2004 Public Lectures
The lectures described were held at Antiquarian
Hall, 185
Salisbury Street, Worcester.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
A New England Tragedy: The Life and Death of Hiram Harwood
by
Robert E. Shalhope
The story of Hiram Harwood (1788-1839) is the story of an individual's
struggle to achieve manhood within a family devoted to the ideal of
patriarchy. In this lecture based upon his recent book, A Tale of New
England, Robert E. Shalhope details how the pressure on Hiram to
conform--to
become a diligent farmer--was tremendous. Viewing himself as a man of
pleasure rather than a man of business, Hiram struggled against the
efforts of his father and grandfather to make him live up to their
expectations. With the passage of time, Hiram did become a dedicated
farmer and did gain the success demanded of him. Ultimately, however, the
price Hiram paid for this success was enormous: his struggle to achieve
patriarchy brought tragic consequences in its wake.
Robert E. Shalhope is the George Lynn Cross Research Professor of History
at the University of Oklahoma. His articles on political thought in the
Revolution and early national periods have appeared in the Journal of
Southern History, the William and Mary Quarterly, and the
Journal
of
American History. He is also the author of Bennington and the Green
Mountain Boys: The Emergence of Liberalism in Vermont, 1763-1850
(1996) and A Tale of New England: The Diaries of Hiram Harwood,
Vermont,
Farmer 1810-1837 (2003), both of which were published by the Johns
Hopkins University Press. An American Antiquarian Society-National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1995-96 brought him to AAS to
work on the Harwood book.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Mysterious Raps and Apparitions:
The Fox Sisters and America's
Passion
for
Talking to the Dead
by
Barbara Weisberg
In 1848, two young girls, Kate and Maggie Fox, anxiously reported to a
neighbor that their family had been hearing strange raps at night. Within
a few years, tens of thousands of Americans were flocking to
séances to
contact the departed, and Kate and Maggie Fox had become world-famous
mediums. How did a reported haunting in rural New York state spark the
rise of the international movement known as Modern Spiritualism, and what
role did the Fox sisters play in this transformation? Why were these two
nineteenth-century children so influential in convincing ordinary
Americans that the dead can talk to the living? In this program, Barbara
Weisberg discusses the Fox sisters and reads from her new book, Talking
to
the Dead, a family saga that reflects the tensions of life in
mid-nineteenth century America and also illuminates the age-old--and very
current--longing to communicate with spirits.
Barbara Weisberg had a distinguished career in television before becoming
an accomplished poet and writer. She was co-creator of the syndicated
situation comedy Charles in Charge in addition to other projects
for
WNET, HBO, and Nickelodeon. Her writings include Coronado's Gold
Quest, a
nonfiction children's book, and Susan B. Anthony, a young adult
biography. Weisberg conducted research on the Fox sisters while an AAS
Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellow in 1998. Her book on the
sisters, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of
Spiritualism, is forthcoming from HarperSanFrancisco in April 2004.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Re-imagining the Salem Witch Trials: A Poetry Reading
and Discussion
by
Nicole Cooley
Co-sponsored by the Worcester County Poetry Association
During the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts (1691-93), twenty-four
people were executed or died while incarcerated and many others were
imprisoned. More than three hundred years later, the Salem witch trials
still retain an enormous cultural power. In this presentation, poet Nicole
Cooley will read from her recently published book of poems, The
Afflicted
Girls, which focuses on this event, and will discuss the background,
research, and writing of the project. The poems explore what happened in
Salem
from a variety of perspectives the accusers, the accused, and those whose
lives were forever changed by the accusations, trials, and executions and
meditate on the lasting effects of the trials on present-day America.
Nicole Cooley teaches English at Queens College, City University of New
York. Her poems have been published in such periodicals as the New
England
Review, The Nation, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry
Northwest,
among others. Cooley is also the author of two books, a novel, Judy
Garland, Ginger Love, and a book of poems, Resurrection, which
received
the 1995 Walt Whitman Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. In
1999, Cooley held an AAS Creative and Performing Artists and Writers
Fellowship in which she conducted research for The Afflicted Girls,
to be
published this spring by Louisiana State University Press.
Friday, October 22
The First Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
Thomas Hutchinson in Context: The Ordeal Revisited
by
Bernard Bailyn
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When Bernard Bailyn's biography of the last colonial governor of
Massachusetts was published in 1974, the Times Literary Supplement called
it "a biography that is a work of art: exquisitely written, delicate in
insight, and imbued with a wisdom about men and affairs that is the true
hallmark of a great historian." The book subsequently won the National
Book Award for History in 1975.
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Hutchinson is depicted as "the wicked statesman, or the traitor to
his country,
at the hour of his death" in this engraving
by Paul Revere
from the cover of The
Massachusetts Calendar;
or An
Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ
1774.
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Now, inaugurating the first annual Robert
C. Baron Lecture, Bailyn will return to AAS to discuss his reasons for
writing The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, how he interpreted
Hutchinson's
career as the despised anti-hero of the American Revolution, the book's
original reception, and his own assessment of his work, thirty years after
its publication.
Named in honor of Robert C. Baron, past AAS chairman and president
of Fulcrum Publishing, the annual Baron lecture asks distinguished AAS
members who have written seminal works of history to reflect on one book
and its impact on scholarship and society in the years since its first
appearance.
Bernard Bailyn is Adams University Professor and James Duncan
Phillips Professor of Early American History, emeritus, at Harvard
University. He is the author or editor of seventeen books and the winner
of two Pulitzer Prizes for The Ideological Origins of the American
Revolution (1967) and Voyagers to the West (1986).
Friday, November 19
The James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in
American
Culture
Magnalia Historiae Libri Americana; or, How the American
Antiquarian
Society Brought the History
of the Book into the New Millennium
by
Philip F. Gura
Since the inception of its Program in the History of the Book in American
Culture in 1983, AAS has emerged as a primary center for scholarship in
this burgeoning field. How does a research library, as opposed to a
university, come to fill such an important role? What is the nature of the
research and scholarly collaboration that AAS has nurtured that has been
internationally recognized? What is the relation of the work done at AAS
to the larger questions scholars address in American history and culture?
And most importantly, what new directions might such research take in the
new millennium? Gura will address these and other questions, offering both
a retrospective and prospective look at the significance of AAS as a
research center in the history of the book and of print culture.
This is the twenty-second annual Wiggins Lecture
named for James Russell
Wiggins (1903-2000), chairman of the Society from 1970 to 1977, who was
editor of the Washington Post and, until his death at the age of 96,
editor of the Ellsworth (Maine) American. Wiggins also served as US
ambassador to the United Nations in 1968.
Philip F. Gura, Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and
Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author or
editor of nine books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language,
Theology,
and Literature in the New England Renaissance (1981), C. F. Martin
and His
Guitars, 1796-1873 (2003), and an interpretive biography, Jonathan
Edwards, America's Evangelical, forthcoming from Hill & Wang.
2003 Public Lectures
2002 Public Lectures
2001 Public Lectures
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For further information on public lectures, contact James David Moran at
jmoran[at]mwa.org or (508) 755-5221.
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2006 Public Lectures
2005 Public Lectures
2003 Public Lectures
2002 Public Lectures
2001 Public Lectures
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