NEH Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society
FAIN: RA-50112-12
American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA 01609-1634)
Paul J. Erickson (Project Director: August 2011 to September 2016)
Susan Forgit (Project Director: September 2016 to April 2017)
Twenty-four months of stipend support a year for three years at the American Antiquarian Society. Grant funds support fellows' stipends and help defray expenses related to the process of selecting fellows.
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
Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance and the Urban Environment, 1840-1880 (Article)Title: Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance and the Urban Environment, 1840-1880
Author: Melanie Kiechle
Abstract: Attitudes toward fresh air and fear of stenches guided choices that restructured and changed the urban environment and governance between 1840 and 1880. This study of olfactory-inspired reforms demonstrates the cultural significance of nuisance beyond the courtroom. City dwellers used their understanding of stench nuisance as detrimental to health to construct smellscapes or olfactory maps of New York City. Such maps identified health threats and guided movements through or out of the city. These maps proliferated before and after the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Health in 1866. Sanitarian concern about stenches echoed lay concerns, and encouraged the creation of standing health boards. These boards mapped air currents that crossed political boundaries rather than pursuing individuals’ stench complaints. Considering individuals’ smellscapes alongside the health board’s maps demonstrates that 1866 was a turning point for the creation of both institutionalized public health and the conflict between lay and expert.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://juh.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/12/0096144214566981.abstractPrimary URL Description: Periodical website
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Urban History
Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Book)Title: Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
Author: Melanie A. 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
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780295741932
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
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: Collen Boggs
Editor: Michael Lundblad
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Book Title: Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human
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
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetorics of Archaeological Value (Article)Title: Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetorics of Archaeological Value
Author: Christen Mucher
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Transnational American Studies
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 D. 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://www.worldcat.org/title/slavery-and-the-making-of-early-american-libraries-british-literature-political-thought-and-the-transatlantic-book-trade-1731-1814/oclc/1084317961?referer=di&ht=editionPublisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198836377
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor (Book)Title: A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor
Editor: Naomi J. Stubbs
Editor: Amy E. Hughes
Abstract: Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was also a prolific diarist. For fifteen years Watkins regularly recorded the plays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Performing across the U.S., Watkins collaborated with preeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as well as his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary of substantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—making Watkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys. Theater historians Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs have selected, edited, and annotated excerpts from the diary in an edition that offers a vivid glimpse of how ordinary people like Watkins lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. The selections in A Player and a Gentleman are drawn from a more expansive digital archive of the complete diary. The book, like its digital counterpart, will richly enhance our knowledge of antebellum theater culture and daily life in the U.S. during this period.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/a-player-and-a-gentleman-the-diary-of-harry-watkins-nineteenth-century-us-american-actor/oclc/7973651315?referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Secondary URL:
https://www.press.umich.edu/9290953/player_and_a_gentlemanSecondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-0-472-1309
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Harry Watkins Diary: Digital Edition (Web Resource)Title: The Harry Watkins Diary: Digital Edition
Author: Naomi J. Stubbs
Author: Amy E. Hughes
Abstract: Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was aprolific diarist. For fifteen years (1845–60), Watkins regularly recorded theplays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions ofcurrent events. Performing across the United States, Watkins collaborated withpreeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as wellas his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth,Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary ofsubstantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—makingWatkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys.
This searchable digital edition includes the entire uncorrected text of Watkins’s diary, encoded in XML, prepared in accordance with guidelines established by the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org). It is archived by the University of Michigan Library as a companion to the University of Michigan Press volume: A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor, eds. Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs (University of Michigan Press,2018), https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9290953.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/hwatkins/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_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781625344748
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Patriotism By Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of the Citizen-Soldier, 1863-1865 (Book)Title: Patriotism By Proxy: The Civil War Draft and the Cultural Formation of the Citizen-Soldier, 1863-1865
Author: Colleen Glenney Boggs
Abstract: At the height of the Civil War in 1863, the Union instated the first-ever federal draft. Patriotism By Proxy develops a new understanding of the connections between American literature and American lives by focusing on this historic moment when the military transformed both.
Paired with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 draft inaugurated new relationships between the nation and its citizens. A massive bureaucratic undertaking, it redefined the American people as a population, laying bare social divisions as wealthy draftees hired substitutes to serve in their stead. The draft is the context in which American politics met and also transformed into a new kind of biopolitics, and these substitutes reflect the transformation of how the state governed American life. Censorship and the suspension of habeas corpus prohibited free discussions over the draft's significance, making literary devices and genres the primary means for deliberating over the changing meanings of political representation and citizenship.
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:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/patriotism-by-proxy-the-civil-war-draft-and-the-cultural-formation-of-citizen-soldiers-1863-1865/oclc/1142327582&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198863670
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes