From pumpkin pies to johnnycakes, maple syrup, roast turkey, and cornmeal cakes, the history of “traditional” New England cuisine is rooted in Indigenous knowledge and traditional foodways. Join us for a cooking demonstration and discussion that will place Indigenous ways of knowing and tradition-keeping into conversation with AAS archival materials to examine the lasting impact of settler colonialism in the Eastern Woodlands region.

Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy

Panel 3 - "Textual Editing Beyond the Print Edition of the Canonical Writer"

Chair and Keynote:

John Bryant (Professor Emeritus of English, Hofstra University)

In this program, poet David Mills will read from and reflect upon the research behind his recent collection, Boneyarn, the first-ever book of poems about slavery in New York City. The city holds the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the United States—the African Burial Ground—which was open from 1712 to 1795 and is located in Wall Street’s shadows. Fifteen thousand enslaved and free Blacks, some Native Americans, and poor whites are buried there. Mills creatively “excavates” the tragedies and triumphs of New York’s enslaved and free Black community.

For thirty-five years, American Girl dolls have attempted to encourage girls to embrace their strength, be themselves, and engage with American history, while also, of course, providing countless hours of entertainment. For many girls—including some AAS staff members!—the historical worlds of the dolls have inspired a lifelong love of history, sometimes even a career path. But what is the real history behind these fictional characters?

In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning; often libraries clear out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not.