The Stubbs Collection at the American Antiquarian Society contains hundreds of friendship albums. Friendship albums usually contain messages to the album owners from friends, family members, and schoolmates. Many messages have a “forget me not” theme, or they may be philosophical or humorous. The contents of friendship albums were not private, in that the albums … Continue reading Interpreting Coded Messages in Friendship Albums
Jeff Cooper serves as Director of New England’s Hidden Histories. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and taught in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America (Oxford, 1999) and has edited, with Kenneth P. Minkema, The Sermon … Continue reading Hidden Histories and the Digitization of New England’s Earliest Manuscript Church Records
Jeremy Dibbell is the director of communications and outreach at Rare Book School and the volunteer head of the Legacy Libraries and Libraries of Early America projects for LibraryThing. He is always happy to receive information on American book lists/inventories/catalogs of any size, particularly for the colonial period. In July 1812, Isaiah Thomas presented a … Continue reading Isaiah Thomas’s Library Catalog Is Now Digital
Kathleen Major has been volunteering in the Manuscripts Department at AAS for several years. She worked at AAS from 1976 to 1984 and was Keeper of Manuscripts for a portion of that time. After leaving the Society to care for her children, Kathy worked at the Gale Free Library in Holden, most recently as head of … Continue reading Identifying the Unidentified
My latest volunteer project, to quote Winston Churchill, was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” I was handed twenty-eight legal depositions, tucked in a manila folder, with a notation that simply said: “The depositions were part of a suit by multiple claimants for the $500 reward.” First, the riddle: Who offered the $500 … Continue reading Calling Sherlock Holmes…
Online searching has undoubtedly revolutionized information gathering. Census rolls, vital records, family trees, and genealogies are among the familiar, much-used digital resources at our fingertips free of charge in the Society’s reading room. A lesser utilized treasure trove of information is held in the Society’s collection of printed college and school catalogs. These “catalogs” were … Continue reading Database Reveals a Soldier’s Unexpected Past
Kathleen Major has been volunteering in the Manuscripts Department at AAS for several years and just recently processed the diaries of nineteenth-century serviceman, adventurer, and housekeeper Frank Nash. Kathy worked at AAS from 1976 to 1984 and was Keeper of Manuscripts for a portion of that time. After leaving the Society to care for her … Continue reading Halfway across the world and back again
Kathy Major has been volunteering in the Manuscripts Department at AAS for several years and just recently found a small collection of uncataloged Richard Henry Lee letters, which she writes about below. Kathy worked at AAS from 1976 to 1984 and was Keeper of Manuscripts for a portion of that time. After leaving the Society … Continue reading “Here a Lee, there a Lee, everywhere a Lee, a Lee”
Bloggers at Past is Present have previously written about the recent donation of Pike-Wright Family papers in posts about the family’s photographs, Dr. Nathan Pike’s medical tools, and Nathan’s trips to the 1850s South. The following post is from AAS member (elected 2002) and volunteer Sande Bishop, who researched Nathan’s medical education and practice. Among the … Continue reading Mining the Numbers in a Medical Ledger
AAS member Jane K. Dewey has volunteered in the manuscripts department for almost 30 years and processed forty large collections. Jane most recently organized, housed, and wrote about some of the manuscripts from the Pike-Wright Family papers, a recent donation from Susan Pike Corcoran. Even though the donation includes a substantial collection of ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and photographs and a … Continue reading A broadside of note
Recently AAS was delighted to receive as a gift a large collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts from the Pike and Wright families of northeastern Connecticut. The collection came in two segments, both the gift of Susan Pike Corcoran in honor of her Pike and Wright ancestors. Caches of family records are rich resources for scholars working … Continue reading Time Stands Still in Collection of Family Photographs
Every quarter at AAS we release a list of recent publications by those who have researched at the library as fellows, members, or readers. To see this list, as well as a list of works published from 2000-2014, please visit our recent scholarship page on the AAS website. If your book, article, or other achievement is not included, … Continue reading Now In Print from the AAS Community
Newell Family Papers, 1817-1925. Robert Ralsten Newell (1843 – 1883) left Harvard College in 1863 to join the Union Army as second lieutenant for the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first northern regiment of African American soldiers. He was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant, then captain. He was discharged in 1865, returned to … Continue reading The Acquisitions Table: Newell Family Papers
Josiah Burden is a history teacher at Worcester’s South High Community School. Over the course of several years, he was able to take part in many workshops at AAS through a federally-funded Teaching American History grant awarded to AAS and the Worcester Public Schools. The experience led him to bring two of his own U.S. … Continue reading Exploring the Archives with High School Students
The News-Letter (Otterville, Missouri). Jan. 27, 1862. Vol. 1, no. 1. Newspapers published by Civil War regiments are scarce. One scarce genre of newspapers is Civil War regiment publications. Sometimes a regiment had printing equipment at a fort or took over a printing office at an occupied town and produced its own newspaper for the … Continue reading The Acquisitions Table: The News-Letter
