Academic Seminars

2012-2013

American Antiquarian Society Seminars in association with the history departments of
Brown University, Clark University and the University of Connecticut

• Thursday, May 16, 2013, at 5:00 p.m., at AAS
  Carl Keyes (Assistant Professor of History, Assumption)
  History Prints and Promoting Patriotic Consumption after the Revolution: First Attempts at National Advertising Campaigns

  Refreshments will be provided after the paper, which will be followed by a dutch-treat dinner in Worcester. If you plan to attend, please notify Paul Erickson at AAS (at perickson@mwa.org) no later than Monday, May 13.

• Thursday, December 13, 2012, at 5:00 p.m., at AAS
  Martha Elena Rojas (Associate Professor of English, University of Rhode Island)
  ‘Matters of Surprise’: John Adams and the Diplomatic Book

  PRÉCIS: While serving as diplomats Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams each published books in Europe. Franklin's Constitutions des Treize États-Unis de L’Amerique (1783), Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), and Adams' Defence of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States (1787-8), all answered questions and countered misinformation circulating about the new nation. Putatively written in response to French criticisms of the U.S. state constitutions, Adams’ book differed from those of Franklin and Jefferson in content, methodology, and dissemination in ways that reflect and anticipate varying priorities, diplomatic strategies, and visions for the future United States.

  Refreshments will be provided after the paper, which will be followed by a dutch-treat dinner in Worcester. If you plan to attend, please notify Ann-Cathrine Rapp at AAS (at arapp@mwa.org) no later than Monday, December 10.

• Wednesday, October 3, 2012, at 5:00 p.m., at AAS
  Joseph M. Adelman (Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State University)
  National Productions: Rebuilding Print Networks in the Confederation Period

  PRÉCIS: This paper examines the role of printers in the development of a national communications infrastructure during the 1780s. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, Americans began to rebuild their economy and society while at the same time imagining.largely for the first time.just what shape the nation would take. Printers were crucial to that process: at the same time as they rebuilt their own trade, devastated by the war, they expanded rapidly across the Appalachian Mountains and began to cultivate ideas about national literature and politics. In so doing, they worked to convert a communications system that prior to the Revolution had been designed to foment intercolonial opposition to the British Empire into one that instead fostered cooperation among the newly independent states