Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) examines the historical origins, the geographic spread, and the cultural consequences of the rise of “gentility” in early America—a complex of ideas and behaviors that encompassed how to talk, worship, and dress, how to paint your house and furnish your parlor.
Columbia University professor and AAS member Eric Foner (elected 1989) will discuss his groundbreaking and definitive 1988 book, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. This work won the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize, and the Lionel Trilling Prize.
In this lecture, AAS member Robert Gross discussed his 1976 Bancroft Prize -winning book, The Minute Men and their World. Providing a provocative and compelling look at the everyday lives of New England farmers and their community as they rebelled against Great Britain, The Minute Men and the World was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. In the tradition of the Baron Lecture—named in honor of Robert C. Baron, the past chairman of the AAS Council—Gross will reflect on the conception of this ground-breaking work and its ongoing impact on scholarship and society.
Breaking with the standard pattern of Baron Lectures, Mary Beth Norton (with the concurrence of AAS) will discuss not one book but the four related works in which she examined aspects of the same theme: the relationship of women and the public sphere in Early America, from the beginnings of English settlement through 1800. The talk will examine the trajectory of her work and describe the surprises she encountered along the way.
The four books Norton will discuss include:
When the book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic appeared in 1995, it deftly combined social history, biography, and literary analysis to explore the business and political career of James Fenimore Cooper’s father and the development of the western-New York frontier region of Otsego County. William Cooper’s Town won the Bancroft and the Pulitzer Prizes for history.
James H. Merrell will recount how he found his way into, or, as he puts it, “more accurately, stumbled upon,” The Indians’ New World and how this Bancroft Prize-winning book and the field have fared in the decades since the work appeared.
What would Willa Cather's widely read and cherished novels have looked like if she had never met magazine editor and copywriter Edith Lewis? In this groundbreaking book on Cather's relationship with her life partner, author Melissa J. Homestead counters the established portrayal of Cather as a solitary genius and reassesses the role that Lewis, who has so far been rendered largely invisible by scholars, played in shaping Cather's work.
Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War.
Translingual Inheritance tells a new story of the early days of democracy in the United States, when English had not yet become the only dominant language. Drawing on translingual theory, which exposes how language use contrasts with the political constructions of named languages, Elizabeth Kimball argues that Philadelphians developed complex metalinguistic conceptions of what language is and how it mattered in their relations.
The United States has been a space power since its founding, Gordon Fraser writes. The white stars on its flag reveal the dream of continental elites that the former colonies might constitute a "new constellation" in the firmament of nations. The streets and avenues of its capital city were mapped in reference to celestial observations. And as the nineteenth century unfolded, all efforts to colonize the North American continent depended upon the science of surveying, or mapping with reference to celestial movement.