Join us for virtually to hear Eric Gardner, in conversation with AAS Counselor Derrick Spires, discuss his most recent book Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction.
Join us in person, or virtually, to hear Karin Wulf speak on her newest book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America. Genealogy is everywhere– online, on screens, and through organizations and conferences and more. But technologies aside, genealogy was everywhere in the 18th century, too. I’ve written a book about that, about how meaningful genealogy was for diverse early Americans, in part because genealogy was foundational in law, politics, and religion and for plenty of purposes--including slavery.
Join us virtually as Matthew P. Brown discusses his latest book,The Novel and the Blank, where he uncovers the vibrant, overlooked world of the eighteenth-century British American print shop. Printing more than just novels and pamphlets, these workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks—that reflected the complexities of colonial life.
This five-day summer institute for school educators in social studies and language arts will take place at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In January 2026, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) will convene the Scholars’ Workshop in Early African American Print. Held onsite at AAS, the four-day workshop will assemble a cohort of graduate students and early career scholars specializing in pre-1900 African American history and culture. Participants will hone their skills using primary sources and refine their writing projects (dissertation chapter, book proposal, scholarly article, or other work-in-progress).
Join us virtually to hear Harold Holzer speak on his newest book Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (2024). In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.
Join us virtually as Sharon Ann Murphy discusses her latest book Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (2023), which takes the reader on a sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.
Join us virtually, or in person, to hear Akela Reason discuss her new book, Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York, a rich history of Gilded Age partisan politics, aesthetics, and the creation of New York City’s Civil War monuments.
Join us virtually on Zoom to hear Philip Gould discuss his newest book War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North, (2024). Gould will speak generally about the work and also give an overview of its readings, from authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott. By the end of the program the audience will see the parallels between the wartime state in the 1860s, with its expansion of federal and executive authority, to political questions we face today.
This virtual talk by Don James McLaughlin offers a new history of phobia’s rise as a framework for understanding the human mind and political life from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. He shows how phobia first acquired familiarity through “hydrophobia,” the historic name for rabies. Transliterated from the Greek, hydrophobia referenced a fear of water understood to be the disease’s telltale symptom, emanating from painful throat convulsions induced when trying to drink.