NEH Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society

FAIN: RA-50075-09

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Paul J. Erickson (Project Director: August 2008 to April 2016)

The equivalent of three fellowships a year for three years.

This application seeks continued funding for the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) under the NEH's initiative supporting Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions. Previous grants since 1975 have helped support a rich and growing body of scholarship in fields including American history, literature, religious history, art history, musicology, and the history of the book. The funding requested reflects the increased level of NEH fellowship stipends, and would include funds to award three full-year fellowships at the maximum stipend annually for three years. For more than three decades, the AAS-NEH fellowship program has made AAS's unparalleled resources for the study of American history, literature, and culture through 1876 accessible to scholars from throughout the nation, has fostered a culture of collegiality and scholarly interaction among fellows and staff, and has enabled AAS to more effectively promote humanistic scholarship in and about the United States.

Associated Products

New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Book)
Title: New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849
Author: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Abstract: In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World—one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/New-World-Drama/
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8223-534
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Copy sent to NEH?: No

"Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America" (Article)
Title: "Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America"
Author: Joseph M. Adelman
Abstract: During the American Revolutionary era, immigrant printers and their North American–born counterparts faced many struggles to secure sufficient business to remain solvent and simultaneously navigated complex political situations. Immigrant printers also faced the challenges of integrating themselves into extant commercial and political networks. They formed a substantial minority within the trade, making up nearly one-fourth of the master printers between 1756 and 1796. This essay examines the experiences of this group of printers, including Mathew Carey, and it focuses on their individual efforts to succeed in founding and furthering the publishing industry in the United States. In so doing, it explains how immigrant printers integrated themselves into American political and commercial information networks and highlights the vital role of their social capital and skills in achieving these printers’ goals during this era.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/early_american_studies_an_interdisciplinary_journal/v011/11.3.adelman.html
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Studies
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

"Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment" (Article)
Title: "Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment"
Author: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Abstract: In his classic account of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James relates a brief anecdote concerning a slave who is discovered to have stolen some potatoes and hidden them in his shirt. When confronted with the evidence of this theft, the slave replies, “Eh! Master. The devil is wicked. Put stones, and look, you find potatoes.” James writes, regarding this event, that the “majority of the slaves accommodated themselves to [the] unceasing brutality [of slavery] by a profound fatalism and a wooden stupidity before their master . . . When caught in error they persisted in denial with the same fatalistic stupidity.” Yet the stupidity at stake in this anecdote seems more than wooden—that is, it seems to partake of a certain creative resistance: the claim that the stones one put in one’s shirt were transformed into potatoes by the devil supposes or asks one to entertain the transformative capacity of inanimate, inert objects. More radically, the slave’s words invoke an alternative regime of being or ontology—one in which there is a plasticity between and among objects, one in which the devil has as much power to order the relations among people and things as does the master. The ontology evoked in James’s anecdote is given full expression in Obeah—the Jamaican religious/medical practice associated with colonial slave culture and the African diaspora.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_journal_of_nineteenth_century_americanists/summary/v001/1.1.dillon.html
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: J19: Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

"Coloniality, Performance, Translation: The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America (Book Section)
Title: "Coloniality, Performance, Translation: The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America
Author: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Editor: Daniel Maudlin
Editor: Robin Peel
Abstract: This essay examines the of colonial encounter as a scene of translation, focusing on the degree to which colonial encounter is a scene—an embodied performance—as much as on the extent to which this encounter concerns translation, linguistic force, and erasure. More specifically, it sketches a New World genealogy of theatricalized colonial encounters, beginning with Prospero and Caliban’s encounter in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and following its permutations in John Dryden and William Davenant’s The Enchanted Island (1667), through Daniel Defoe’s scene of encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Richard Sheridan’s theatricalized version of the same—Harlequin Friday or Robinson Crusoe (1781). The essay analyzes each of these texts in relation to a central scene of colonial encounter that, in every case, is also a scene of translation and/or language instruction. It also aims to consider the way in which this genealogy of texts is itself marked by translation—Dryden and Davenant translate Shakespeare; Sheridan translates Defoe. And finally, it focuses in particular on one historical locus of these multiple translations—namely, the performance history of The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe in the theaters of Charleston, S.C. in the 1790s. This performance history, occurring at a time when the theater had enormous cultural currency, underscores the significance of the geographical translation of English texts to American stages and points, as I ultimately want to argue, to the importance of the embodied public—the embodied scene of encounter with its attendant remains—in the creole culture of America.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.upne.com/1611684247.html
Publisher: University Press of New England
Book Title: Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations
ISBN: 978-1-61168-42

"What He Did for Love: David Claypoole Johnston and the Boston Irish" (Article)
Title: "What He Did for Love: David Claypoole Johnston and the Boston Irish"
Author: Jack Larkin
Abstract: This essay analyzes the career of nineteenth-century Boston's leading caricaturist, David Claypoole Johnston, particularly in the context of his personal life. A Whig loyalist who initially drew insulting caricatures of Irish immigrants, Johnston's marriage to a daughter of an elite Boston Irish family, and his eventual conversion to Catholicism, exerted a profound influence on his later artistic production.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.common-place.org/vol-13/no-03/larkin/
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Common-place
Publisher: American Antiquarian Society

Prizes

Uncommon Voice Prize
Date: 5/15/2014
Organization: Common-place
Abstract: Prize for the article in the previous volume of Common-place showing the highest literary merit.

