Public Program Season Starts with Historic Performance

Kate Carney. Photo © Susan Wilson

This Thursday evening at 7 p.m., we will start our fall series of public programs with a one-woman play called Lowell Mills Boardinghouse Keeper. Kate Carney wrote and performs this presentation about Mrs. Lois Larcom (1786-1868), who kept a boardinghouse for female factory workers in the 1840s. Her daughter, Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), became a poet, ...

New Program for the Public a Hit

Take some history buffs, students, teachers, museum professionals, an enthusiastic and well-known scholar, and some wonderful materials from our collections and what do you get? A great inaugural Hands-on History Workshop! Last Saturday we presented “Worcester and the American Revolution,” led by Ray Raphael, to a diverse group of interested, informed, and eager participants. We thought ...

New Hands-On History Workshop: Worcester and the American Revolution

To study closely a nineteenth-century lithograph or actually touch the impressions of type in the sheets of an eighteenth-century newspaper can be a magical, even transformative, experience. For years I have seen K-12 educators become engrossed and inspired by such activities. However it was only after we conducted a one-day workshop for K-12 educators on ...

Creating Historical Theater in an Afternoon

“…you sockdologizing old man-trap!” Stomp. Scream. Panic. “Good, good – now next time, keep the scream going longer and continue the dialogue over it. Let’s see how that works.” This was just one of many exchanges between the group of nine actors practicing a staged reading of the historically-based play Sockdology, and Jeffrey Hatcher, the playwright ...

Public Program: Nathaniel Philbrick Takes a Fresh Look at Bunker Hill

This Thursday, May 2, at 7 p.m., Nathaniel Philbrick will deliver a lecture titled “Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution,” based on his new book of the same name. We’re particularly excited to have Mr. Philbrick here this week as the book’s release date is today, making his visit ...

New K-12 Workshop: The Emancipation Proclamation with Harold Holzer

Over the next several months we are very excited to offer a new series of workshops for K-12 teachers. First up is “The Emancipation Proclamation” on Saturday, April 20 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., led by prominent Lincoln historian Harold Holzer. During this one-day workshop we will examine carefully the text of the proclamation, examine ...

Public Program: “From Emancipation to Civil Rights and Beyond: Legacies of the Civil War at 150”

The last public program in our fall lineup will be delivered by one of the nation’s foremost historians of slavery and resistance, David Blight, next Thursday, November 1 at 7 p.m. In recent public programs we have discussed the bicentennial of AAS and the War of 1812. Now, Blight will shift focus to another current ...

Baron Lecture: Patricia Limerick Reflects Upon “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West”

Patricia Nelson Limerick, A Western American historian at the University of Colorado, will deliver the ninth annual Baron Lecture on October 25 at 7 p.m. This lecture is named after Robert C. Baron, past AAS chairman and president of Fulcrum Publishing in Denver. This lecture invites a distinguished AAS member who has written a ...

“Two at Two Hundred” celebrates Bicentennials of AAS and First Baptist Church

This just in for people looking for something to do in Worcester this Saturday…The Antiquarian Society is teaming up with the other venerable Worcester institution to be celebrating its bicentennial in 2012.  That’s right, on Saturday, October 20th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the First Baptist ...

Public Program: “In Vogue with the Vulgar: Music during the War of 1812”

If you thought you’d learned all you needed to know about the War of 1812 from Alan Taylor’s lecture “The Civil War of 1812” last week, you would be missing out on a wonderful night of music and stories. Tomorrow night, October 16 at 7 p.m., David Hildebrand will be performing a concert, in costume and ...

Public Program: “The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies”

Second up in our fall line-up of public programs is a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Alan Taylor. Although the War of 1812 is an oft-forgotten part of American history, it looms much larger in the memory and story of Canada, along the border of which much of the fighting took place. Taylor’s lecture, based ...

Wiggins Lecture: “In Search of Phillis Wheatley”

We are pleased to announce the start of our signature bicentennial Fall Public Programs! The programs this fall include an impressive array of scholars and artists who will share new perspectives on key moments and fascinating people in American history. We will be kicking off the series on September 28 at 7 p.m., when Vincent Carretta, ...

Celebrating our Mutual Bicentennial: A Conference on the War of 1812

As many of you may already know, the story of the American Antiquarian Society is in many ways linked to the War of 1812. For if the war had not been underway when Isaiah Thomas decided to found the Society, we could very well have ended up in Boston rather than here in Worcester. As ...

Symposium: Poetry & Print in Early America

Today, poetry occupies one of the smallest possible corners of the publishing landscape. The market for books of poetry by contemporary poets is miniscule, and—apart from occasionally having one of the poems in, say, the New Yorker catch one’s eye—many readers can go months (if not years) without seeing a contemporary poem in print. This ...