Long-Term Research Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society

FAIN: RA-228592-15

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Paul J. Erickson (Project Director: August 2014 to September 2016)
Susan Forgit (Project Director: September 2016 to December 2016)
James David Moran (Project Director: December 2016 to May 2017)
Nan Wolverton (Project Director: May 2017 to present)

28 months of stipend support (3-7 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The American Antiquarian Society 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 1/1/2016 through 6/30/2019, 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

Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (Book)
Title: Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast
Author: Christine DeLucia
Abstract: Noted historian Christine DeLucia offers a major reconsideration of the violent seventeenth-century conflict in northeastern America known as King Philip’s War, providing an alternative to Pilgrim-centric narratives that have conventionally dominated the histories of colonial New England. DeLucia grounds her study of one of the most devastating conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers in early America in five specific places that were directly affected by the crisis, spanning the Northeast as well as the Atlantic world. She examines the war’s effects on the everyday lives and collective mentalities of the region’s diverse Native and Euro-American communities over the course of several centuries, focusing on persistent struggles over land and water, sovereignty, resistance, cultural memory, and intercultural interactions. An enlightening work that draws from oral traditions, archival traces, material and visual culture, archaeology, literature, and environmental studies, this study reassesses the nature and enduring legacies of a watershed historical event.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300201178/memory-lands
Primary URL Description: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300201178
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Book)
Title: Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
Author: Melanie Kiechle
Abstract: What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that nineteenth-century city dwellers, anxious about the air they breathed, attempted to create healthier cities by detecting and then mitigating the most menacing odors. Medical theories in the nineteenth century assumed that foul odors caused disease and that overcrowded cities-filled with new and stronger stinks-were synonymous with disease and danger. But the sources of offending odors proved difficult to pinpoint. The creation of city health boards introduced new conflicts between complaining citizens and the officials in charge of the air. Smell Detectives looks at the relationship between the construction of scientific expertise, on the one hand, and "common sense"-the olfactory experiences of common people-on the other. Although the rise of germ theory revolutionized medical knowledge and ultimately undid this form of sensory knowing, Smell Detectives recovers how city residents used their sense of smell and their health concerns about foul odors to understand, adjust to, and fight against urban environmental changes.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/KIESME.html
Primary URL Description: University of Washington Press
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780295741932
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Gender Expression in Antebellum America: Accessing the Privileges and Freedoms of White Men (Book Section)
Title: Gender Expression in Antebellum America: Accessing the Privileges and Freedoms of White Men
Author: Jen Manion
Editor: Anne Valk
Editor: Leslie Brown
Editor: Jacqueline Castledine
Abstract: Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, the ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current scholarship, examining both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. The book offers a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches, while vividly conveying the multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that is U.S. women’s history.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/search-list?keyword=U.S.%20Women's%20History:%20Untangling%20the%20Threads
Primary URL Description: Rutgers University Press
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Book Title: U.S. Women's History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood
ISBN: 978-0-8135-758

History and Its Discontents (Book Section)
Title: History and Its Discontents
Author: Manisha Sinha
Editor: Kate Viens
Editor: Conrad Edick Wright
Abstract: National leaders in the fields of academic and public history offer wide-ranging commentary on the current challenges and opportunities in the field as we strive to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse and networked society. In 14 short opinion pieces, an Introduction, and Afterword they explore the options available to us and stake out potential paths for the field in the coming years.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.masshist.org/publications/future_history
Primary URL Description: Massachusetts Historical Society
Publisher: Massachusetts Historical Society
Book Title: The Future of History: Historians, Historical Organizations and the Prospects for the Field
ISBN: 9781936520114

Reviving the Black Radical Tradition (Article)
Title: Reviving the Black Radical Tradition
Author: Manisha Sinha
Abstract: When we write new histories of slavery and capitalism, we need to revive both the history and the ongoing political project of black liberation. If histories of capitalism have been willfully blind to slavery, race, and imperialism, they are “equally blind to the emancipatory possibilities of the black radical tradition which emerged in opposition to it,” as Paul Hebert put it in a recent forum on Robinson’s Black Marxism on the African American Intellectual History Society’s blog. This tradition has a lot to tell us about the theory and praxis of resistance.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://bostonreview.net/forum/remake-world-slavery-racial-capitalism-and-justice/manisha-sinha-reviving-black-radical
Access Model: open access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Boston Review

