2007 Public Programs
Friday, January 19, 2007
Rabble Rousers and Reformers
A showcase of historical one person shows for schools,
historical societies, and professional associations
more information
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Remember the Ladies: A New Reading of Abigail Adams's Famous Letter
by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
This lecture is drawn in part from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's forthcoming
book, Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History, which suggests some
of the
ways the recent renaissance in women's history has forced a re-examination
of familiar topics. It examines the famous letter in which Abigail Adams
urged her husband to "remember the ladies" in the light of new scholarship
on the relationship between family values and political revolution. In
their exchange, Abigail and John showed how sentimental ideas about
male/female relations might help contain the social ferment unleashed by
revolution.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at
Harvard University where she teaches in the History Department. She is the
author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early
New
England, 1650-1750 (1982) and A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha
Ballard
Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990) which won the Pulitzer Prize for
History in 1991 and became the basis of a PBS documentary. Her 2001 book
The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of An American
Myth used ordinary household artifacts as a way of connecting
seemingly
unrelated strands of early New England history and the lives of white
women and their indigenous neighbors.
This special Women's History Month program is part of the Keepers of
the
Republic Teaching American History project with the Worcester,
Millbury,
and Sutton public schools. It is open and free to all K-12 educators;
however, advance registration is required. Please contact Amy Sopcak at
508-471-2129 or asopcak@mwa.org to register. First preference will be
given to educators in the Worcester, Millbury, and Sutton schools.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Real Civil War In Soldier Testimony
by Robert Bonner
This illustrated lecture is based on Robert E. Bonner's latest book,
The
Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War, for which he
selected letters, diaries, and sketches by sixteen men who fought,
suffered, and (in some cases) died during the Civil War. Drawn from more
than 180 documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection in New York City,
these previously unpublished images and letters, addressed to family and
loved ones, create an immediate and moving portrait of the common
soldier's experiences under fire during the nation's bloodiest and most
divisive war.
Robert E. Bonner is currently in residence at the Society as an American
Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. He has
taught at Michigan State University, Amherst College, and Dartmouth
College and is the author of Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the
Confederate South (2002) and Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis
of
American Nationhood (2007).
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
The Most Famous Man in America: Henry Ward Beecher
by Debby Applegate
Today he is remembered as the baby brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of the blockbuster novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, but in his
lifetime
Henry Ward Beecher was praised by great men such as Mark Twain, Ralph
Waldo Emerson and President Abraham Lincoln as "the most influential man
in America." The charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding
his father's fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a gospel of
unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of
modern American Christianity. Beecher inserted himself into nearly every
important drama of the era -- among them the antislavery and women's
suffrage
movements. And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused of
adultery with one of his most pious parishioners and the salacious legal
trial that followed became the most widely covered event of the century,
garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher
survived, but his reputation and his causes suffered devastating setbacks
that echo to this day.
Debby Applegate is the author of The Most Famous Man in America: The
Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (2006) on which this lecture is based.
This book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography and was chosen as one
of the 100 notable books of 2006 by the New
York Times. Applegate's writing has won her numerous prizes and
fellowships and has appeared in publications ranging from the Journal
of
American History to the New York Times. She has taught at Yale
and
Wesleyan universities.
Commenting upon her upcoming lecture, Applegate said, "It is especially
fitting to speak here on the heels of winning this prize since the
generosity of the Antiquarian Society has been so important to my book.
For a historian the Antiquarian Society is like Aladdin's cave; here I
discovered Henry Ward Beecher's college essays, a picture of his
long-burned-down high school, and one-hundred-and-fifty year-old gossip
magazines, just the kind of details that make a biography come alive.
Frankly, it wouldn.t have been much of a book without the AAS."
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Financing America's First Literary Boom
Wayne Franklin
American literature has had many origins, but as a modern commercial
phenomenon it took its clearest rise in New York City and Philadelphia in
the two decades immediately following the War of 1812. Here a group of
apologists for the coming maturity of American culture battled English
condescension in a series of publications such as James Kirke Paulding's
Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan (1812), Robert
Walsh's
Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain (1819), and Charles
Jared
Ingersoll's Discourse of America on the Mind (1823). More
importantly,
writers in this region invented both a series of popular literary types
and innovative means of marketing them. "Financing America's First
Literary Boom" will examine the parallel efforts of Washington Irving and
James Fenimore Cooper to secure the profits from their wildly successful
books in the United States and abroad in the years from 1820 to 1830. In
doing so, it will offer a lively portrait of how literature was
transformed from a cultural ambition into a paying profession in the new
American nation. This lecture is based on Franklin's forthcoming book,
James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (Yale University Press, May
2007).
