This was the question I got recently as I was sorting through some photographic material at my desk and was putting carefully aside a small, round photograph of two children. As you might already know, the American Antiquarian Society has important holdings of early photography, including daguerreotypes from the 1830s and cabinet photographs of performers [...]
The American Antiquarian Society’s Graphic Arts department is currently in the early stages of a two-year long project entitled Prints in the Parlor. The project is funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities and focuses on cataloging engravings which would have appeared in the American parlor from 1820 to about 1876. [...]
Here at AAS we have lots of small collections that are safely tucked away, accessible only due to the knowledge of the reference staff, catalogers, or curators who bump into them occasionally when searching for other things. As we work our way through our holdings we try to increase access to these “lost” collections by [...]
All the votes have been counted and the winner is…. Penny! 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. 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. [...]
This is for all the historical comedians out there … 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 [...]
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 [...]
In the cold of a New England winter, it is easy to feel sorry for one’s self as the grey clouds of January barely dissipate in the low light of February’s early gloam. Some believe that the best way to tackle winter is to embrace it, and so the Graphic Arts department offers for your [...]
Dogs. Some people love them, others hate them. Regardless, there is just no getting around the fact that the lives of humans and dogs have long been intertwined. Depictions of dogs were painted on cave walls by early man and just last week images of “First Dog” Bo (the Obama’s Portuguese water dog) playing in [...]
At parties, when people discover I work at the American Antiquarian Society, they often ask: what’s your favorite item in the collections? To my mind, this is akin to asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child. I’ve heard curators answer this impossible dilemma simply: whatever I received this morning is always my [...]
They represent a type of carnage we can’t even imagine. Today they would cause more than a few gasps. And, yet unable to rewrite this tragedy, we feast on the spoils. Okay, I’m being dramatic. But for archivists and librarians the idea that 600 cartoons were cut from Civil War era newspapers is a little [...]
Clerk and the City, 1849 Schoolmarm, 1870
