The fall is always an exciting time here at AAS, with a full schedule of public programs, conferences, and workshops. We’ll be keeping you updated with all of these events throughout the season, starting here with our next round of professional development workshops for K-12 educators.
First up, on Saturday, October 19, will be the “Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address,” led by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. With both of these seminal documents celebrating their 150th anniversaries this year, it was the perfect time to reflect on their significance in their own times, as well as today. We’ll be exploring their impact through primary sources in our collections, as well as through more recent media. Take this image to the right, for example. At first glance, you see a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. But if you take a closer look, you’ll find that the portrait is actually composed of the text of the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s similar to those puzzles that use tiny still frames from movies that all add up to one big still frame. In terms of more recent media, Harold Holzer served as a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and wrote the official companion to the film, Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America (2012), putting him in the perfect position to examine the ways Lincoln’s legacy has persisted to the present day. Holzer will also be delivering a free public lecture at Antiquarian Hall the previous night, October 18, called “Emancipating Lincoln: The Prose and Poetry of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
“Picture Perfect: Nineteenth-Century Women in Words and Images” will follow on Saturday, November 16. This interdisciplinary workshop, which is co-sponsored by the Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC), will examine historic visual representations of women in conjunction with selected texts by nineteenth-century women authors, many of whom are cited in curriculum frameworks. What’s so exciting about this workshop is that it will appeal to history, English language arts, and visual arts teachers alike, all of whom will find the texts and images useful tools in the classroom. Through the juxtaposition of words and images we’ll explore notions of gender, reform, and women’s roles and examine topics such as anti-slavery reform, the domestic environment, Indian removal, and westward migration. We’ll put the works of well-known authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Laura Ingalls Wilder into context using contemporary manuscripts, images, and printed documents. For example, how do Wilder’s descriptions of encounters with Native Americans compare with this 1850s image seen to the left? The lead scholar for the day will be Laura Smith, a lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches courses in American literature and English teaching methods.
We hope to see you there! Details and registration can be found here.
