Discovery Channel may have cornered the market on Shark Week, but here at Past is Present we are instituting our own Fraud Week to explore the seamier underside of the archive. Or perhaps we will discover that there is another side to fakes, forgeries, and frauds, in a similar manner to how Shark Week has [...]
Chelsea White, past AAS intern and present Simmons MLS student, has transcribed a diary from AAS’s collections that will become our newest Line-a-Day blog debuting with the new year. Here is her introduction: If you’ve enjoyed reading the A Day in the Life of a Blacksmith or the A Day in the Life of a [...]
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Assistant Reference Library Tracey Kry comments on her impressions of AAS as a newly-arrived employee. A couple of months ago now, we had a post about creating an AAS Glossary that would talk about terms and collections unique to AAS (http://pastispresent.org/category/aas-glossary/ ). The first post was about people’s confusion with [...]
Like the other catalogers here at AAS, part of my job as the Graphic Arts cataloger is to figure out the artists, sitters, publishers and others who contributed to the works in the collection. So when I catalogued a large color lithograph view of Portland, Oregon from 1891, I noticed that the copyright holders were [...]
There is something fitting in one librarian coming to the aid of another. The mystery surrounding the New York Times 1964 claim that the Adams family celebrated July 4, 1776 with “Green turtle soup, New England poached salmon with egg sauce and apple pan dowdy,” found a resolution with the detective work of New York [...]
If Abigail Adams were planning an Independence Day feast what would she make? According to a 1964 New York Times article: “green turtle soup, New England poached salmon with egg sauce and apple pan dowdy.” In fact, the article claims she served this fine menu to John Adams on the very first Independence Day. Is [...]
Avis G. Clarke, cataloger-cum-researcher of early American imprints and printers, filled hundreds of AAS card catalogue drawers with the AAS printers’ file. Detailing the lives and works of virtually every printer working in America before 1820, the printers’ file is a masterpiece of indexing. Comprising 134 drawers of biographical, printing, and publication history for a [...]
Ding, ding, ding… We have a winner! Our exercise in crowd-sourcing research questions was a success, and all the antiquarian glory goes to peterme for solving the reference mystery posed in our earlier post. The correct book our reader was looking for was (drum-roll please) “The Way Our People Lived: an Intimate American History,” by [...]
I was in a bookstore in the ’80s and started reading a book about Puritans feeding their babies ale but now I can’t remember the title. Can you help me find the book? This is the kind of question we live for at AAS: the test that can make or break you as a professional. [...]
Continued from Part 2 of the Embezzler Redeemed One possible answer to this question is suggested by an account published in the November 19, 1803 issue of the Morning Chronicle. We understand that the Manhattan Company have discovered a further fraud of about eight thousand dollars, committed by Benjamin Brower, previous to his elopements. It [...]
Continued from Part 1 of “The Embezzler Redeemed” A report that Benjamin Brower had been apprehended at Albany was refuted almost immediately as being “wholly without foundation.” But on October 25, 1803, the New England Palladium (Boston) briefly reported he had been captured. On the 29th the New York Morning Chronicle expanded upon the news [...]
People tend to treat catalog records a lot like refrigerators: open it, grab what you need, and close it up again. At AAS, the milk, eggs, and butter of the record are the author, title, and call number. Locate those three and the rest can stay a black and white blur. But know that somewhere [...]
One of the great joys of cataloging is figuring out who the folks were who wrote, edited, illustrated, printed, published, or owned the books that cross our desks. In most cases we don’t have time to delve into the lives of these people, and wistfully think that someone ought to write a dissertation on this [...]
Schoolmarm, 1870
