Join Our Live Feed of the National Humanities Medal Ceremony!

Join us here today, at 3 p.m., for a live feed of the 2013 National Humanities Medal ceremony taking place at the White House! AAS president Ellen Dunlap with be accepting the award on behalf of the Society, as well as AAS Council Chair Sid Lapidus and AAS Councilor Bill Reese. We are also following Ellen's ...

AAS Awarded a 2013 National Humanities Medal!

NEH Medal

AAS is extremely humbled and honored to be a recipient of a 2013 National Humanities Medal. President Barack Obama will present the medal to Ellen S. Dunlap, AAS president, Sid Lapidus, AAS Council Chair, and William S. Reese, AAS Councilor at the White House on Monday, July 28, 2014, at 3 p.m. The citation for ...

Vimmin and politics!

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Penny Yankee Doodle  (New York, NY).  November 2, 1850. This is one of a number of illustrated humor newspapers and periodicals that appeared in the 1840s and 1850s.  The editor says they are not an imitation of Punch from England, but, “I am myself alone – the original Genius of American Humor.”  There are the usual ...

Catalog Camper or Archive Detective? My Summer at the AAS

The author at work in the reading room.

Samantha Cook is a senior at the University of Wyoming where she is majoring in History and Museum Studies. She spent last summer on an archeological dig in Italy, and this summer, she has been with us at AAS as a catalog camper, doing a completely different kind of digging. When I made the bold decision ...

The Acquisitions Table: The Eclectic Harmony

Eclectic Harmony

Johnson, Andrew W. The Eclectic Harmony. Revised and improved second edition. Shelbyville, Tenn.: N.O. Wallace & Co., Printers, Shelbyville Free Press Office, 1847. Only one other copy is known of this title, and that was purchased in 2001 by the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University. Then just this past year a private ...

The red vegetable pill or the blue vegetable pill?

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Graefenberg Gazette (New York, NY),  August 1847. The first thing that should grab your attention about this advertisement sheet is that it is printed in red ink.  This was a marketing trick by the Graefenberg Company that put out a wide variety of pills and elixirs.  This particular sheet promoted their vegetable pills, sarsaparilla compounds, eye ...

From Conservation: Treatment of the Protestant Tutor

Cover of the item before treatment.

Recently, I had the opportunity to treat a very special item from our Reserve collection as part of our Save America’s Treasures grant.   The Protestant Tutor for Children is attributed to Benjamin Harris and was printed by Samuel Green in Boston, 1685. Thought to be a precursor text to the New England Primer, it is ...

Isaiah Celebrates the Fourth of July

Portrait of Isaiah Thomas by Ethan Allen Greenwood, 1818

Here at AAS, nary a holiday goes by without some reflection on how the same was celebrated in days past. On this Fourth of July we’re going to take a trip back 200 years and check in on how our founder, Isaiah Thomas, celebrated the holiday. In July 1814 the United States was in the midst ...