Long-term Research Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society

FAIN: RA-259197-18

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Nan Wolverton (Project Director: August 2017 to present)

24 months of stipend support (2-6 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is an independent research library of early American history, literature, and culture through 1876 located in Worcester, MA. Founded in 1812, the Society's collections include over four million items--the largest collection of early American printed materials anywhere in the world. Building on decades of support from the Endowment, the AAS is applying for renewal funding for its program of long-term fellowships, to run from 1/1/2019 through 6/30/2022, for thirty fellowship months per year, enabling scholars from around the country and a variety of career stages to visit AAS to conduct sustained research for a period of 4 to 12 months. These fellowships are crucial to the Society's robust set of scholarly programs, and to its mission of fostering innovative humanities research of the highest quality that presents the unique holdings of the Society's library to a broad set of audiences.

Associated Products

Revolutionary Networks : the Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Book)
Title: Revolutionary Networks : the Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789
Author: Adelman, Joseph M
Abstract: During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks, Joseph M. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their commercial and political connections to directly shape Revolutionary political ideology and mass mobilization. Going into the printing offices of colonial America to explore how these documents were produced, Adelman shows how printers balanced their own political beliefs and interests alongside the commercial interests of their businesses, the customs of the printing trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. Adelman describes how these laborers repackaged oral and manuscript compositions into printed works through which political news and opinion circulated. Drawing on a database of 756 printers active during the Revolutionary era, along with a rich collection of archival and printed sources, Adelman surveys printers' editorial strategies. Moving chronologically through the era of the American Revolution and to the war's aftermath, he details the development of the networks of printers and explains how they contributed to the process of creating first a revolution and then the new nation. By underscoring the important and intertwined roles of commercial and political interests in the development of revolutionary rhetoric, this book essentially reframes our understanding of the American Revolution. Printers, Adelman argues, played a major role as mediators who determined what rhetoric to amplify and where to circulate it. Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/revolutionary-networks
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781421428604
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement (Book)
Title: Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement
Author: Morgan-Owens, Jessie
Abstract: When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she “passed” as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race. Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay—one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DP5FXLW/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0
Publisher: W.W. Norton & CO.
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0393609240

Slavery and the Making of the Early American Library British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Book)
Title: Slavery and the Making of the Early American Library British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814
Author: Sean Moore
Abstract: Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: //https://global.oup.com/academic/product/slavery-and-the-making-of-early-american-libraries-9780198836377?cc=us&lang=en&
Access Model: subscription
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198836377

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 (Book)
Title: The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870
Author: Daniel Mandell
Abstract: The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person's right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a "rough" or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/lost-tradition-of-economic-equality-in-america-1600-1870/oclc/1108783121&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781421437118
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Book)
Title: Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917
Author: Dale Cockrell
Abstract: Everybody’s Doin’ It follows the birth of popular music, including ragtime and jazz, in New York’s convivial meeting places for sex, drink, music, and dance. Whether a single piano player or small band, live music was a nightly feature in spirited basement dives, dance halls, brothels, and concert saloons. There men and women, and often blacks and whites, mingled freely—to the horror of the moralistic elite. This rollicking demimonde drove innovative new music and dance styles. Irving Berlin with his hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band make appearances, but so too do Stephen Foster, Charles Dickens, Theodore Roosevelt, and Juba.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.dalecockrell.com/home-1
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0393608948
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Patriotism by Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865 (Book)
Title: Patriotism by Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of Citizen-Soldiers, 1863-1865
Author: Colleen Glenney Boggs
Abstract: Assembling an extensive textual and visual archive, Patriotism by Proxy examines the draft as a cultural formation that operated at the nexus of political abstraction and embodied specificity, where the definition of national subjectivity was negotiated in the interstices of what it means to be a citizen-soldier. It brings together novels, poems, letters, and newspaper editorials that show how Americans discussed the draft at a time of censorship, and how the federal draft changed the way that Americans related to the state and to each other.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://global.oup.com/academic/product/patriotism-by-proxy-9780198863670?q=Boggs&lang=en&cc=us#
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198863670
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and nineteenth-Century American Literature (Book)
Title: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and nineteenth-Century American Literature
Author: Jonathan Senchyne
Abstract: The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/intimacy-of-paper-in-early-and-nineteenth-century-american-literature/oclc/1101040819&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: worldcat.org
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781625344731
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (Book)
Title: Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America
Author: Rachel Walker
Abstract: While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1304360933
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226822563
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The In/Visibility of Mourning: Seeing Labor, Loss, and Enslavement in an Antebellum Posthumous Portrait (Article)
Title: The In/Visibility of Mourning: Seeing Labor, Loss, and Enslavement in an Antebellum Posthumous Portrait
Author: Christina Michelon
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: American Art

Early Black Evangelical Writing and the Radical Limitations of Print (Book Section)
Title: Early Black Evangelical Writing and the Radical Limitations of Print
Author: Joe Rezek
Editor: Rhondda Thomas
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: African American Literature in Transition, 1750-1800

The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania (Book Section)
Title: The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of Monomania
Author: Jonathan Schroeder
Editor: Jonathan D.S. Schroeder
Editor: Meredith Farmer
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Book Title: Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn

This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (Book)
Title: This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations
Author: Whitney Nell Stewart
Abstract: The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white. Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. By exploring the material remnants of the past, Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.
Year: 2023
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph

White/white and/or the Absence of the Modifier (Article)
Title: White/white and/or the Absence of the Modifier
Author: Whitney Nell Stewart
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2023
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Early Republic 43, no. 1: 101–108

Mathematical Geography, the “Use of the Globes,” and Race Theory in Early America (Article)
Title: Mathematical Geography, the “Use of the Globes,” and Race Theory in Early America
Author: Tamara Thornton
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 77

Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (Book)
Title: Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America
Author: Rachel Walker
Abstract: Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person's intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature. While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant--if largely forgotten--cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1365367123
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph

Post-Civil War Black Childhoods (Book Section)
Title: Post-Civil War Black Childhoods
Author: Nazera Wright
Editor: Eric Gardner
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: African American Literature: In Transition, 1750- 2015

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