Abby Epplett, Historian

Early today — Wednesday, March 22 — at 4:00 p.m., I attended the webinar “ Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory ” hosted by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA . This talk featured five speakers who each held a unique perspective on the life and work of Revolutionary War era African-American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters . The first presentation was given by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers , an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Age of Phillis , published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 and long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry . Jeffers described her first encounter with the works of Wheatley Peters while an English student at Talladega College , an HBCU in Alabama. In 2003, she read The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. When Jeffers became a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellow at the AAS in July 2009, she read the memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell , a White woman and f...

On January 18 at 4:00 p.m., the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts presented “ Herald of Freedom : Perspectives from the Collection” via Zoom. The program centered around the rediscovery of two editions of Peter Humphries Clark’s paper Herald of Freedom , an abolitionist newspaper owned by an African American socialist, within the society’s collection back in June 2022 . Since then, the newspapers have been digitized and are on display through the AAS website . Embedded below is the issue from June 2, 1855 (Volume 1, Number 1). The talk began with a video from by Vincent Golden , the newspaper and periodicals curator at AAS, who described the discovery of the newspapers. Golden explained how libraries have backlogs of unprocessed material and are often not sure exists in the collection. He was searching through a backlog from before 2002 and found two issues of the rare newspaper. Research led Golden to the biography America’s First Bl...