Transcribing the War of 1812: AAS Collections in the Classroom

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Associate Professor of History at Assumption College Carl Robert Keyes and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American history and digital humanities in the classroom. About a year ago, AAS launched the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. Featuring 338 broadsides, 800 images, and many contextualizing essays, ...

New Web Resource: The Journals of Edmund Q. Sewall Jr., 1837-1840

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Thoreau scholars have long been aware of the journal kept in Concord, Massachusetts, during a period of seven weeks in 1840 when twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. was attending John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and boarding in the Thoreau household. One reason Edmund’s journal is of interest is that it contains one of ...

Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print: AAS Collections meet DH Pedagogy

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Assistant Professor of English at  University of Maryland Baltimore County Lindsay DiCuirci and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American labor history and digital humanities in the classroom.  It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the latest Omeka exhibition from AAS: Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print. We ...

Out In the Open: Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art

L. Prang & Co., “Plate XVI. Transmutation Splash Vase.”

In December 2014, AAS member Joanne S. Gill gave the Society a copy of Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art, published in 1897. The work, in four volumes, describes the collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics collected by William T. Walters of Baltimore, now housed along with some of the original Prang watercolors in the ...

C-SPAN’s profile of Worcester is now available online!

The C-SPAN crew filming AAS President Ellen Dunlap.

Periodically, C-SPAN2 Book TV and C-SPAN3 American History TV profile regional American cities through a series they call C-SPAN Cities Tour. Working with their local cable partners, special C-SPAN production crews explore the literary life and history of these cities by interviewing local historians, librarians, authors, and civic leaders. Last Autumn C-SPAN visited Worcester and ...

Writing American Music: The American Vernacular Music Manuscripts Project

Manuscript Music Book Belonging to Mrs. Eliza Everett. This page comes from a calf-bound octavo volume inscribed "Presented to Mrs Eliza Everett Boston Janry 17th 1811" and "Samuel W. Everett. Jany. 24th 1838." The volume contains manuscript copies of 130 English, Scottish, and Irish jigs, reels, and music associated with the theater from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

By the mid-eighteenth century, a common rite of passage for many young people in Colonial America was to attend a local singing school conducted by some itinerant music-master. There they learned the names of the notes, time signatures, rudimentary music theory, and how to sing harmony in four parts. For the young, singing schools were ...

Fall 2015 Almanac now available!

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The fall issue of our twice annual newsletter, the Almanac, is now available electronically! In addition to all of the usual items—upcoming public programs and conferences, book reviews, and other Society news—this issue has some great features: updates about the future of digital humanity projects at the Society reports about the acquisition of a unique set of daguerreotypes and ...

New Online Exhibition Launched: Women and the World of Dime Novels

Julie Le Roy is one of the more sensational dime novels, full of death and tragedy. Julie is seduced by a young man who promises marriage. When she realizes that he has no intention to marry her, she threatens to stab herself rather than continue as his mistress. She attempts to flee from him, but trips and falls onto her knife. She is one of many women in dime novels to come to a tragic fate as a result of premarital sex.

I’ve written previously about my experiences cataloging the AAS dime novel collection.  I was still fairly early in the process when I discussed the relative quality of three publishing houses: Beadle and Adams, George Munro, and Elliott, Thomes & Talbot. As I have continued working with the collection since, I have had a chance not ...

AAS’s First Digital Humanities Project

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After two years of working under the generous dome, I will no longer be the ACLS Public Fellow and Digital Humanities Curator at AAS. Instead, I will be the Digital Humanities Curator, a full-time staff member. My work will not change much, but this transition from fellow to staffer offers a chance for me to ...

Digital Antiquarian Wrap-Up: The End of the Beginning

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It is hard to believe that after a year of preparations the Digital Antiquarian Conference and Workshop are now behind us. What began as a twinkle in my and Thomas Augst’s eyes when he was an NEH fellow here blossomed into a 10-day extravaganza here at AAS, starting with the largest academic conference the Society ...

New AAS Online Exhibition Launched: Louis Prang and Chromolithography

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When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...

Metadata Matters: “African American” in the News and in the North American Imprints Program

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This post was co-written by AAS Digital Humanities Curator/ACLS Fellow Molly O'Hagan Hardy and AAS Head of Cataloging Alan Degutis. The New York Times recently reported the “discover[y]” of the earliest known use of the term “African American” from almost fifty years earlier than previously thought. The Oxford English Dictionary attributed it to The Liberator in ...

Spring Almanac now available!

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It's that time again—the latest issue of the Almanac is now out! This issue features stories from every department at the Society, from curatorial and readers' services to outreach and digital humanities. Some highlights include: a generous gift to AAS from a local member and former AAS councilor a new digital project featuring Isaiah Thomas's collection of ...

A Paddy’s Day Present: A Database for Mathew Carey Account Books and a Window into the Early American Book Trade

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A year ago today, we announced work on a database that would make the extensive financial records of Mathew Carey, a Dublin native who came to Philadelphia in 1784, navigable. One St. Patrick’s Day later, we are happy to announce that this resource now exists. Carey’s records include receipts, bills, memoranda, invoices, bills of lading, ...