One lesser-known collection at the American Antiquarian Society is a group of broadsides printed on textiles. Broadsides are ephemeral, single-sheet items that are usually printed only on one side. Some topics typical of broadsides include advertisements, official proclamations, theater announcements, and opinions. AAS has approximately 148 textile broadsides that showcase the breadth and type of these objects. The textiles were produced on the same presses that were used for paper printing, and like their paper counterparts, they combined text and decorative elements. These objects were used as keepsakes, souvenirs, or commemorative objects, and some, in theory, could be used as handkerchiefs. The themes include commemorating specific events or people, “persuasive texts” that showcase social or political movements of the time, and instructional textiles that would have been used for teaching tools in reading, spelling, and arithmetic. The commemorative textiles were usually printed on silk, whereas the “persuasive” and instructional textiles were printed on cotton or muslin (Affleck, 2001).
These textiles were created using various transfer methods common in paper printing, including plate printing, letterpress, and lithography. In addition to the content being copied from other printed sources, the decorative elements like the images and borders were also not created specifically for the textile broadside. The same decorative elements are seenin other printed formats like title pages, tail pieces, and on book covers. The tools used to create these decorations were generally made at local type founders, and many of the ornamental borders can be found in catalogues or type specimen books for these foundries (Affleck, 2001).Continue reading Not Everything That is Printed is on Paper: Survey of Textile Broadsides
[Currency conversion table] [graphic] / Engrav’d printed & sold by Natl. Hurd.Amasa Southwick was a Quaker born in Bolton, MA in 1778. By 1809 he was living in Leicester, where he was engaged in the manufacture of cards used in processing cotton and wool fibers. The Amasa Southwick manuscript collection1 at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) mainly consists of business correspondence and financial documents. An example is the slip of paper shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. Amasa Southwick’s note in favor of Paulina Southwick dated May 28, 1809.
In the summer of 2023, while completing my MA in book conservation at West Dean College in Chichester, England, I undertook a 10-week internship at the American Antiquarian Society, working alongside Chief Conservator Babette Gehnrich and Library and Archives Conservator Marissa Maynard. In between my time spent writing a thesis, attending a week-long course on the history of the book in China at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, and undertaking pigment identification research at Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center, Babette and Marissa provided a fantastic opportunity to explore the wealth of the AAS collections and hone my treatment skills in an exceptional lab environment.
Beyond the physical repair of cultural heritage objects, conservation involves the preservation of the intangible values, meanings, and stories embodied by those artifacts. The first step in an effective treatment, then, must be to consider what makes those objects worth preserving. Babette encouraged me to take advantage of AAS’s unique collection of early American printed works and pursue personal research interests in 18th-century decorated papers and book structures. These elements found a happy balance in a short study of one quintessential American publication, The New England Primer. Continue reading ‘To Which is Added’: The History, Structure, and Conservation of New England Primers at the American Antiquarian Society
The Stubbs Collection at the American Antiquarian Society contains hundreds of friendship albums. Friendship albums usually contain messages to the album owners from friends, family members, and schoolmates. Many messages have a “forget me not” theme, or they may be philosophical or humorous. The contents of friendship albums were not private, in that the albums were circulated by the owner among those who made entries, and in many cases the albums would have been on display for household visitors to read. Some messages are in foreign languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and various Asian languages. While reviewing the albums recently, we noticed coded messages in two of the albums.
The first example is in 17-year-old Mary Boyden’s 1854 album from South Walpole, MA. It contains the following dedication:
A birthday present from her friend Dkaqhcfd, July 27th/54
The person who presented Mary Boyden with her album wrote his name in code, perhaps to preserve a sense of privacy, but it is a code which is easily solved. If we shift each letter by one place in the alphabet, D becomes E, k becomes l, and so forth, yielding the name Elbridge for the album donor. We can determine who Elbridge was by looking at public records. From marriage records, we find that at age 23, Mary Boyden, the daughter of Harvey and Esther Boyden, married E. P. Boyden, a schoolteacher, the son of James and Lucy Boyden on June 3, 1860. Later records confirm that E. P. Boyden was Elbridge Boyden. In other words, the coded name “Dkaqhcfd” represents the person that Mary would marry, six years after the entry was made in her friendship album. Continue reading Interpreting Coded Messages in Friendship Albums
Within the vast collections at the American Antiquarian Society there is a particularly interesting assortment of items that offer a unique glimpse into the world of Dr. Nathan Staples Pike, his family, and the medical trade in antebellum America. The Pike-Wright Family collection, donated to AAS by Susan Pike Corcoran, contains Dr. Pike’s early 19th century medical equipment alongside numerous letters, ledgers, journals, and more. A handful of these items are currently on display in the AAS reading room, along with related materials. Looking at these items brings to life the daily activities of Dr. Pike more than just reading words on a page. You can almost see him plucking one of the tools out of his bag while visiting a patient recorded neatly in his ledger.