Love Triangle With Dog: 'Whym Chow,' the 'Michael Fields," and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animals' Affective Bonds (Book Section)
Title: Love Triangle With Dog: 'Whym Chow,' the 'Michael Fields," and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animals' Affective Bonds
Author: Colleen Boggs
Editor: Michael Lundblad
Abstract: Michael Lundblad’s edited collection, Animalities, is a timely intervention in literary and cultural criticism, appearing at a moment when, as Lundblad points out, the burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of animal studies, critical animal studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism are becoming increasingly prominent in mainstream academia. In his illuminating introduction to the volume, Lundblad pauses to reflect on the usefulness of a wildly varied area of study that incorporates wide-ranging, and often contradictory, methodological approaches and ideologies. This variety has an immediate impact, as Lundblad indicates, on the ever-evolving classificatory apparatus that is deployed to define interest in the animal, the human, and animal-human relations – in addition to those mentioned above, Lundblad also describes animality studies, humanimal studies, and species studies as producing a proliferating cloud of terminology (1). One aim of this book then, is not to contribute further to any diffusion of common interest, but instead to focus on ‘a set of dynamics that move beyond the human […] that construct animals, on the one hand, or humans in relation to animals, on the other hand, or both’ (1–2). Lundblad identifies three primary ‘forms’ scholarship takes, human-animal studies, animality studies, and posthumanism, and proceeds to provide a valuable distinction between the three. This introduction lays out a clear and precise context for what follows, but is not didactic in its operation – as Lundblad wisely emphasises, he has ‘resist[ed] the impulse’ to label the work of his contributors (11).
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/general-and-theory/michael-lundblad-ed-animalities-literary-and-cultural-studies-beyond-the-human/
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Book Title: Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human
ISBN: 9781474400022

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History (Book)
Title: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History
Author: Juliana Chow
Abstract: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781108990660

Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (Book)
Title: Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession
Author: Christen Mucher
Abstract: Before American History examines the project of settler nationalism from the 1780s to the 1840s in two of North America’s republics—the US and Mexico—through an analysis of historical knowledge production. As the US and Mexico transformed from European colonies into independent republics—and before war scarred them both—antiquarians and historians compiled and interpreted archives meant to document America’s Indigenous pasts. Before American History approaches two iconic imaginings of the past—the carved Sun Stone and the mounded earthwork—as archives of nationalist power and Indigenous dispossession as well as objects that are, at their material base, Indigenously-produced but settler-controlled and settler-interpreted. In making the connection between earthworks built by an allegedly vanished people merely peripheral to US citizens and the literal touchstone of Mexicans’ history, Before American History details how Mexican and US nationalists created national histories out of Indigenous pasts and thereby wrote Indigenous pasts out of their national histories and out of national lands. It uncovers how the manipulation of Indigenous pasts and (mis)interpretations of “American Antiquities”—Indigenous documents, objects and monuments—served the purposes of a trans-imperial/transnational network of creole ruling elites, first in New Spain and British America, and later in Mexico and the United States, as they struggled to construct new political, geographic, and historical orders.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://open.upress.virginia.edu/projects/before-american-history#:~:text=Before%20American%20History%20approaches%20two%20iconic%20imaginings%20of,their%20material%20base%2C%20Indigenously-produced%20but%20settler-controlled%20and%20settler-interpreted.
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780813947754

Collateral Damage: The Impact of Foreclosure on Enslaved People during the Panic (Article)
Title: Collateral Damage: The Impact of Foreclosure on Enslaved People during the Panic
Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of the Early Republic, v. 40, no. 4, Winter 2020

Agents, Regulations, and Scandals: US Life Insurance Companies in Late-Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Book Section)
Title: Agents, Regulations, and Scandals: US Life Insurance Companies in Late-Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Editor: Jeronía Pons Pons
Editor: Robin Pearson
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://eh.net/book_reviews/risk-and-the-insurance-business-in-history/
Publisher: Fundación Mapfre
Book Title: Risk and the Insurance Business in History
ISBN: 978-8498447538

