Walking from Boston to Washington between February 22d and March 4th 1861. Boston, 1861. This small handbill records the unusual political activism of the Providence, RI, book publisher Edward Payson Weston (1839-1929). During the 1860 presidential campaign, Weston made a wager against the odds of Lincoln winning. If Lincoln won, Weston agreed to walk from ...
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 Fanny) ...
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, ...
Horseneck Truth-Teller, and Gossip’s Journal (Greenwich, CT). Aug. 9, 1830. This is the first volume of a previously unrecorded newspaper. The publisher was given as Diedrich van Tod, but it was actually published by Whitman Mead. According to the prospectus, the paper would contain, “1st, truth; 2d, politics; 3d, anti-masonry; 4th, the spleenful or old maidship; ...
A Place of Reading. That phrase defines Antiquarian Hall. Reading is an everyday occupation for those of us in Antiquarian Hall whether staff or, yes, readers. But it is also part of the title for the newest online exhibition posted on the AAS website. How did this one come to pass? It started over twenty ...
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 ...
Per a suggestion on a previous post, my next adventure into historic cooking will be with a mince meat pie. (Thanks for the suggestion, David!) While I can’t say whether or not I would recommend this recipe, hopefully the results will speak for themselves. Having never had mince meat pie before, I feel I may ...
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 ...
NPR had a piece this morning on an exhibit that just opened at the Smithsonian called Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. If you are in the D.C. area, the exhibit is running until January. It sounds like they are making some interesting connections between the American ...
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 ...
Last month, the American Antiquarian Society entered a new era. Since 1981, fellows and visiting scholars have been housed at the Goddard-Daniels House, an elegant turn-of-the-century mansion located across Salisbury Street from the library building. On May 25, with Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray leading the proceedings, the ribbon was cut to officially open the Society’s ...
A few weeks ago, I spent some time with AAS’s cookbook collection. As promised in my earlier post, I whipped up a batch of fish chowder from Mrs. Bliss’ Practical Cook Book (1851). The overwhelming consensus was, simply put, “not bad.” It wasn’t great. I certainly wouldn’t entertain with this recipe. However, it was entirely ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
