Reflections on Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere

The gallery doors that opened, closed, and then reopened on the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere have now closed for the final time. In recent weeks, the exhibition’s many rare prints, paintings, and decorative arts objects were condition checked, packed, and shipped via art handlers safely back to their respective homes. Split between two venues ...

Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture

Revere

When a singular image is reused in various publications or shows up in more than one medium, it’s indicative of the breadth of its impact. Take, for example, perhaps the most iconic image of the American Revolution, “The Boston Massacre” by Paul Revere, which was not only first copied by Revere from someone else’s design, ...

English Ceramics, American Scenes, French Name?

Platter depicting the "Landing of Gen. Lafayette At Castle Garden New York, 16th August 1824."

In his 1913 “Report of the Librarian” published in the AAS Proceedings,  Clarence Brigham concludes with an account of “one of the most valuable gifts ever received by the Society.”  It was a collection of some 300 pieces of Staffordshire with American scenes. “It is particularly appropriate,” noted Brigham, “that the Society, which already possesses ...

An Old Vial of Tea with a Priceless Story: The Destruction of the Tea, December 16, 1773

tea vial

Sometimes the most unassuming objects can take on powerful meaning. A small, sealed glass bottle of tea, displayed at the American Antiquarian Society, is a case in point. Donated in 1840 by the Reverend Thaddeus M. Harris (1768-1842), a Unitarian clergyman in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and a member of AAS, the tea is one of the ...

Picture this!

How can images help make the past more accessible to students? If you are an educator looking for ways to enrich your classroom teaching, consider an upcoming workshop at the American Antiquarian Society—Picture Perfect: Nineteenth-Century Women in Words and Images. The Center for Historic American visual Culture (CHAViC) at AAS is sponsoring a one-day interdisciplinary ...