May 3rd is an important date for both the American Antiquarian Society and the community of Worcester. On that date in 1775, Isaiah created the first object printed in this community: his newspaper the Massachusetts Spy. In this issue, he described the Battles of Lexington and Concord. While Thomas was present at those battles, his ...
In 1995, the Society welcomed its first class of a new kind of fellow. They were the Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellows, and they included fiction writers, poets, playwrights, visual artists, sculptors, performance artists, and musicians, as well as non-fiction writers, documentary filmmakers, journalists anyone seeking to create original works based upon American ...
The deadline for our Fellowships for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers is Friday, October 5th. The 2019 class of fellows will be our twenty-fourth. This initiative encourages creators of all types to come to AAS for a month and conduct research on original works of art and non-fiction related to pre-twentieth-century American history and ...
The fall issue of the AAS newsletter, Almanac, is hot off the press and ready for your reading! There are some great pieces in this installment including:
An update on the expansion and renovation of Antiquarian Hall featuring coverage of the groundbreaking and progress of the construction. This September edition also takes an in-depth look ...
Do you know what year it is? Well, Isaiah Thomas thinks it is 1812. That is, the reincarnated Isaiah who is currently going into fifth-grade classrooms and sharing some of his favorite books and broadsides with students. This Isaiah also brainstorms with these students what he should do with these materials. He is particularly concerned ...
This past March the Society held a Hands-On History Workshop on the Declaration of Independence. It featured Danielle Allen of Harvard University and used AAS collection materials to explore how Americans first learned about and celebrated independence in 1776 and how the Declaration was represented and interpreted in the nineteenth century.
Our Hands-On History Workshop ...
Periodically, C-SPAN2 Book TV and C-SPAN3 American History TV profile regional American cities through a series they call C-SPAN Cities Tour. Working with their local cable partners, special C-SPAN production crews explore the literary life and history of these cities by interviewing local historians, librarians, authors, and civic leaders. Last Autumn C-SPAN visited Worcester and ...
We recently hosted twenty-five educators who came to the Society from across the country to participate in a two-week Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Titled The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865, the program examined—through twenty-one seminar sessions and eighteen library workshops—how news was defined, reported, and disseminated ...
As the United States is gearing up to celebrate its independence for the 239th time, here in the Outreach Department at AAS we’re also gearing up for another kind of event, taking place for the first time: hosting an NEH Institute for K-12 Teachers.
Among the many sessions in this institute, titled The News Media and ...
AAS staff and fellows recently got a remarkable lesson in printmaking by Annie Bissett, who was in residence as a Jay and Deborah Last Creative Artist Fellow. Annie led a fellow’s talk one evening after the library closed, during which she shared some of her previous works and then conducted a demonstration in printmaking. She ...
With support from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati we were able to bring our popular Isaiah Thomas-Patriot Printer program to communities in northern Worcester County. After one such performance at the Leominster Public Library, Donald Hicks came up to me and we chatted about Isaiah Thomas’s involvement with the Masonic order. Mr. Hicks, a ...
On September 6, 1774, 4,622 militiamen from 37 towns marched into Worcester, shiretown for the county, closed the Royal courts, and forced each court official to resign. Forming two lines, they forced each court official, hat in hand, to disavow the recent Massachusetts Government Act, which revoked the Province’s charter and disenfranchised its citizens. With ...
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, ...
On Saturday, June 22, AAS will hold an interactive workshop for educators entitled Mining for Minerals: The Pull of the West that explores the search for gold and silver in the west and the impact that it had on immigration, economic development, the environment, Native Americans and social interactions. Led by Middlebury College professor Kathyrn ...
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 ...
