A Culinary Road Trip at AAS

We at AAS are excited to be embarking on a culinary road trip this summer! What’s a culinary road trip, you might ask? A culinary road trip is an AAS social media series featuring AAS staff members traveling back in time and across the country (we’re not really doing either, but it’s fun to imagine) by ...

Hidden Histories and the Digitization of New England’s Earliest Manuscript Church Records

Jeff Cooper serves as Director of New England's Hidden Histories. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and taught in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America (Oxford, 1999) and has edited, with Kenneth P. Minkema, The Sermon ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part III

This week concludes the story of Nancie Colburn Hartford and her husband, Miles, whom we met in Part I and Part II. Their letters can be found in the Shaw-Webb Family Papers.

Although westward expansion and the ensuing spread of slavery is often cited as a leading cause of the Civil War, the experiences of those ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part II

Last week, we met Nancie Colburn Hartford and her mining husband, Miles, and explored their change in attitude toward mining over the course of a couple of years. This week, we’ll look at a different kind of change: those that so often happen in the life of a woman.

While Miles was navigating the difficulties of ...

The Life and Times of a Miner’s Wife: Part I

Detail from "The Miner

The nineteenth-century gold rushes continue to have a strong hold on the imagination of the American public. Perhaps it’s the promise of wealth or adventure or simply starting a new life. In any case, the gold rushes opened not only new physical and political frontiers for the United States, but also very personal ones for ...