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AAS may not have any Norman Rockwell paintings, but we do have the stereograph above that looks like it could have been one of Rockwell’s images.  Apparently Rockwell would “cast” his neighbors as characters in his scenes, select the appropriate props, and then take a photograph of the scene.  He then used the photo as the model for his oil paintings. So this barbershop image really could almost be a Rockwell!

The time is right for another What-Caption-Would-You-Write contest.   Reply with your best comment on our barber image and we’ll select the funniest caption to highlight next week. Have fun!

Past is Present would never have a tweeting blacksmith, Diann informed us in her blog post when the blacksmith initially forged his way into the digital world. Instead, the blacksmith, and Diann, butted into the online world every day with blog entries, the closest they could get to a diary in digital form.

The identity of the blacksmith was a puzzle for us to solve, yet clues came slowly and erratically as the diary entries were posted at Past is Present and A Day in the Life of A Blacksmith (at http://blacksmithaday.wordpress.com/). One reader expressed uncertainty about the relationship between the blacksmith and his beloved Sara (Was she his wife? His betrothed? His beloved?). Most others ventured no guess about the identity of the blacksmith, his relatives, or his friends. The blacksmith has now been identified as Albert M. Stone, and interested readers can read a full update on his life at A Day in the Life of a Blacksmith. Once there you can learn all about his relationship with Sara, his California dreams, and his family.

While we bid a fond goodbye to Albert the blacksmith, this summer Past is Present is introducing a new diarist to its family of bloggers. In keeping with our established “A Day in the Life of…” ritual, we’ll be importing entries from our new diarist’s own 1870 diary-blog. Mary L. Bowers was a schoolteacher in western Massachusetts who kept a tiny pocket diary throughout 1870. Every day, Bowers wrote in her 1870 pocket diary, and each day will post on her 2010 blog, allowing us twenty-first-century readers to gain access to her thoughts on teaching, family affairs, household matters, and, unfortunately, deteriorating romantic relationship. We have titled our blog of entries from Bowers’ diary A Day in the Life of a Schoolmarm (at http://schoolmarmbowers.wordpress.com/) You will now find entries from her diary as a header on Past is Present.

Bowers most likely never intended for her diary to be public in the way that our blog will make her private diary open to readers in the blogosphere. She expressed hesitancy about telling her diary, let alone the rest of us, her secrets: “I have a heavy weight of woe but I dare not tell it even to my most confidential friend (my diary) and the world must never know it” (May 30). Bowers’ diary was her only friend, her confidante, in what seems to have been a lonely world.

1870 Diary of Mary L. Bowers

Over sixty years after Bowers kept her pocket diary, another female diarist, Anaïs Nin, would tell her diary, “You have kept me alive as a human being. I created you because I needed a friend. And talking to this friend, I have, perhaps, wasted my life.” We have no indication that Bowers’ daily record of 1870 led to sentiments of a wasted life. We also have no indication that Bowers had aspirations of anything beyond teaching, marriage, and a quiet life in western Massachusetts. Her diary, her friend—a written work without readers—is now available for the reading pleasure of the rest of us bloggers and tweeters, who might sometimes find ourselves feeling the same emotions as Bowers about life and writing.

Penny’s caption won our hearts and received the most thumbs up in Past is Present‘s first humorous what-caption-would-you-write contest.

“Yes, I broke my slate, and I’ll break the next one too–I want an iPhone like all the other kids have!”

Her submission had the added bonus of connecting to the original post on Slate, before the hype by AAS’s curator of Graphic Arts, Lauren Hewes.  Feel free to give your acceptance speech as a comment on this post, Penny!

Honorable mentions should go to our other nominees, especially Sharlene for “Little Lawrence finds out too late that although slate is rock, it will break when thrown to ground during a temper tantrum” and Ken Richardson (who posted the first comment) for “I don’t want to look like daddy!!”  You can check out all the caption comments by clicking here.

On a related note, Past is Present has been giving away enough awards lately that we need to have a name for our prizes.  Does anyone have an idea for a good name for our antiquarian-glory-only prizes?  We can promise you in return your very own one of our name-to-be-determined awards in the category of neologisms. Here are a few further thoughts to spark your collective creative spirit.

Abbreviations are always a good source of award names.  For example, a good friend of AAS created the Rellas, or Research Library Awards, which she awarded to various institutions on her blog, AuntieQuarian.  We could go in a similar direction with something like the PiPs.

Awards tap in to the part of us all that likes to be recognized for our abilities. In the nineteenth-century, rewards of merit were the hot pedagogical teaching tool.  If you search AAS’s online catalog for the genre rewards of merit you will find almost 2,000 examples, many of which are digitized in our digital partner Readex’s American Broadsides & Ephemera.

The awards you really wanted to get in early America, though, was a Premiums.  That’s because Premiums meant money.  They were most often awarded for agriculture, but in 1796 the American Philosophical Society announced they would award premiums “to the authors of the best performances, inventions, or improvements, relative to certain specific subjects of useful knowledge.”  By 1806, the APS was laying out conditions for their Magellanic and extra-Magellanic Premiums.  The Magellanic Premium was named in honor of the donor of the fund, Dr. John Hyacinth De Magellan of London, and the recipient of the second award apparently had to be extra-Magellanic.  You would have to read their pamphlet of conditions to find out exactly what that would entail.

Sometimes an award has a boring name like the Academy Awards and so needs to be spiced up with a fun nickname like the Oscars. In our case, I guess our awards could be familiarly called the Isaiahs, in honor of AAS’s founder, Isaiah Thomas.

Here at Past is Present we can’t promise a parade of designer dresses like the Academy Awards, but we can promise to keep the awards coming.  So send us all your best ideas for names and once again all the Past is Present readers can vote for their favorites.  The voting will be open to all, which is more than the Oscars can say!

Seeing the illustration above, titled “The Naughty Boy,” in Lauren’s post Slate, Before the Hype started me wondering what led up to this scene. There has to be a good story here. The sulky pout. The curls and the dress (which to modern eyes appear gender-bending). This scene cries out for creative description.

Wow us with your best tag lines and the readers of Past is Present will vote for their favorite (I’ve added a thumbs-up function to the comments section). Keep coming back to vote! Next week we’ll announce the winner of another of our antiquarian-glory-only prizes. And who knows? Maybe we’ll post a few other fun images that have come across our desks recently.

(Check out the results in our later post, The Antiquarian Oscars)