"'Turned Their Minds to Religion': Oquaga and the First Iroquois Church, 1748-1776" (Article)
Title: "'Turned Their Minds to Religion': Oquaga and the First Iroquois Church, 1748-1776"
Author: Daniel R. Mandell
Abstract: In the mid-eighteenth century a cluster of Oneida-Tuscarora villages along the upper Susquehanna River formed a Protestant congregation directed by local leaders, who took the names Isaac and Peter, which had close ties to New England missionaries. Like other Native groups in the region, Oquaga embraced Protestantism in response to wars and other terrible disruptions. But this Iroquois church was distinctive. It preceded Samuel Kirkland's more famous effort by two decades; was driven and directed largely from within by Oneida leaders and needs; reflected Iroquoian norms of decorous ritual; initially shared the powerful spirituality of contemporary Native "prophets"; but showed little interest in the radical "New Light" pietism embraced by Natives in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island. After the French and Indian War, the community faced land-hungry colonists, newly arrived Tuscaroras who scorned Christianity, and a large influx of Mohawks loyal to the Church of England—whose leader, Joseph Brant, married Isaac's daughter. In 1773 Kirkland visited and roiled the church with his insistence on Calvinist reforms. The subsequent division and dissolution of the Oquaga church highlights how local, regional, and international politics—particularly those of the American Revolution—shaped religious identity in America.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/early_american_studies_an_interdisciplinary_journal/v011/11.2.mandell.html
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Studies
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

"Modernity, Gender, and the Panorama in Early Republican Literature" (Article)
Title: "Modernity, Gender, and the Panorama in Early Republican Literature"
Author: Yvette Piggush
Abstract: To trace the panorama’s meaning in the early Republic, this study reconstructs and analyzes a set of interconnected responses to stationary and moving panoramas, emanating primarily from New York. These responses begin with the artist Edward Savage’s initial efforts to market the stationary panorama to American audiences in Boston and New York. It then examines writing by figures including Benjamin Silliman, an early mentor to James Fenimore Cooper, Cooper himself, and his friend William Dunlap.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/early_american_literature/v048/48.2.piggush.pdf
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Literature
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Book)
Title: Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy
Author: Kyle Volk
Abstract: Should the majority always rule? If not, how should the rights of minorities be protected? In Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy, historian Kyle G. Volk unearths the origins of modern ideas and practices of minority-rights politics. Focusing on controversies spurred by the explosion of grassroots moral reform in the early nineteenth century, he shows how a motley but powerful array of self-understood minorities reshaped American democracy as they battled laws regulating Sabbath observance, alcohol, and interracial contact. Proponents justified these measures with the "democratic" axiom of majority rule. In response, immigrants, black northerners, abolitionists, liquor dealers, Catholics, Jews, Seventh-day Baptists, and others articulated a different vision of democracy requiring the protection of minority rights. These moral minorities prompted a generation of Americans to reassess whether "majority rule" was truly the essence of democracy, and they ensured that majority tyranny would no longer be just the fear of elites and slaveholders. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century, minority rights became the concern of a wide range of Americans attempting to live in an increasingly diverse nation.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/moral-minorities-and-the-making-of-american-democracy/oclc/870986742&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199371914.do
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0199371914
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Merle Curti Prize for Intellectual History
Date: 4/16/2015
Organization: Organization of American Historians

"Must Not Their Languages Be Savage and Barbarous Like Them?”: Philology, Indian Removal, and Race Science (Article)
Title: "Must Not Their Languages Be Savage and Barbarous Like Them?”: Philology, Indian Removal, and Race Science
Author: Sean P. Harvey
Abstract: article not available
Year: 2011
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the Early Republic

Prizes

Ralph D. Gray Article Prize
Date: 1/1/2011
Organization: Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
Abstract: Awarded annually for the best original article published in the previous volume of the Journal of the Early Republic.

