Join us for virtually to hear Eric Gardner discuss his most recent book, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction (September 2025), which offers a powerful reexamination of one of the most important yet understudied Black women of the nineteenth-century. A writer, activist, and lecturer, Harper fought tirelessly for abolition, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and temperance.
Join us in person or virtually to hear historian Karin Wulf discuss her latest book, Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America (2025).
In this virtual book talk, Matthew P. Brown discusses his new book, The Novel and the Blank (2025), and explores the lively and often overlooked world of eighteenth-century print shops in British America. These workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from novels and pamphlets, legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks—which reflect the complexities of colonial life.
In August 2026, the American Antiquarian Society will host its second Historic Children's Voices K-12 Teacher Institute. Designed for educators in social studies and language arts, the five-day institute includes hands-on workshops using AAS’s collection of early American books for children, as well as its fascinating collection of children’s own writings from the colonial period through the 19th century. Looking at books children read, coupled with their own written words, offers an unusually intimate and immediate connection to literacy goals and practices of the past.
In January 2026, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) will host the Scholars’ Workshop in Early African American Print. This four-day, in-person program will bring together graduate students and early-career scholars focused on African American history and culture before 1900.
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.