The Mince Meat Throwdown was a success! Unlike the chowder made from Mrs. Bliss’ cookbook, the mince pie actually held its own as a main course. The recipe could have easily worked as a dessert pie, being as sweet as it was. Even though there was beef in the pie, it certainly didn’t taste like [...]
Archive for the ‘Good Sources’ Category
Have You Seen This Woman?
August 16th, 2010, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
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The following conundrum for Past is Present readers comes from AAS reader Mary Fissell. I’m writing a book about Aristotle’s Masterpiece, and have just spent a couple of very productive and happy weeks working with the AAS’s collection of 50+ editions. This book, neither by Aristotle, nor a masterpiece, is one of the longest-running popular [...]
Tags: Aristotle's Masterpiece, images
Henry David Thoreau meets Cotton Mather at the Antiquarian Society
August 10th, 2010, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
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The following post comes to us from AAS reader Peter MacInerney. Early in January 1855, a Concord-based free-lance writer, occasional surveyor, and sometime lecturer, visited the American Antiquarian Society at its then-new building. This second Antiquarian Hall had been completed little more than one year before, after the Society outgrew its original building. The visitor [...]
Tags: libraries, mathers, rare books, readers
Everyone Loves a Wedding
August 2nd, 2010, by Christine Graham-Ward
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With all of the media buzz around the recent nuptials of Chelsea Clinton, I thought of another presidential wedding: the marriage of Nellie Grant to English aristocrat Algernon Sartoris in 1874. Eighteen year-old Nellie Grant was the only daughter of Ulysses S. and Julia Grant. She met Sartoris, the son of the famous singer Adelaide Kemble (sister of [...]
Tags: weddings
High Anxiety: American Bibliophobia
July 30th, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
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Book sales may be up overall this year due to the introduction of e-readers (see the New York Times report here). But strange fears about the demise of the book still abound (read the New York Times on old-fashioned book covers and e-readers here). Are Americans simply afraid to buy books, or afraid that we’re, [...]
“It seems to me that a sick man in California digging gold in the water up to his knees would look funny”
July 23rd, 2010, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
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An earlier post about bibliographies on everything from the California Gold Rush to tomatoes got me wondering about the impetus behind that heady experience (the Gold Rush, not the tomatoes). How did a man who heard all the fairy-tale stories of incredible wealth just waiting to be picked out of the rivers make the difficult [...]
Tags: Gold Rush, letters, manuscripts
Private Libraries in a Digital Age
July 16th, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
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In an age of inter-connectivity, mobility, and Librarything.com that purports to bring us together in a digital utopia, whither will the truly personal library go? Do we risk having a network of Gatsbys present and past, interested in books more essential for their social value than their literary or historical merit? A social networking database [...]
Tags: cataloging, libraries
“Animal Magnetism” at its best
July 2nd, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
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Over two hundred years ago Elizabeth Inchbald wrote and published the three act farce Animal Magnetism. Heavily criticizing Mesmer’s magnetized baths and healing wands, this typical eighteenth-century afterpiece farce features befuddled lovers, lovers’ ruses, and battle of the sexes. Two hundred years later, befuddled lovers remain but Animal Magnetism is now carefully housed in AAS’s [...]
Bibliographies: from the Gold Rush to Tomatoes
June 18th, 2010, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
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A recent reference question reminded me just how many amazing bibliographies there are, and it also sparked a memory of a wonderful cache of letters in AAS’s manuscript collection that give an insider’s view of the ’49er experience. (The entire Grant-Burr Family Papers are fully transcribed online, including the letters on the California Gold Rush.) [...]
The First Publication for the AAS Bicentennial
June 16th, 2010, by Caroline Sloat
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The first of the books about the history of the American Antiquarian Society to mark the 2012 bicentennial has arrived. It is A Place in My Chronicle: A New Edition of the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835, co-authored by Jack Larkin and Caroline Sloat. We always call it “diary” in the singular, but Baldwin [...]
Tags: AAS bicentennial, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, diary
“Who did it? The Maine Question,” Part 2
June 9th, 2010, by Jennifer Burek Pierce
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Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent AAS fellow, discusses the game “Who did it? The Maine Question” (described in an earlier Past is Present post) in the context of children’s games generally. In the array of AAS materials about young people’s play and [...]
“Who did it? The Maine Question”
June 7th, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
1
Returning the occasional game to the AAS graphic arts department does not usually result in discovering the explosives that blew up the USS Maine in 1898. Well, it never does, actually. But when Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent Jay and Deborah Last [...]
Tags: fellows, games
”What Shall be Done with the Contrabands?”
June 4th, 2010, by Ranger Chuck Arning
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It is an atmosphere both festive yet filled with curiosity. It is an arrangement of tables filled with the written word of America. The words and images spill out across the tables with humor, with poignancy, in rhyme and in the marketing jargon of the day, dressed in color or black and white, yet all [...]
Goodbye Blacksmith, Hello Schoolmarm!
June 1st, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
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When Diann Benti, former AAS assistant reference librarian, created our now (nearly) complete anonymous blacksmith blog, she was inspired to do so by the Massachusetts Historical Society’s tweeting John Quincy Adams. Past is Present would never have a tweeting blacksmith, Diann informed us in her blog post when the blacksmith initially forged his way into [...]
Tags: blacksmith, diary, school
On “Readies” and Fore-edge Painting
May 25th, 2010, by Ashley Cataldo
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In a New York Times Book Review article last month, Jennifer Schuessler quoted Bob Brown, an early proponent of electronic reading devices. In his prescient manifesto, “The Readies,” Brown declared: “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age…. Writing has been bottled up in books since the start.” Brown called for no less than [...]
Tags: fore-edge painting, images
The Civil War, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society
May 7th, 2010, by Lauren Hewes
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Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Many institutions are planning exhibitions, activities, and publications around the events which tore the United States apart between 1861 and 1865. Some organizations have already contacted AAS regarding the possibility of borrowing or reproducing material from our collections. The uptick in [...]
Tags: Civil War, images
What is in a title?
May 5th, 2010, by Andrew Bourque
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When I first saw the front page of our convict’s little excerpted diary (the one I wrote about in a previous post), I thought to myself, what a curious title. The title was, of course, one of the main things that encouraged me to poke my nose into it in the first place. If our [...]
Tags: diary, prisoner, titles
What (some) cataloguers do on vacation…
April 30th, 2010, by Christine Graham-Ward
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I recently spent a week in Salt Lake City on vacation. One of the sites I visited was the FamilySearch library at Temple Square, run by the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints. I’ve found most of my family history with the genealogical resources at the AAS, but I thought it would be fun to [...]
Tags: genealogy, Mormons
Milk-in’ the Sources
April 26th, 2010, by Jackie Penny
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When I first told people I’d decided to nurse my twins I was asked jokingly, “So you’re going to hire a wet nurse?” followed by “too bad they’re not around anymore.” Of course they are, I thought – just ask Salma Hayek. For awhile I didn’t think about nursing history, until I recently saw in [...]
Tags: advertising, corsets, images, nursing
Three Opportunities to Learn More About Early African American Lives
April 20th, 2010, by Elizabeth Watts Pope
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Spring is springing, the bees are buzzing, and we are coming into the busy season here at AAS. Opportunity is knocking. This week AAS will be involved with two wonderful lectures on the lives of African Americans, so it’s a perfect time to tout the wide-range of material we have supporting the study of African [...]
Tags: African Americans, lectures
