“Listen my children and you shall hear,/ Of the midnight ride of…” Dr. Samuel Prescott?

Each April here at the American Antiquarian Society, our thoughts turn to Patriots’ Day, a holiday which we celebrated last week here in Massachusetts. Patriots’ Day commemorates the famous battles of Lexington and Concord, the battles that started the American Revolution.  We envision minutemen firing muskets on Lexington Green and gun smoke clouding Concord’s North ...

Join Us At the Book Fair!

An annual rite of spring for AAS curators is the Boston Book & Paper Exposition and Sale, one of two fairs sponsored annually by the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Antiquarian Booksellers (MARIAB). This spring’s fair will be held on Saturday, May 7, 2011 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Shriner’s Auditorium, 99 Fordham ...

Tonight: “Noah Webster and the Creation of an American Culture”

Don't forget to join us tonight at 7:30 to hear Joshua Kendall discuss his new book, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture. Noah Webster was not only America’s greatest lexicographer; he also helped to define American culture through his dictionaries and spelling books. A search ...

The Acquisitions Table: Catalog of the Mobile Circulating Library

Mobile Circulating Library. New and revised catalogue of the Mobile Circulating Library … established November, 1874. Mobile [AL]: Shields & Co., 1879. Only recorded copy (in any edition) of this catalog of a substantial southern lending library. Rates began at $6 per year and up, for which subscribers had access to over 2,000 volumes (including some ...

“The buckwheat cake was in her mouth. The tear was in her eye.”: Early American Cookery and Women’s History

Ever wonder what Susanna was chewing on in Stephen Foster’s famous folk song?  Curious about how women occupied their days at home in early America?  Interested in learning more about the relationship between early American housewives and their maids?  Whether you are interested in the history of American cooking, women’s history, domestic history, or the ...

The Acquisitions Table: The New Tale of a Tub

The New Tale of a Tub. London & New York: George Routledge and Sons, [ca. 1870] The Routledge firm was a popular transatlantic picture book publisher and a direct competitor of McLoughlin Bros. The New Tale of Tub is a humorous poem about two Bengalese gentlemen whose picnic feast is interrupted by the approach of a ...

Join us for “Teapot in a Tempest”

On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of disguised Bostonians boarded three merchant ships and dumped more than forty-six tons of tea into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party, as it later came to be known, was an audacious and revolutionary act. It electrified Massachusetts, set the stage for war, and cemented certain ...