The remarkable story of John Swanson Jacobs—lost for 168 years—was rediscovered in 2016 by historian Jonathan Schroeder. In a conversation with AAS member Manisha Sinha (elected October 2006), Schroeder will discuss his incredible discovery of Jacobs’s first-person slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, first published in Australia in 1855.
This evening of music will be a celebration of the Society’s online resource Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. With over 800 images and 300 mini-essays, the site offers a unique and comprehensive view of the broadsides that Isaiah Thomas collected in early nineteenth-century Boston. The site is the culmination of decades of work by Kate Van Winkle Keller and is the result of a generous gift left to AAS by Arthur Schrader.
Maureen Cummins and Nicole Cooley, two former AAS Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellows will return to discuss their collaborative project entitled Salem Lessons. This work is a limited-edition artist book that features a slate-covered container and a "chorus of voices" that provide multiple perspectives on the experience of the Salem Witch trials of the 1690s.
In this program, poet Tess Taylor will recount how a residency here at the AAS helped her as she researched and wrote her latest book of poems, The Forage House. Her poems layer oral histories, documents, and folksongs to craft an exploration of her ancestors- a mix of New England missionaries and Southern slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson. Taylor's poems are as much about the imperfect material of family stories as they are about the politically charged material of history.
AAS member Nathaniel Philbrick (elected 2002) comes back to Antiquarian Hall to discuss his forthcoming book, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (May 2016).
This season’s public programs will begin with an exploration of the 1774 arms race between the Royal Army and colonial militia by AAS member J. L. Bell (elected 2011). Starting in September 1774, Massachusetts patriots and royal governor Thomas Gage raced for the province’s most powerful military resources—cannon and other artillery pieces. That competition cost the royal government control of most of Massachusetts, spread to neighboring colonies, and led to war the following spring.
Caleb Smith will discuss the memoir of a free black man from Rochester, New York, who spent most of his early life in the juvenile reformatories and state prisons of the antebellum period. Discovered in 2009 and recently published by Random House, Austin Reed's "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict," gives an inside account of the origins of the American prison system, providing a link between slavery and mass incarceration.
AAS member Patricia Crain (elected 2002) returns to the AAS reading room to discuss her latest book, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. This work explores what it meant for a child to be a "reader" and how American culture came to place such a high value on this identity. Crain conducted the research for Reading Children at AAS when she was an AAS-NEH fellow in the 2005-06 academic year.
This program will explore the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in August 1831. Patrick Rael will offer a new interpretation of Turner’s purpose and assess the significance of the rebellion for the national argument over slavery then underway. Ultimately, he argues, one of the least overtly “political” of all slave rebellions had political consequences that led to the breakdown of the union and the civil war that set African Americans free.
What is family? How does it lend itself to the writing of biography? What particular challenges does the writing of family biography present when the family in question is African American? Finally, how might the task change as we move from the Obama Years into the Trump Years in our national history?