Few national landmarks are better known than George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Join us for a special Presidents’ Day forum featuring Scott Casper discussing his book Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon, which brilliantly recovers the life of Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, in slavery and after emancipation. Through her life and those of her family and friends, Dr.
In this conversation between historian Manisha Sinha and AAS President Scott Casper, Sinha will discuss her forthcoming book on the history of the Reconstruction period. This new work expands the period both chronologically and thematically. Sinha will discuss how her current research at AAS has helped her examine the connections between Western expansion, conflicts between the federal government and Native Americans, the women’s rights movement, and the process of reconstructing American democracy in the South through the end of the nineteenth century.
In just fifteen years the game of baseball went from an obscure regional game to our national pastime. The story of how this happened is a fascinating tale that connects disparate concepts and events such as the rise of the middle class, immigration, the building of the Erie Canal, health reform, the growth of cities, changing conceptions of leisure, and the Civil War. It is also a story of baseball’s own false origin stories, why they were told, and how they have distorted our historical memory to this day.
AAS is hosting a virtual conference that will bring together a range of scholars in conversation about new directions in textual editing and scholarly editions. Since the late 1960s the American Antiquarian Society has been a sponsor of the Cooper Edition, a scholarly edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s works with the seal of the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. The conference coincides with the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Cooper’s first major novel, The Spy.
A sweeping reassessment of the American Revolution, Woody Holton’s new book, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution, shows how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, the book explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers.
In this program, Georgia Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, will discuss her new book, Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785–1885, which explains some of the costs and risks that book publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture at the end of the eighteenth century to a rich one a century later.
We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what produces it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an artificial construction of the modern world, and the primary timekeeping unit to which people in the modern world have anchored their rhythms, their schedules, and their perceptions of the flight of time.
In this program, Roberto Saba will discuss with Manisha Sinha his new book American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation, which explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians—which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others—consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries.