The AAS was founded by Isaiah Thomas, whose paper The Massachusetts Spy, was the voice of the Whig party during the American Revolution. Thomas, who became the leading printer, editor, publisher and bookseller in the U.S. after the war, joined with a group of men who believed in the necessity of preserving historical material to found the society in 1812. Today, nearly three million books, pamphlets, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, maps and newspapers related to the history, literature and culture of the first 250 years of this country are preserved in its research library at 185 Salisbury St. The collections serve a worldwide community of students, teachers, historians, bibliographers, genealogists and authors. Ellen S. Dunlap is the organization's current president.
Ljungquist, a faculty member since 1977, is a specialist in American studies who has written extensively about Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper. His recent accomplishments include editing the Facts on File Bibliography of American Fiction and co-editing, with Schachterle, Cooper's The Deerslayer. During a 1991 sabbatical at the Antiquarian Society he determined that an unsigned review of Poe's series on "Autography" that appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1841 was, in fact written by Poe himself.
Schachterle, who joined the faculty in 1970 as assistant professor of English, has published studies of Cooper, Charles Dickens and Thomas Pynchon. A member and former chair of the American Society for Engineering Education's Liberal Education Division, he received the 1995 Sterling P. Olmsted Award from that division for innovative contributions to the liberal arts within engineering education. As a WPI administrator he oversaw the development of the project program, helped develop the Global Perspective Program, and was involved in the establishment of the Massachusetts Academy of Mathematics and Science. In the early 1980s he and chemistry professor Stephen J. Weininger founded the Society for Literature and Science, a research society that promotes a multidisciplinary dialogue on the relationship of science, the humanities and the arts.
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