This illustrated talk combines two stories: a narrative of the life of the most prolific and pioneering African American writer of the nineteenth century, and an account of a biographer's journey to present that life to a twenty-first-century public. Brown personified the American Dream. Born into slavery and locked into illiteracy until his escape at age 19, he became an internationally renowned antislavery activist-writer who resided and traveled widely across the northern United States and the British Isles. Over the course of a life devoted to personal and collective reform, he wrote a series of remarkable books that includes the first African American novel, the first printed African American play, the first African American travelog, the first African American panorama displayed in Britain, and the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. This talk will present this remarkable life story via an account of a year-long, ongoing research journey to retrace the course of Brown's life and gather material for a comprehensive biography.

Ezra Greenspan is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and professor of English at Southern Methodist University.

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The 1931 Cheney Report referred to book distribution as the "tragedy of the book industry," claiming that the industry was at the time "threatened with destruction." And yet the book trade survived, carrying on in much the same way that it had done for nearly a century. This paper explores the development of a national trade book distribution system in the United States during the antebellum period, a system that survived more or less intact until the present century. Special attention is given to the role of independent, dedicated bookstores as chief outlet for books, drawing on surviving images of bookstore interiors and early national directories of bookstores.

This seminar series is sponsored by AAS in association with the history departments of Brown University, Clark University and the University of Connecticut.

This seminar series is sponsored by AAS in association with the history departments of Brown University, Clark University and the University of Connecticut.

See books, pamphlets, newspapers, prints and other items that have found a home at AAS and make a contribution to help the library take in other waifs and strays. AAS curators will give a brief overview of what they buy and why.

Films offer representations of history with potential benefits and pitfalls. This interactive presentation explores a framework for using films that promotes effective instructional strategies for developing students. historical understanding. Specifically, participants will evaluate how to use film to develop historical empathy and to help students use films as both primary and secondary sources.

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The dream of a pluralistic America has endured throughout the nation's history, and much of the twentieth century witnessed progress, however halting at times, towards a more inclusive definition of "who is an American." In part, this seminar will examine the ways in which groups relegated to second-class status for much of the twentieth century nonetheless exercised enormous influence in the creation of American popular culture. Participants will focus upon music, film, radio and television, comic strips, comedy generally, language, and fashion.

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What happens when we view the imagined community of U.S. print culture from the vantage point of the South? How might such a reoriented book history challenge emerging transatlantic, transnational, and cosmopolitan histories of the U.S.? At a moment when industrial print culture was consolidating itself in the Northeast, "the South" appeared in print on several spatial scales. While asserting an "American" identity, Southerners represented themselves as a sectional alternative to the nation. Boasting a distinctive regional culture, they simultaneously celebrated local diversity. The seminar will investigate how these complementary practices of national, regional, and local self-definition circuited through print cultural conditions on the ground. How, we will ask, did distribution, copyright, authorship, and reading inflect the South's sectional self-fashioning, its attempt to lay claim to the nation, and its engagements with the wider world?

Of particular interest to literary scholars and historians, the seminar should also appeal to art historians and legal scholars, as well as those researching the multi-ethnic history and culture of the U.S.

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The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society is pleased to announce that its first summer seminar will be held in Worcester. The topic of the seminar will be focused on Interpreting Historical Images for Teaching and Research.

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