The Brown Family Library was donated to the American Antiquarian Society in 2019 by Dr. John Goldsberry, Jr., and his wife Dr. Dorista Goldsberry, along with their family. The family’s library joins other part of the Brown Family Collections already at AAS, donated by earlier generations of the family starting in the 1970s. Togetherthe collections consist of family papers, portraits, photographs, and over one hundred 19th-century books. The materials center around William and Martha Ann Brown and their descendants, a prominent Black family living in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the mid-1800s.
Recently, a conservation survey was conducted to assess the overall condition of each of the 19th-century books. From this survey, books were pulled to be placed in custom housing for preventive conservation, or for treatment to help improve the longevity and stability of these historic materials. Below is a snapshot of the spreadsheet created to record the condition and treatment or rehousing measures taken for each Brown family book.
Figure 1. Sample of Excel spreadsheet used for survey of Brown Family Collections.
Some of the main treatments included minor repair of the original cloth bindings using wheat starch paste or animal glue and toned Japanese papers, as well as reattaching loose spines and cover boards (figs. 2-7). Here is one example where the back cover board and spine were detached from the textblock (figs. 2 and 3).Continue reading Conservation of the Brown Family Collection
As I near the end of my second summer at the American Antiquarian Society as an intern through the Library Internship for Nipmuc Community Members, supported by a grant from the United Way Central MA, I wanted to reflect on what this internship has done for me, and what I have been doing for it in return.
Sophia speaking to visitors during the meeting of the Northeast Regional and Digital Native American Archives Collective at AAS.
This internship has given me a passion for archives and librarianship – things I didn’t think I’d be interested in when I applied, as I’d mainly applied due to my love of books and history. I remember when I wrapped up my time at AAS last year, I was in disbelief at just how much I loved my time here and how much excitement for my future and career I came away with. It’s given me opportunities by way of admission to Simmons University for a library science degree and has given me hope for a future where I can steward cultural archives and give other youth from underprivileged communities the same opportunities I was gifted. It has fostered my love for research and has given me tools for hunting down topics I’m interested in, or for tracking down genealogies. Continue reading Reflections from a Returning Intern
For the past few months, I have had the opportunity to work as an intern in the manuscripts department here at the American Antiquarian Society. Usually, I spend my days the digitizing department working as a liaison between AAS and our vendors, paging newspapers and serials. I jumped at the chance to work in manuscripts and learn a little more about a different part of our collections.
I started my internship working with the miscellaneous oversized manuscripts. My task was to sort through the box, pull out items that needed different housing, and identify any items that should get their own catalog record. One item particularly caught my eye: a large, undated, hand-written document addressed to the New York state legislature signed by one DeWitt Clinton. Reading through the document without any context, it seemed as though Clinton was calling for less funding for New York public schools; but I knew there was more to the story, and in any case, I needed to figure out when the document was created to catalog it. So, with the permission and encouragement of manuscript curator (and my internship supervisor) Ashley Cataldo, I dove into the world of early 19th-century New York public education. Continue reading DeWitt Clinton and the Common School Fund: Early Public Education in the Collection
The history of the book is predicated on the idea that the book itself as an object is significant in its own right, not simply on its printed content alone. Which materials were used, how they were made, and who made them all speak to a vast network of economic, environmental, and human systems that came together to create a printed volume; these elements of bookbinding are always interesting and worthy of investigation. And if those things are beautiful to behold, even better!
