American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Manisha Sinha, the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut, and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, will discuss the state of slavery studies with AAS Councilor Richard D. Brown, Board of Trustees and Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Connecticut.
Sidney Lapidus is a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law, a retired partner of the private equity firm Warburg-Pincus, and served as chair of the AAS Council from 2008 to 2019.
Founded in 1812, the AAS has been actively collecting for over two centuries. It holds an estimated two-thirds of the earliest publications printed in what became the United States. Today, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imprints are rare and thus expensive, so filling gaps in the library’s pre-1801 holdings can be challenging. The establishment of the Lapidus Pre-1801 Gift Fund was innovative and has allowed AAS curators to aggressively pursue material they could not afford otherwise. Since 2014, treasures have come from all manner of sources, including eBay vendors, auction houses, and thirty-five different antiquarian booksellers and printsellers.
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. A historian of the long nineteenth century, her research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. Sinha taught at the University of Massachusetts for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed on faculty. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in the New York Times 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. It was named Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review, book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication, and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. She was elected to AAS membership in October 2006 and was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence in 2020.
Richard D. Brown is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. He has taught as a Fulbright lecturer in France and at Oberlin College. A past president of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic and the New England Historical Association, Brown has held fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently he is the author of Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2017). He is also the author of Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1989) and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). With Irene Quenzler Brown he is the co-author of The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2003). Brown was elected a member of AAS in 1981 and currently serves on the Society’s Council (board of trustees.)