A History of Stepfamilies in Early America (Book)
Title: A History of Stepfamilies in Early America
Author: Lisa Wilson
Abstract: In the first book-length work on the topic, Lisa Wilson examines the stereotypes and actualities of colonial stepfamilies and reveals them to be important factors in early United States domestic history. Remarriage was a necessity in this era, when war and disease took a heavy toll, all too often leading to domestic stress, and cultural views of stepfamilies during this time placed great strain on stepmothers and stepfathers. Both were seen either as unfit substitutes or as potentially unstable influences, and nowhere were these concerns stronger than in white middle-class families, for whom stepparents presented a paradox. Wilson shares the stories of real stepfamilies in early New England, investigating the relationship between prejudice and lived experience, and offers a new way of looking at family units throughout history and the cultural stereotypes that still affect stepfamilies today.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-stepfamilies-in-early-america/oclc/876000095&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781469618425
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Emily Dickinson's Teenage Fanclub (Article)
Title: Emily Dickinson's Teenage Fanclub
Author: Lara Cohen
Abstract: This essay explores the 1882 publication of “Success is counted sweetest” in the Amateur Journal, a newspaper edited by eighteen-year-old Albert E. Barker of Judsonia, Arkansas. The Amateur Journal was part of a fad that swept the United States after the Civil War, when thousands of teenage boys began publishing their own newspapers on diminutive printing presses. At its height in the 1880s, amateur journalism linked boys across the country into tightly knit virtual communities with their own distribution methods, literary conventions, social customs, and vernaculars. Barker likely reprinted “Success is counted sweetest” from the anonymous anthology A Masque of Poets, which had appeared four years before, and Dickinson was almost certainly unaware of her distant adolescent fan. But Barker’s adoption of the poem—and, in a series of intriguing editorial interventions, his adaptation of it—transforms its paean to failure into a manifesto for amateurdom, networking Dickinson into one of the earliest teenage subcultures.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/emily_dickinson_journal/v023/23.1.cohen01.pdf
Primary URL Description: Project Muse Page
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Emily Dickinson Journal 23, No. 1
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Emancipation of Boyhood: Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press (Article)
Title: The Emancipation of Boyhood: Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press
Author: Lara Langer Cohen
Abstract: In the late 1860s, manufacturers of printing presses in the United States began producing smaller versions of their commercial offerings for use in the home, where they could sit on a dining room table or fit in the corner of a parlor (fig. 1). The invention of these hobby presses led to an explosion of newspapers written, edited, and printed by teenage boys, who identified themselves as "amateur journalists." By the end of the 1870s, every state in the union could boast at least a handful of amateur papers, and some had hundreds. There are over 55,000 in the American Antiquarian Society collections alone (fig. 2). Most issues were four to eight pages, or one or two folded sheets of paper, but some ran up to thirty-two pages. At least one was printed on the back of a postcard. About half of amateur editors printed their own papers; perhaps another quarter or third had them printed by other amateur printers, and the remainder took them to professional job printers. In the twentieth century, amateur journalism grew to include adults as well as adolescents, but in its early decades it constituted a uniquely teenage print subculture—arguably, the first in existence.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.common-place.org/vol-14/no-01/cohen/#.VSvcq5PcCaohttp://
Primary URL Description: Periodical website
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Common-place

“The Postal Service is a Civic Institution, Not a Business.” (Article)
Title: “The Postal Service is a Civic Institution, Not a Business.”
Author: Joseph M. Adelman
Abstract: “The Postal Service is a Civic Institution, Not a Business.”
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/the-postal-service-is-a-civic-institution-not-a-business/256306/
Access Model: Open access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: The Atlantic

“USPS Folly Was Foreshadowed by Confederate Post Office.” (Article)
Title: “USPS Folly Was Foreshadowed by Confederate Post Office.”
Author: Joseph M. Adelman
Abstract: “USPS Folly Was Foreshadowed by Confederate Post Office.”
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-07/usps-folly-was-foreshadowed-by-confederate-post-office
Access Model: Open access
Format: Other
Periodical Title: BloombergView

“Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America.” (Article)
Title: “Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America.”
Author: David Anthony
Abstract: “Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America.” American Literary History 26:3 (2014): 431-461.
Year: 2014
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Literary History

Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation. (Book)
Title: Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation.
Author: Sean P. Harvey
Abstract: Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674289932
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674289932

"Transbutch" (Article)
Title: "Transbutch"
Author: Jen Manion
Abstract: "Transbutch"
Year: 2014
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Transgender Studies Quarterly

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: not available
Year: 2017
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Book Title: U.S. Women's History: Untangling the Thread of Sisterhood

The Consequential State: Public Law and the Release of Energy in Nineteenth-Century America (Article)
Title: The Consequential State: Public Law and the Release of Energy in Nineteenth-Century America
Author: Kyle Volk
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Journal of Legal History

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: Joseph M. Adelman
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://www.worldcat.org/title/revolutionary-networks-the-business-and-politics-of-printing-1763-1789/oclc/1088407552&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/revolutionary-networks
Secondary URL Description: Publisher
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: Jessie Morgan-Owens
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.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/girl-in-black-and-white-the-story-of-mary-mildred-williams-and-the-abolition-movement/oclc/1091330191&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Secondary URL: https://books.wwnorton.com/books/Girl-in-Black-and-White/
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-393-6092
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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