“An Opulence Unexpected” brings together a variety of books bound in red morocco leather, which have been prized for centuries for their beauty and exemplification of a binder’s craft. Also known as “Turkey leather,” it was first produced in North Africa from Turkish goats and exported to Spain as early as the 11th century. It is made traditionally with tawed goatskin stained with sumac (a tangy spice prevalent in Middle Eastern cuisine) for its iconic deep red color. The use of morocco in western book binding became popular in the 17th century, as goatskin leather was supple, long lasting, and took color and tooling well, especially gilt tooling, a method of finishing bindings by pressing gold into covers and bindings with specific tools to create ornate, sometimes lavish, designs. Continue reading “An Opulence Unexpected”: Examples of Red Morocco’s Use in Bookbindings
Operation Alert was a Cold War exercise designed to assess how prepared both government agencies and citizens were in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. Starting in 1954, about 200 cities around the country took part in these drills until the project ceased in 1962. Worcester, Massachusetts, the home of the American Antiquarian Society, was one of these cities.
This fall I’ve been an intern at AAS as part of my graduate program in public history and archives, and one of my projects has been cataloguing the objects in the Society’s archives. While working with these objects, I came across a sign that reads, “There will be a civil defense exercise during the course of this morning May 6, 1958. If you are still in the Library when the alarm sounds your cooperation is requested.” On that day, alarms and air raid sirens would have gone off and people were required to stay indoors, sheltering in place for fifteen minutes. Depending on the location, certain penalties were in place for noncompliance. For example, in New York City, there was a fine of $500 for people who didn’t follow the directions of the Civil Defense Agency. Continue reading “Your cooperation is requested”: The American Antiquarian Society and Operation Alert
Book bansand challenges have been on the rise in libraries and schools across the United States: according to the American Library Association, who have tracked book censorship since 1982, over 1,600 titles have been affected in 2022 alone. These challenges, whether for political, legal, religious, or moral motivations, illuminate a variety of the nation’s current cultural anxieties, are not the first instances of books being banned in America. The American Antiquarian Society holds a panoply of materials that have been repressed, hidden, and censored, including a facsimile of the book which lit the flame of North America’s relationship with the concept of literary obscenity and government sanctioned censorship. In 1651, William Pynchon’s 1650 writing The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was publicly burned in Boston via court order for its perceived criticism of the Puritans, who dominated local governance; Boston’s common executioner personally carried out the order. The book was so efficiently destroyed that only four copies are known to be extant, and are held at the Congregational Library in Boston, the British Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Connecticut Historical Society.
Title page of a reproduction copy of The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, including details of Pynchon’s main argument, directly opposing Calvinist theory of the time.
Over 200 yearslater, after an aggressive morality campaign led by Civil War veteran and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, the Comstock Laws of 1873 were passed in Congress which would effectively outlaw the distribution, sale, and possession of “obscene” materials, especially those solicited and sent through the U.S. Postal Service. U.S. obscenity laws were largely overturned through a series of Supreme Court decisions in the late 1950s, backed up by the First Amendment, which ended a nearly 90 year crusade on novels, valentines, song sheets, textbooks, contraception, newspapers, and erotica. Materials were confiscated and destroyed en masse during this time, significantly impacting the history of material culture in the United States. Continue reading Adultery, crime, and the “professedly obscene”: The beginnings of book bans in the United States
“The world is full of poetry, the air is living with its spirit, and the waves dance to the music of its melodies.” ~ James Gates Percival’s “Poetry” copied into Martha Ann Brown’s commonplace book from 1849.
Please join us at the American Antiquarian Society this Thursday, November 17, at 7 p.m. (register here to attend in-person or virtually) to explore the power of poetry and its role connecting us to the past. What did poetry mean to Martha Ann Brown, a nineteenth century woman of color integrally connected to the local Black and Indigenous communities, and what does poetry mean to us today? How did women in the Brown family pass along forms of artistic expression through generations, and how are similar generational connections maintained today?
In partnership with the Worcester Black History Project, Thursday evening’s event in the new AAS Learning Lab will be moderated by Deborah Hall and begin with a brief historical introduction to the Brown Family Collections at AAS by Kimberly Toney. Then we will hear new original poems from three Black women poets working in Worcester today – Rev. Catherine Reed, Xaulanda Thorpe, and Ashley Wonder – who will reflect on connections especially among the women of the Brown Family as well as in their own families and lives.
