Renowned British historian Jeremy Black examines the established interpretations of the War of Independence and places the conflict in the context of military history. By focusing on British strengths and American weaknesses, he clarifies the reasons for American success and the extent of the American achievement. Black chairs the History Department at the University of Exeter, England.
What did it take for New England Indians and colonists to live alongside one another in peace? Was it possible for native communities to maintain distinct cultural and geographic boundaries after the English had seized the balance of power? In this presentation, David J. Silverman answers these questions by using Martha's Vineyard as a case study. He also shows that some island Wampanoag communities, such as Aquinnah (or Gay Head), lasted because their members were willing to adapt in order to preserve their land base and community ties.
Everyone knows that the American Revolution started at Lexington Green with the "shot heard 'round the world." Or did it? In his latest book, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, researched at AAS, Ray Raphael makes the claim that the American Revolution actually began seven months earlier in rural towns such as Worcester, when thousands of farmers and artisans overthrew the established government by forcing resignations and recantations from all Crown-appointed officials in rural Massachsetts.
Join historical performance specialist Shirley Hunt as she discusses her recent musical research as a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Hunt's research examines performance traditions and cultural contexts surrounding bowed string instruments in early nineteenth-century New England, with a specific focus on the early New England bass viols and violins housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As a result of her research at AAS, Hunt performed and video-recorded numerous musical selections on the instruments housed in MFA collection.
Sharing readings from their recently published books, scholars and creative writers Juliana Chow and Gillian Osborne will discuss the languages used in 19th-century American natural history to account for individual, species, and cultural loss.
At first glance, camping out appears to be a simple and seemingly timeless proposition: pack up the car and put up a tent in the great outdoors, get back to nature and get away from it all. A closer look at the 19th-century roots of this recreational habit reveals a more complex landscape. Before camping became a widely popular, and federally supported, modern vacation choice, we can trace the crisscrossing paths and varied encampments of elite tourists, Civil War veterans, freedpeople, transient workers, naturalists, and Indigenous peoples.
Join artist Brece Honeycutt as she discusses her project “A Bird to overhear-” an audio-visual essay drawn from her research as a Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2019. During her fellowship at AAS, Honeycutt examined over 140 books and collections, yet it was the unexpected viewing of the book Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio (1886) that intertwined her appreciation of plants deemed useless, such as weeds, with the magnificent nests of birds.
The American Antiquarian Society is one the nation's chief repositories for newspapers published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in what is now considered the United States, portions of Canada, and the British West Indies. The collection contains more than two million issues and takes up nearly seven miles of shelving. While recently searching through a backlog of unprocessed newspapers held in the library’s stacks, AAS staff discovered two previously un-recorded issues of Peter H. Clark’s paper Herald of Freedom.
In 1995, The American Antiquarian Society acquired one of the two earliest known copies of the New England Primer. Considered a staple text of Puritan childhood that taught letters, reading, and religion, the first edition of the New England Primer was most likely printed between 1683 and 1690, either in London or Boston. Early printings of the text, such as the AAS copy that was printed in 1727, are extremely scarce because of heavy use by generations of children and families.
The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.