903 - 2000), president of the Society from 1970 to 1977, who was
editor of the Washington Post and, until his death in 2000 at the
age of
96, editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American. Wiggins also
served as US
ambassador to the United Nations in 1968.
Gregory H. Nobles is professor of history at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. He is the author of Divisions Throughout the
Whole: Politics
and Society in Hampshire County, Massachusetts 1740-1775 and
American
Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest, and co-author
of
Evolution and Revolution: American Society 1600-1820. He held a
Boni
Fellowship at AAS in 1991-92.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
To Create a "Historians' Nation": Paul Cuffe's Vision of the Ties
Between Africa and African-America
, by James Sidbury
In 1815, the sea captain and merchant Paul Cuffe wrote a letter
foretelling a time when the country of his "ancestors" would enjoy the
same privileges as "other historian Nations." Cuffe was, by that time,
one of the most famous black men in the United States, and was renowned
among opponents of slavery for his efforts to forge ties of commerce and
friendship between the peoples of Africa and the black residents of the
United States. Earlier writers had used the language of the nation in
speaking of the creation of an African people, but they rarely elaborated
upon it. Cuffe built upon and extended this vision to bring the
privileges of "historian Nations" to Africa and African-America by
creating a diasporic African people. His early and innovative African
nationalist vision stands as a high point in early black conceptions of
African identity, and in blacks' battle against slavery and the Atlantic
slave trade.
James Sidbury is associate professor of history at the University of Texas
at Austin. In 2002-3 he was in residence at AAS as the Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow. He is the author of Ploughshares into
Swords: Race,
Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730 - 1810.
Saturday, October 18, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
Discovering Meriwether Lewis with Clay Jenkinson
Humanities scholar and cultural commentator Clay Jenkinson will return
to
AAS to deliver a first-person historical interpretation of one of the
leaders of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition. Clays portrayal of
Meriwether Lewis uses the Chautauqua method to take us on a spectacular
trip from the Missouri River, over the Rockies to the mouth of the
Columbia, and back. Stephen Ambrose said of Jenkinson's portrayal, "We
have
the insights of a man who has walked many miles in the moccasins of
Meriwether Lewis and ultimately, much to our benefit, managed to get
inside his head as well as his extra sensitive heart." This event is part
of the Worcester Cultural Coalition's No Limits to Discovery series
of
programs.
A native of North Dakota, Mr. Jenkinson is a writer, lecturer, and
award-winning first-person interpreter. He is the host of a nationally
syndicated radio program, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and of a
weekly
television book review program. He has appeared on the Today show,
Politically Incorrect, and CNN, and was a main commentator for Ken
Burnss
PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson as well as the on-camera host of the
documentary Travelin' on the Lewis & Clark Trail. In addition to
Meriwether
Lewis, Jenkinson portrays J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Wesley Powell, Sir
Francis Bacon, William L. Shirer, and Thomas Jefferson, as whom he
appeared at AAS in 1991 and 1993.
Thursday, May 1, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson, by Philip F. Gura
Is the image on the left that of Emily Dickinson? If it is, it becomes
probably the second known photographic image of the famous 19th-century
American poet and recluse. This lecture by AAS member Philip F. Gura will
focus on how he came into possession of this photograph and his detective
work to prove it is an authentic portrait of the Belle of Amherst.
Mr. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American
Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Some of his publications include The Crossroads of American
History
and Literature: Essays in Cultural History (1996) and A Glimpse of
Sion's
Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (1986).
Tuesday, April 22, 2003,
at 7:30 p.m.
Could the British Have Won the American War of Independence?, by
Jeremy
Black
Renowned British historian Jeremy Black examines the established
interpretations of the War of Independence and places the conflict in the
context of military history. By focusing on British strengths and
American weaknesses, he clarifies the reasons for American success and the
extent of the American achievement.
Mr. Black chairs the History Department at the University of Exeter,
England. An expert on British military history, he has authored 46 books,
including The World in the Twentieth Century (2002), The Making
of Modern
Britain: The Age of Empire to the New Millennium (2001), and The
English
Press 1621-1861 (2001).
2004 Public Lectures
2002 Public Lectures
2001 Public Lectures
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