Long-term fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society

FAIN: RA-278173-21

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Nan Wolverton (Project Director: August 2020 to present)

26 months of stipend support (4 to 6 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The American Antiquarian Society seeks renewed funding for the term 1/1/2022 through 6/30/2025 in the amount of $399,000 to support long-term fellowships for a total of 26 fellowship months per year at the stipend level of $5000/month. Founded in 1812, the AAS is a learned society centered on an independent research library of pre-20th century American history and culture. The Society offered its first National Endowment for the Humanities funded fellowships in 1976-77. The proposed renewal of NEH-supported fellowships will enable scholars from around the country, from diverse backgrounds, and at varied career stages, to conduct research at AAS for periods of 4 to 12 months. The Society asks that NEH provide it with the means to maintain the long-term fellowship program and thus to continue to serve the cause of humanistic scholarship in the United States.

Associated Products

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
Primary URL: http://https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108990660
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781108990660
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

“Full and Impartial Justice”: Robert Morris and the Equal School Rights Movement in Massachusetts (Article)
Title: “Full and Impartial Justice”: Robert Morris and the Equal School Rights Movement in Massachusetts
Author: Kabria Baumgartner
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2022
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New England Quarterly 25:2

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
Title: Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America
Author: Rachel E. Walker
Author: Rachel E. Walker
Abstract: Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. 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.
Abstract: Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. 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
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo182756428.html
Primary URL: http://https://search.worldcat.org/title/1348481729
Secondary URL: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo182756428.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226822563

Female Husbands: A Trans History (Book)
Title: Female Husbands: A Trans History
Author: Jen Manion
Abstract: Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands- people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women- were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before World War I, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, and threat of violence. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes toward female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of "female husband" in the early twentieth century. Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://https://search.worldcat.org/title/1257408335
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781108718271
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America (Book)
Title: The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America
Author: Daniel R. Mandell
Abstract: This book chronicles the decline of the American foundational idea that a relative equality of wealth for citizens is essential to a well-functioning republican government. The author explains how egalitarianism gave way over time to an acceptance of economic disparity and hierarchy as a social reality in American society. The book provides a historical perspective on the gap between rich and poor that characterizes the contemporary United States.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://search.worldcat.org/title/1108783121
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781421437125
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Nature of the Future : Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (Book)
Title: The Nature of the Future : Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North
Author: Emily Pawley
Abstract: The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality--antebellum New York State--and follows thousands of "improving agriculturists," part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://search.worldcat.org/title/1145611159
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226693972

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