This paper asks how our ideas of the "modern,” the “stranger,” and the relationship between these two change when considered in the context of nineteenth-century debates over the Bible's position on slavery. Those nineteenth-century debates often turned on the question of who should count as a stranger. They also asked whether the Bible endorsed the enslavement of strangers or demanded hospitality to them. In addition to refining our sense of the meaning of the stranger in modernity, this context also illuminates the fugitive slave narrative's repeated turns to the language of strangerhood. >

This seminar series is sponsored by AAS in association with the history departments of Brown University, Clark University and the University of Connecticut. Directions to the Goddard-Daniels House    

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

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This seminar will particularly emphasize three case studies: the First World War, which erupted in August 1914 in large measure because rumors of German and Russian mobilization became reality; the October 1973 Middle East War, which was triggered by both regional tensions between the Arab states and Israel and a superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union; and the Second Gulf War of March 2003, which raises questions about pre-war intelligence, post-war planning, and presidential power.

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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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