Programs

Public Programs

2010 Public Programs

• Tuesday, March 30
  Third Annual Adopt-A-Book Evening
  

  See books, pamphlets, newspapers, prints and other items that have found a home at AAS and make a contribution to help the library take in other waifs and strays. AAS curators will give a brief overview of what they buy and why.

  2010 Adopt-A-Book Catalog

• Wedesday, April 14 - 7:30 p.m.
  "Uncivil Discourse: A Conversation with Jim Leach and Jill Lepore"

  Join us for a conversation with National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chairman Jim Leach and historian and essayist Jill Lepore about the state of political discourse in America, past and present. This event is sponsored by the NEH in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society and Mass Humanities.

• Thursday, April 15 - 7:30 p.m.
  "Empire of Liberty"
  by Gordon S. Wood

  Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Gordon Wood will discuss his latest book Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009). This book covers the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 1812, a time marked by tumultuous change in all aspects of American life. The founders of the nation had high hopes for the future of the nation but few of their dreams worked quite as they expected. They hated political parties but parties nonetheless emerged along with a vibrant and raucous popular democracy dominated by the "middling sorts" composed of merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs with a fierce belief in equality. While many of the founders hoped to eventually abolish slavery by 1815 the institution was stronger than ever and starting to expand westward. These are just a few of the themes that Professor Wood explores as he describes this pivotal era when America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation.

  Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University. His 1969 book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, received the Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes and was nominated for the National Book Award. His 1992 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Emerson Prize. His other works include The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin and The Purposes of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. Dr. Wood contributes regularly to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

• Thursday, April 22 - 7:30 p.m.
  "Researching and Writing African American Biography: The Life of William Wells Brown"
  by Ezra Greenspan

  This illustrated talk combines two stories: a narrative of the life of the most prolific and pioneering African American writer of the nineteenth century, and an account of a biographer's journey to present that life to a twenty-first-century public.

  Brown personified the American Dream. Born into slavery and locked into illiteracy until his escape at age 19, he became an internationally renowned antislavery activist-writer who resided and traveled widely across the northern United States and the British Isles. Over the course of a life devoted to personal and collective reform, he wrote a series of remarkable books that includes the first African American novel, the first printed African American play, the first African American travelog, the first African American panorama displayed in Britain, and the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. This talk will present this remarkable life story via an account of a year-long, ongoing research journey to retrace the course of Brown's life and gather material for a comprehensive biography.

  Ezra Greenspan is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is a literary and cultural historian who studies the history of print culture in its various manifestations in the United States. Dr. Greenspan is interested, in particular, in the central activities (such as writing, reading, printing, and publishing) and institutions (such as libraries, bookstores, and schools) of American print culture. Among his many publications are: George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (Penn State Press, 2000), Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition (Routledge Press, 2004), William Wells Brown: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Walt Whitman and the American Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1990). He is the co-editor of the journal Book History the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP). Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and the reception of script and print. Currently Professor Greenspan is in residence at the American Antiquarian Society as the Mellon Distinguished Scholar where he is working on a comprehensive literary and cultural biography of William Wells Brown.

• Tuesday, May 4 - 7:30 p.m.
  "New England's Other Witch Hunt: John Winthrop, Jr. and the Hartford Witch Hunt of the 1660s"
  by Walter W. Woodward

  In the years before Salem, Connecticut, not Massachusetts, was New England's most zealous prosecutor of witchcraft. Not only did Connecticut conduct the first witch hanging in New England, it executed each of the first seven persons indicted for that crime. This talk focuses on John Winthrop, Jr. and the Hartford Witch hunt of the 1660s, showing how this alchemist, physician, political leader, and authority on the occult intervened to transform Connecticut from New England's fiercest witch hunter into a colony that ended executions permanently a generation before Salem. This talk is based upon the new book Prospero's America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchehemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606-1676 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  Walter W. Woodward is the Connecticut State Historian and an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He has published widely on Early America, the Atlantic World, and Connecticut history.

• Tuesday, May 18 - 7:30 p.m.
  "'A very radical proposition': Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Meanings of the Vote"
  by Lori D. Ginzberg

  Brilliant, self-righteous, charismatic, intimidating, and charming, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the founding philosopher of the American movement for woman's rights. To many she was a dangerous radical, whose words threatened men's exclusive control over politics, the stability of marriage, and the sanctity of religion. In advocating women's right to vote at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, she expressed the radical possibilities of American liberalism; at the same time, in her refusal to examine closely the racist and elitist implications of some of her most deeply held beliefs, she exposed the limitations of the feminism she would help make part of the very air we breathe. Lori Ginzberg, author of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), will explore some of these implications for our understanding of the vote, of individualism, and of Stanton herself.

  Lori D. Ginzberg is professor of history and women's studies at Penn State University with a longstanding interest in the intellectual and political history of American women. She is the author of several books, including Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-century United States (Yale, 1990) and Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (UNC, 2005).

  

• Thursday, June 3 - 7:30 p.m.
  "A Rumor that Almost Sparked a Revolution in 1774"
  by T.H. Breen

  This presentation explores the complex relation between the members of the First Continental Congress and the insurgents of New England. It argues that at a key moment almost two years before the Declaration of Independence the people were prepared to resist Great Britain, with arms if necessary. The lecture is drawn from T.H. Breen's new book American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010).

  T.H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is the author of several works of history including Tobacco Culture: the Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Imagining the Past: East Hampton Histories (winner of the Historical Preservation Book Prize) and Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004) Additionally, Professor Breen has written for The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times Book Review.

When the AAS was founded in 1812, and for much of the nineteenth century, most educated men and women took an interest in history as one of the obligations of being citizens in the American republic. As the writing and teaching of history became increasingly professionalized and specialized in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gaps developed between academic historians and the general public.

As one of the few American learned societies whose membership rolls include a substantial proportion of lay people as well as scholars, AAS is committed to help bring the work of American historians before the general public--to connect scholars and citizens, in other words. AAS public programs spotlight the work not only of historians but also of creative and performing artists and writers who have performed research at the Society.

Programs include a wide variety of events, including lectures, book discussions, theatrical and musical presentations, and film showings. Some of these public programs reach wider audiences by being taped for presentation of National Public Radio and on the weekend Book TV programming of the national cable network C-SPAN 2.

Attend a public program and earn 2 WOO points. More about the WOO card

For a complete listing of upcoming events at AAS, please view our calendar

For further information about our public programs, contact James David Moran at jmoran[at]mwa.org or call our main number at 508-755-5221

Directions to Antiquarian Hall

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.

2006 Public Programs
2007 Public Programs
2008 Public Programs
2009 Public Programs