Public Program
Thursday October 25, 2012
7:00 PM
'Those Who Labor in the Archives Are the Chosen People of God, If Ever He Had a Chosen People'": Or, How The Legacy of Conquest Could Have Been a Better Book If Its Author Had Spent a Season at the American Antiquarian Society
By Patricia Nelson Limerick
The Ninth Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
With the substitution of one noun, the title of this talk takes Thomas Jefferson's famous tribute to the yeoman farmers "whose breasts [God] has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," and turns it into an equally deserved tribute to yeoman historians who spend their time with documents and manuscripts. A Western American historian at the University of Colorado, Patricia Nelson Limerick is indebted beyond measure to the labors of those who manage and explore archives, and is thus distinctively positioned to express the appreciation of synthesizers and "big-picture" historians for the writers of scholarly articles and monographs. Taking the opportunity presented by two anniversaries in 2012--the 200th anniversary of the American Antiquarian Society and the (dramatically less significant!) 25th anniversary of the publication of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Limerick will combine reflections on the instructive and amusing journeys that her book undertook, with a reckoning with the "substantial and genuine virtue" that Legacy would have gained from time spent in Worcester.
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Location: Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA
Click here to go to the American Antiquarian Society calendar.
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