In the mid 1800s, people began appearing with eyes so clear they were nearly invisible. The ghostly faces stared straight ahead without a hint of shame in their alien faces. They haunt us still, following us from countless daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and cartes-de-visite, warning us of a different time. A fearful era when to be photogenic [...]
Archive for October, 2009
One more thing about me…
October 22nd, 2009, by Diann Benti
1
An online fad became a journalistic obsession with a late-winter craze known as “25 Random Things.” Members of the social networking site Facebook began crafting lists about themselves: personal histories, likes, and dislikes — self-identified quirks describable in a sentence they then displayed for others to see. The only thing that seemed to equal the [...]
The Original Balloon Boy: Edgar Allan Poe?
October 21st, 2009, by Diann Benti
2
Have you heard the one about the balloon boy? No, not that balloon boy. On April 13, 1844, the New York Sun printed an extra edition reporting that man had finally flown across the Atlantic. In a balloon. A postscript in the April 13th morning edition of the Sun taunted readers, We stop the press at a late [...]
Tags: balloon, Edgar Allan Poe, hoax
Baron Lecture Thursday Night
October 21st, 2009, by Diann Benti
0
AAS invites you to join us in Antiquarian Hall at 7:30pm on Thursday, October 22nd for the 6th Annual Baron Lecture. William W. Freehling, the Singletary Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Kentucky and Senior Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, will be discussing his 1965 work Prelude to Civil [...]
Tags: announcements, Civil War, lectures
Your Daily Dose
October 19th, 2009, by Diann Benti
0
What’s the world coming to? John Quincy Adams is tweeting from 1808 and our own anonymous blacksmith’s apprentice is blogging away right above these very words. Following Adams’ debut on Twitter, one of the librarians from the Massachusetts Historical Society explained that, “We want to get it out there to the technophile generation … We [...]
Tags: apprentice, blacksmith, daily, john quincy adams
Sensational Images
October 15th, 2009, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
2
At parties, when people discover I work at the American Antiquarian Society, they often ask: what’s your favorite item in the collections? To my mind, this is akin to asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child. I’ve heard curators answer this impossible dilemma simply: whatever I received this morning is always my [...]
Tags: CHAViC, images, sensationalism
Let them eat cake
October 13th, 2009, by Diann Benti
5
If one thing connects Americans over the centuries, it’s dessert. Vanilla may have replaced rose water, the electric mixer (even the egg beater) may be heavenly gifts from a sympathetic large-bicepped ancestor, but the recipes (and the tastes) are remarkably similar. The first cookbook published in America, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery, offers recipes for [...]
Tags: dessert, fellows, sarah josepha hale
Cookbooks and calf heads
October 8th, 2009, by Diann Benti
1
In 1952 the renowned chef Julia Child joined a book project to bring French cuisine into North American homes. As many movie-goers now know, she spent the next nine years working on the “dog-eared, note-filled, butter-and-food-stained manuscript” (My Life in France, 207) that would become the seminal Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The wearisome [...]
Apply for an AAS research fellowship and learn a trade!
October 6th, 2009, by Paul Erickson
0
Since the early 1970s, the American Antiquarian Society has been awarding fellowships to enable scholars to come to Worcester and spend anywhere from a month to a year in residence at the Society, immersing themselves in our collections. Many fellows over the years have raved about the richness of the research experience, which is borne [...]
Tags: fellows, videos
Fellow finds horse’s head
October 2nd, 2009, by AAS Contributor
3
One of the great joys of working on the far side of the reference desk is hearing the words we all love to hear from our researchers: “Look at what I found.” We always know we’re in for a surprise, and we plan to use this site to share these treats with you. (Be sure to read this one through to the end … it’s hilarious!)
Tags: discoveries, fellows, oddities
Welcome!
October 2nd, 2009, by Ellen S. Dunlap
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For those of us who have the privilege and pleasure to work everyday with the remarkable collections of the American Antiquarian Society the past is indeed present. Whether we are selecting new acquisitions, cataloging collections, preparing web exhibits, processing photo requests, conserving materials that have seen better days, planning workshops, editing publications, or assisting researchers [...]
Tags: announcements
Try tilting your head just slightly…
October 2nd, 2009, by Diann Benti
0
They represent a type of carnage we can’t even imagine. Today they would cause more than a few gasps. And, yet unable to rewrite this tragedy, we feast on the spoils. Okay, I’m being dramatic. But for archivists and librarians the idea that 600 cartoons were cut from Civil War era newspapers is a little [...]
Tags: Civil War, images
