Last month, the American Antiquarian Society entered a new era. Since 1981, fellows and visiting scholars have been housed at the Goddard-Daniels House, an elegant turn-of-the-century mansion located across Salisbury Street from the library building. On May 25, with Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray leading the proceedings, the ribbon was cut to officially open the Society’s [...]
A few weeks ago, I spent some time with AAS’s cookbook collection. As promised in my earlier post, I whipped up a batch of fish chowder from Mrs. Bliss’ Practical Cook Book (1851). The overwhelming consensus was, simply put, “not bad.” It wasn’t great. I certainly wouldn’t entertain with this recipe. However, it was entirely [...]
A recent reference question reminded me just how many amazing bibliographies there are, and it also sparked a memory of a wonderful cache of letters in AAS’s manuscript collection that give an insider’s view of the ’49er experience. (The entire Grant-Burr Family Papers are fully transcribed online, including the letters on the California Gold Rush.) [...]
The first of the books about the history of the American Antiquarian Society to mark the 2012 bicentennial has arrived. It is A Place in My Chronicle: A New Edition of the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835, co-authored by Jack Larkin and Caroline Sloat. We always call it “diary” in the singular, but Baldwin [...]
Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent AAS fellow, discusses the game “Who did it? The Maine Question” (described in an earlier Past is Present post) in the context of children’s games generally. In the array of AAS materials about young people’s play and [...]
Returning the occasional game to the AAS graphic arts department does not usually result in discovering the explosives that blew up the USS Maine in 1898. Well, it never does, actually. But when Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent Jay and Deborah Last [...]
It is an atmosphere both festive yet filled with curiosity. It is an arrangement of tables filled with the written word of America. The words and images spill out across the tables with humor, with poignancy, in rhyme and in the marketing jargon of the day, dressed in color or black and white, yet all [...]
When Diann Benti, former AAS assistant reference librarian, created our now (nearly) complete anonymous blacksmith blog, she was inspired to do so by the Massachusetts Historical Society’s tweeting John Quincy Adams. Past is Present would never have a tweeting blacksmith, Diann informed us in her blog post when the blacksmith initially forged his way into [...]
Schoolmarm, 1870