Wayne Franklin is the author of several studies of early American
literature and culture, including Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers
(1979)
and The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (1982). He is the
editor of
the pre-1700 section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and is
the founding editor of the 25-volume American Land and Life series
(1990-present). He is a professor of American Studies and English at the
University of Connecticut.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
John Quincy Adams in Russia
2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the establishment of official
diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia. Through
times of peace and turmoil the two countries have maintained diplomatic
ties. John Quincy Adams in Russia is a dramatic presentation that
celebrates this significant anniversary and also the life of our first
ambassador to Russia. The program will take the form of a dramatic
dialogue between Adams biographer Lynn Parsons and professional actor
Jim Cooke. This historically accurate and dynamically entertaining
performance will explore the life and times of John Quincy Adams, who in
1781 at age 15 served as Secretary to the Mission to Russia and from
1809-1814 served as the first U.S. Minister to Russia.
John Quincy Adams in Russia is part of a region wide
celebration. It will also be performed at the Old South Meeting House
in Boston on September 20, 2007, at 6:30 p.m. and at the Amherst College
Center for Russian Culture on September 23, 2007, at 3 p.m.
Additionally, Dr. Parsons will deliver a lecture at the Massachusetts
Historical Society on September 19, 2007, at 6:30 p.m. John Quincy
Adams in Russia is supported by funds from the Massachusetts Foundation
for the Humanities and the U.S.-Russia Chamber of Commerce of New
England, Inc.
Jim Cooke has been portraying figures from the past for more than twenty
years including Calvin Coolidge, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, William
Lloyd Garrison, and James Whitcomb Riley. He has been invited to give
presentations at several presidential libraries and has appeared on the
Today Show, C-Span, and National Public Radio.
Lynn Parsons is Professor Emeritus from S.U.N.Y. at Brockport where he
chaired the history department. His biography of John Quincy Adams has
been reviewed positively, and he is recognized for his expertise on John
Quincy Adams and the Indians. He has published essays on Adams and his
famous mother Abigail and has recently crafted a play The Tye More
Binding based on the correspondence of Abigail and John Adams.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Taking a Look at Grant Twenty-five Years Later
by William S. McFeely
In 1982, William S. McFeely won the Pulitzer and Francis Parkman prizes
for his book Grant: A Biography (W.W. Norton, 1981). This seminal
biography of one of America's towering and enigmatic figures traced
Grant's entire life from his birth in 1822 through his boyhood in Ohio
to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the
crucial years of Reconstruction and finally his heroic battle with
cancer and death in 1885. McFeely's work is a penetrating examination of
Grant's successes and failures and his extraordinary ordinariness.
During his presentation at AAS, McFeely will recount some of his
experiences writing the book, its reception, as well as some thoughts on
the craft of biography.
William S. McFeely taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College and
is
currently the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at
the University of Georgia. His many works of biography and history
include: Grant: A Biography (1981); Frederick Douglass
(1991), which won
the Lincoln Prize; Proximity to Death (1999); Sapelo's People:
A Long
Walk into Freedom (1994); Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard
and
the Freedmen (1983); and Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins
(2006).
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.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Captain John Smith and the Invention of English America
By Karen Ordahl Kupperman and Walter Woodward
In honor of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, this
program will examine the role Captain John Smith played in the founding
of both Virginia and Massachusetts. Historians usually treat the
founding of Jamestown and the Chesapeake colonies as utterly different
from the beginnings of New England with Plymouth and the Puritans. In
reality, the two regions had a great deal in common in the founding era,
and Captain John Smith is in many ways the link between them. Much of
the experimentation involved in learning how to make colonies function
was done in early Virginia. It was Smith who studied the record and
presented the first full treatment of the theory and practice of
colonization in his writings. He considered the north much more
promising, however, and coined the name New England to cement his
preference. He spent the bulk of his adult life promoting the north and
describing how the region should be developed.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman is the Silver Professor of History at New York
University. Her published books include: Indians and English: Facing
Off
in Early America (2000); Major Problems in American Colonial
History,
2nd ed. (2000,1992); America in European Consciousness (1995);
Providence Island, 1630-1641: The Other Puritan Colony (1993);
Roanoke:
The Abandoned Colony (1984, 1991); and Settling With the Indians:
The
Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (1980).
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 American, Atlantic World, and Connecticut history. He
is currently working on a book Prospero's America: John Winthrop,
Jr.,
Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606-1676, to be
published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and
Culture.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Why Transcendentalism Still Matters: Emerson and His Circle in Our Time
By Philip S. Gura
Based upon his forthcoming book, American Transcendentalism: A
History
(Hill and Wang, November, 2007), Philip F. Gura will explore the
relationships between the ideas and personalities of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, perhaps the most famous of the transcendentalists, and the
lesser known writers, thinkers and clergymen who were his friends,
followers and adversaries. American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive
narrative history of America's first group of public intellectuals, the
men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked
American reform in the decades before and following the American Civil
War.
Philip F. Gura is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American
Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,
where he holds appointments in English, American studies, and religious
studies. Some of his many publications include Jonathan Edwards:
America's Evangelical (2005); 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). He is
currently writing a history of AAS for the Society's bicentennial in
2012.
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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
2006 Public Programs
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