I recently spent a week in Salt Lake City on vacation. One of the sites I visited was the FamilySearch library at Temple Square, run by the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints. I’ve found most of my family history with the genealogical resources at the AAS, but I thought it would be fun to [...]
When I first told people I’d decided to nurse my twins I was asked jokingly, “So you’re going to hire a wet nurse?” followed by “too bad they’re not around anymore.” Of course they are, I thought – just ask Salma Hayek. For awhile I didn’t think about nursing history, until I recently saw in [...]
The ongoing processing of the Society’s Group Photograph collection has recently turned up a small cache of nineteenth-century photographs of librarians. Oh sure, there are also significant photographs of mill workers, school children, and important businessmen, but around here we get pretty jazzed up over images of librarians. On the whole, librarians tend to be [...]
Spring is springing, the bees are buzzing, and we are coming into the busy season here at AAS. Opportunity is knocking. This week AAS will be involved with two wonderful lectures on the lives of African Americans, so it’s a perfect time to tout the wide-range of material we have supporting the study of African [...]
Recently, the American Antiquarian Society digitized a new finding aid to help scholars access the Society’s Group Photograph collection (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/groupphotos.htm). Usually, we like these finding aides to be as complete as possible, with detailed entries and scans — you know, the whole works, like we have done for our collections of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. [...]
Today you can check out a new issue of Common-place.org, an early American online journal AAS co-sponsors. If you want to understand today’s economic woes, you could do a lot worse than explore hard times in early America. That’s the message in “Hard Times,” the latest edition of Common-place.org, guest edited by historian Michael Zakim. [...]
These days you would be more likely to encounter a young child e-mailing or texting than writing a letter to a family correspondent. Many believe that letter writing is a lost art in the digital age. It is certainly romanticized in films and books but in the 19th century household correspondence was an excellent tool [...]
The Weekly Junior Register. Franklin, LA. May 2, 1863. Vol. 2, no. 17. In 1860 there were 555 paper manufacturers in the United States, but only 24 were in the South. Hence Confederate newspaper offices often had trouble obtaining printing paper during the Civil War. They were forced to seek alternative paper sources, such as [...]
If you thought the tension and incivility between political parties in America couldn’t get any worse than it has been recently, then you haven’t spent enough time with nineteenth century political cartoons. Today I don’t think you could get away with publishing an image like “The Philosophic Cock” (in the new fully illustrated online inventory [...]
This was the question I got recently as I was sorting through some photographic material at my desk and was putting carefully aside a small, round photograph of two children. As you might already know, the American Antiquarian Society has important holdings of early photography, including daguerreotypes from the 1830s and cabinet photographs of performers [...]
The American Antiquarian Society’s Graphic Arts department is currently in the early stages of a two-year long project entitled Prints in the Parlor. The project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities and focuses on cataloging engravings which would have appeared in the American parlor from 1820 to about 1876. [...]
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