Libraries like the American Antiquarian Society exist not just to preserve material, but also to help people find it. Detailed descriptions of items in our catalog records and thoughtfully designed systems of organization ensure that items in our collection can be located. But AAS also relies to a great extent on institutional memory—the knowledge of ...
January 6, 2014, marked a notable acquisition here at the American Antiquarian Society. It also signaled the end of an era. When the Society’s current library building opened in 1910, it featured library tables and chairs manufactured by the Francis H. Bacon Furniture Company of Boston. For over a century, readers engaged with AAS’s peerless ...
For over thirty years, the American Antiquarian Society has offered an annual honors seminar in American Studies to undergraduates from the five four-year colleges in Worcester. This year’s seminar, titled “The Nineteenth-Century Networked Nation: The Politics of American Technology, 1776-1876,” is being taught by Daniel Klinghard, Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of ...
The American Antiquarian Society is delighted to welcome Molly O’Hagan Hardy as our new Digital Humanities Curator. Molly will join AAS in September as a 2013 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellow, and will be working to promote digital humanities scholarship using the Society’s collections, increase access to the Society's digitized collection materials, ...
On March 30-31, 2012, as part of our bicentennial programming, AAS hosted a symposium titled “Research Libraries in the Digital Age: Needs and Opportunities.” This symposium was intended to provide the AAS Council and staff with a set of perspectives that would help inform its vision of how AAS can best position itself to remain ...
The AAS’s bicentennial gala—a black-tie affair held in the Society’s reading room, complete with a dance floor where scholars usually sit and an Isaiah Thomas made out of marzipan—has come and gone. But well-dressed enthusiasts of America’s printed legacy still want to know: What is the appropriate sartorial observance of the Society’s bicentennial? While our ...
As a description of a professional trajectory in the research library world, it certainly makes for an impressive resume: Library Assistant, American Antiquarian Society Curator of Maps and Prints, American Antiquarian Society Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society Director, Center for Historic American Visual Culture, American Antiquarian Society At the same time, it’s not unheard of. ...
Today, poetry occupies one of the smallest possible corners of the publishing landscape. The market for books of poetry by contemporary poets is miniscule, and—apart from occasionally having one of the poems in, say, the New Yorker catch one’s eye—many readers can go months (if not years) without seeing a contemporary poem in print. This ...
Disclaimer: This post contains adult content. If there are any children reading this blog, or anyone else who wishes to avoid the "hidden" side of the 19th century, this post isn't for you. But for the rest of our readers, we could use your help learning more about a new acquisition. The AAS curator of graphic ...
On September 23-24, 2011, the American Antiquarian Society will host a symposium titled "The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Globalism & Lecture Culture in Nineteenth-Century America." This conference was organized by Dr. Tom Wright, of the University of Oxford. So what’s a lyceum, anyway? Throughout the nineteenth century, the lyceum—a scheduled public lecture that was intended to be both ...
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 ...
What do we think about when we think about the history of the book in the U.S. South (for those of us prone to think about such things, that is)? It is received wisdom that the South was much less industrialized than the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. And, if print ...
Since the early 1970s, the American Antiquarian Society has been awarding fellowships to enable scholars to come to Worcester and spend anywhere from a month to a year in residence at the Society, immersing themselves in our collections. Many fellows over the years have raved about the richness of the research experience, which is borne ...