The women of the Brown family expressed themselves artistically in many ways.
→ Martha Ann Brown kept a commonplace book that included artistically arranged pressed flowers and poetry in the 1840s. (The entire book is digitized here thanks to funding from the Delmas Foundation.)
Page from Martha Ann Brown’s commonplace book.
→ Emma Griffin Brown (Martha Ann’s daughter-in-law) wrote her own penciled annotation into the margins of a printed book of “Moore’s Poems,” commenting on favorite poems or expressing philosophical angst, in the 1890s.
Page from Moore’s Poetry with annotations by Emma Griffin Brown.
→ Bernice Brown Goldsberry (Martha Ann’s granddaughter and Emma’s daughter) inked her own illustrations in a book in the family’s library and became a professional commercial artist producing Valentines and greeting cards in the 1910s-20s.
Page from novel with ink illustrations added by Bernice Brown Goldsberry.
BONUS EVENT: Intrigued by the Brown Family and interested in learning more about them and their descendants? There is another event you can attend in Worcester on Thursday, November 17 (learn more and register here). At 7 a.m. there will be a networking breakfast at Mechanics Hall to learn more about their Portraits Project, a plan to increase representation of women and people of color among the portraits on display at Mechanics Hall. Martha Ann Brown and William Brown are among those for whom new portraits are to be commissioned, and one of the descendants of the Brown family, James Goldsberry, will be speaking at the breakfast.
If you then come to the American Antiquarian Society at 185 Salisbury Street for the evening’s poetry event at 7 p.m., you will see on permanent display in the reading room a portrait of one of the Brown family’s ancestors, John Moore, Jr., as well as photographs brought out for this event of Martha Ann and William Brown, that will help provide inspiration for today’s artists to create new portraits of the family.
From left to right: Oil on canvas portrait of John Moore, Jr. (b. c. 1800) and carte-de-visite photographs of his nephew, William Brown (1824-1892), and William’s wife Martha Ann (Tulip/Lee/Lewis/Lewey?) Brown (1818-1889).
EXTRA BONUS EVENT (not related to the Brown Family): As if that weren’t enough, AAS also will be holding a virtual book talk on Thursday, November 17, at 2pm. Marcy J. Dinius will talk about her book, The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal”: Print-Based Activism Against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829-1851 (learn more and register here).
So consider bookending your day on Thursday, November 17, with the amazing Brown Family: 7 a.m. at Mechanics Hall for breakfast and 7 p.m. at AAS for poetry!
October 8, 1871 – On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire erupted. The fire burned for two days, destroying buildings, claiming about 300 lives, and causing an estimated $200 million in damages. In all, the fire decimated a four-by-one-mile area of Chicago, including the city’s business district. The city quickly began reconstruction efforts, fostering a newly booming economy and a population to match.
Map from Hartford Fire Insurance Co. showing the burned area of Chicago.
October 7, 1765 – On this day in 1765, the Stamp Act Congress convened in New York City. Representatives from nine colonies met to protest the Stamp Act, which imposed the first direct tax by the British Crown on American colonies. The passage of the Stamp Act is often cited as one of the first catalysts of the American Revolution, as some people living in the colonies felt they were being unfairly taxed without representation in Parliament.
The Boston Gazette and Country Journal published a page-long criticism of the Stamp Act on that day. The newspaper reads, in part:
“AWAKE! – Awake, my Countrymen, and, by a regular & legal Opposition, defeat the Designs of those who enslave us and our Posterity. Nothing is wanting but your own Resolution…Be Men, and make the Experiment. This is your Duty, your bounden, your indispensable Duty.” Continue reading This Day in History: Stamp Act Congress Convenes in Protest
October 3, 1863 – On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation designating the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. The proclamation came in the midst of the Civil War. In his address, Lincoln chose to focus on the country’s prosperity:
Closeup of the text of Lincoln’s proclamation as published in the Evening Star.
“[T]he country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.”
His words throughout the address encourage unity during the Civil War.