The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States (Article)
Title: The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States
Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Southern History, v. 87, no. 3

Gone to Texas: Deadbeat Debtors and their Human Property (Article)
Title: Gone to Texas: Deadbeat Debtors and their Human Property
Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Periodical Title: Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society, v. 11, no. 2

The “Contynuance of our Civell and Religious Liberties”: Plymouth Colonists’ 1665 “Humble Addrese” to the King (Article)
Title: The “Contynuance of our Civell and Religious Liberties”: Plymouth Colonists’ 1665 “Humble Addrese” to the King
Author: Adrian Weimer
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Literature 56.1

The Resistance Petitions of 1664-1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay (Article)
Title: The Resistance Petitions of 1664-1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay
Author: Adrian Weimer
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New England Quarterly 92, No. 2

The Quaker ‘Invasion’ (Book Section)
Title: The Quaker ‘Invasion’
Author: Adrian Weimer
Editor: Susan Juster
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Vol. 1

Colonial Quakerism (Book Section)
Title: Colonial Quakerism
Author: Andrew Murphy
Author: Adrian Weimer
Editor: John Coffey
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2020
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions
ISBN: 9780198702238

Quakers, Puritans, and the Problem of Godly Loyalty in the Early Restoration (Book Section)
Title: Quakers, Puritans, and the Problem of Godly Loyalty in the Early Restoration
Author: Adrian Weimer
Editor: John Smolinski
Editor: Andrew Murphy
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Book Title: The Worlds of William Penn

Longing for Annabel: Queer Love and the Melancholic Critic (Article)
Title: Longing for Annabel: Queer Love and the Melancholic Critic
Author: Ben Bascom
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation (Article)
Title: The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation
Author: Sonia Hazard
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Church History 91:4

Dangerous Proximities: Anglo-American Humanitarian Paternalists in the Era of Indigenous Removal (Article)
Title: Dangerous Proximities: Anglo-American Humanitarian Paternalists in the Era of Indigenous Removal
Author: Elspeth Martini
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Western Historical Quarterly 53:4

Visiting Indians, Nursing Fathers, and Anglo-American Empire in the post-War of 1812 Western Great Lakes (Article)
Title: Visiting Indians, Nursing Fathers, and Anglo-American Empire in the post-War of 1812 Western Great Lakes
Author: Elspeth Martini
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 3

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (Book)
Title: Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States
Author: Sharon Ann Murphy
Abstract: Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders. In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1334895272?oclcNum=1334895272
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226825137

Uneven Improvement (Book Section)
Title: Uneven Improvement
Author: Matt Suazo
Editor: Susan Gillman
Editor: Chris Castiglia
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Book Title: Neither the Time nor the Place: Today's Nineteenth Century

A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire (Book)
Title: A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire
Author: Adrian Weimer
Abstract: With the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the puritan-led colonies faced enormous pressure to conform to the crown’s priorities. Charles demanded that puritans change voting practices, baptismal policies, and laws, and he also cast an eye on local resources such as forests, a valuable source of masts for the English navy. Moreover, to enforce these demands, the king sent four royal commissioners on warships, ostensibly headed for New Netherland but easily redirected toward Boston. In the face of this threat to local rule, colonists had to decide whether they would submit to the commissioners’ authority, which they viewed as arbitrary because it was not accountable to the people, or whether they would mobilize to defy the crown. Those resisting the crown included not just freemen (voters) but also people often seen as excluded or marginalized such as non-freemen, indentured servants, and women. Together they crafted a potent regional constitutional culture in defiance of Charles II that was characterized by a skepticism of metropolitan ambition, a defense of civil and religious liberties, and a conviction that self-government was divinely sanctioned. Weimer shows how they expressed this constitutional culture through a set of well-rehearsed practices—including fast days, debates, committee work, and petitions. Equipped with a ready vocabulary for criticizing arbitrary rule, with a providentially informed capacity for risk-taking, and with a set of intellectual frameworks for divided sovereignty, the constitutional culture that New Englanders forged would not easily succumb to an imperial authority intent on consolidating its power.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1341342907
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781512823974

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