American Studies Seminar
Fall 2021
A Second and More Glorious Revolution:
Protest and Radical Thought in the Nineteenth-Century United States
with Holly Jackson, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Socialist communes; antislavery insurrections; strikes and riots; Free Love dance parties: the nineteenth-century United States bubbled over with schemes to overthrow the existing social order at a time that is too often misremembered as conservative or “Victorian.” Students in this seminar will explore the literature and culture of American radicalism, discovering the forgotten historical precursors of contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Me Too. We will read revolutionary manifestoes, convention proceedings, black nationalist novels, and newspapers that advocated the abolition of slavery, capitalism, marriage, and the private home. Though they tirelessly critiqued the nation’s injustices, these activists regarded themselves as the true heirs of the American founders, striving to make good on the utopian promise of the American Revolution and rout out the entrenched social inequalities that had marred the project from its beginnings. Focusing primarily on Massachusetts – and often on Worcester specifically – we will approach the history of social justice activism, and its international implications, from our local context. Pairing assigned readings with primary materials drawn from the unsurpassed collections of the American Antiquarian Society, this seminar provides students with a unique opportunity for guided, hands-on archival research into the texts, movements, and ideas that shaped the culture of radical dissent and the course of American history.
Holly Jackson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals including PMLA, American Literature, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, and the New England Quarterly, as well as in popular venues including the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post. She is the author of two books, most recently American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation (2019), which was hailed among the year’s best works of nonfiction by Smithsonian Magazine and The Advocate.
WHEN AND WHERE
The seminar will meet Thursday afternoons from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM at the American Antiquarian Society, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts.
WHO IS ELIGIBLE
The seminar welcomes applications from students in all disciplines whose academic record, personal statement, and letter of recommendation indicate a commitment to academic excellence, the ability to work independently, and a sincere interest in the seminar’s subject matter.
Previous Seminars
Each year the Society sponsors the American Studies Seminar for a select group of undergraduates from the five four-year colleges and universities in Worcester: Assumption University, Clark University, the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Worcester State University. Over the course of the semester, students will produce a significant research paper on a topic related to the seminar theme and based on research using primary sources such as lithographs, city views, photographs, maps, portraits, newspapers, and letters held in the AAS collections.
Year | Topic | Leader |
2019 | Pirates in Early America | Lisa Wilson |
2018 | Early American Transgender Studies | Jen Manion |
2017 | Industrializing Massachusetts: Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester, 1800-1875 | Robert Forrant |
2016 | The Worm in the Apple: Slavery, Emancipation, and Race in Early New England | Joanne Pope Melish |
2015 | The North's Civil War: Union and Emancipation | Kevin M. Levin |
2014 | Portraits, Dolls, and Effigies: Humans as Objects in America | Caroline Frank |
2013 | The Nineteenth-Century Networked Nation: The Politics of American Technology, 1776-1876 | Daniel Klinghard |
2012 | Reason, Revival, and Revolution: Religion in America's Founding, 1726-1792 | Stephen A. Marini |
2011 | Dressing Democracy: Clothing and Culture in America | Hannah Carlson |
2010 | History of Sexuality in Early America | Sarah Anne Carter |
2009 | America's Environmental Histories | Megan Kate Nelson |
2008 | "Written by himself... Written by herself" American Life Stories: The Northern United States 1780-1860 | Jack Larkin |
2007 | Captive Histories: Puritan Captivity Narratives and Native Stories from the Era of the Colonial Wars, 1675-1760 | Kevin Sweeney |
2006 | Personal Narratives from the Age of the American Revolution, Or Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times | Joseph Cullon |
2005 | Childhoods, Actual and Imagined: New England, 1790-1860 | Jack Larkin |
2004 | Communication in the Early Nation: Literacy and Print in America, 1750-1840 | Catherine A. Corman |
2003 | Imagining the Civil War: Race, Gender, and Popular Culture, 1860-1877 | Carolyn J. Lawes |
2002 | Private Writings: Their Uses and Value for History and Literature | Helen R. Deese |
2001 | Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture in Early America, 1674-1860 | Daniel A. Cohen |
2000 | Romanticism Confronts History: Literary and Material Culture in the United States, 1820-1876. | Harvey Green |
1999 | The Shaping of Historical Memory: Collecting the Artifacts of America's Past, 1790-1840 | Barnes Riznik |
1998 | Seeing America First: Exploration and Imagination in North America, 1500-1900 | Gregory H. Nobles |
1997 | Accounts of the Self: Autobiography and Personal Narrative in Antebellum America | Ann Fabian |
1996 | Revolutionary Narratives: Memory and Desire in Antebellum America | Wayne Franklin |
1995 | Wilderness Views: Nature as Other, Self, and Enterprise in American Culture c.1776-1900. | Janice Simon |
1994 | Children's Books and Childhood Reading in Early America | Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. |
1993 | The Invention of New England in the Nineteenth Century | Dona Brown |
1992 | Gender in the Nineteenth Century | Lee Heller |
1991 | Slavery and Antislavery in American Civilization, 1820-1861 | William W. Freehling |
1990 | Law and Society in America, 1760-1860 | Jonathan M. Chu |
1989 | Religion in the American Revolution | Stephen A. Marini |
1988 | Health and Health Care in America's Past | Philip Cash |
1987 | The Constitution and the Press, 1787-88: Popular Culture, Political Opinion, and the Ratification Debates | Charles E. Clark |
1986 | The American Landscape | John Conron |
1985 | Antebellum and Civil War Biography | Betty Mitchell |
1984 | The Lethal Imagination: Perceptions of Western Violence in American Thought, 1850-1900 | Robert R. Dykstra |
1983 | Ethnic America Before the Flood: the Irish and Others | Charles Fanning |
1982 | High Culture, Low Culture: Recreation and Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America | Donald M. Scott |
1981 | Individual, Family, and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England | Ross W. Beales |
1980 | Community Life in Preindustrial Worcester | Kenneth Moynihan and Charles Estus |
1979 | Popular Culture in Preindustrial America, 1650-1850 | David Hall |
1978 | Literature and Society in Jacksonian America: Writers Confront the Marketplace | Stephen Nissenbaum |