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. ...
How about hoary, pigtaily, brontosaurian, rusty-dusty, mossy-backed, or square-toed? If so, then you belong with us! Each of these terms were once synonyms for Antiquarian, according to AAS's recently acquired copy of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. A recent New York Times article described the historical thesaurus: "Archaism, it ...
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 ...
Music religious thoughts inspires, And kindles in us pure desires; Gives pleasure to a well-tun’d mind, The most exalted and refin’d Music the coldest heart can warm, The hardest melt, the fiercest charm; Disarm the savage of his rage, Dispel our cares, and pains assuage: With joy it can our souls inspire, And tune our tempers to the lyre; Our passions like the notes agree, And ...
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 ...
March 1, 2010 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the pianist composer Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849). Chopin was born near Warsaw and lived much of his short life in France so you may be asking yourself why on earth there is a post about him on the blog of the American Antiquarian Society. ...
What do we think about when we think about the history of the book in the U.S. South (for those of us prone to think about such things, that is)? It is received wisdom that the South was much less industrialized than the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. And, if print ...
It's a good news / bad news situation. For those of you who were not going to be able to attend Ezra Greenspan's lecture tonight, the good news is his talk on "Researching and Writing African American Biography: The Life of William Wells Brown" has been postponed to Thursday, April 22. And for those who 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 ...
Today's university may be in need of a revolution of its own, what with its failure to create true interdisciplinary conversation and its isolation from the wider public. The late eighteenth-century college did not exist in such isolation from the people, though few colleges became hotbeds of revolutionary activity during the war like Queen's College (now Rutgers University). ...
In my last post ("The Acquisitions Table: Matters Bibliopegistical") I promised a curious story of synchronicity. Readers may recall Curator of Graphic Arts' Lauren Hewes's January 27 entry "Slate, before the hype" about writing slates in the AAS collections. (If you didn't read it, go ahead and do so now. I'll be here when you ...
Thursday, February 25 – 7:30 p.m. at the American Antiquarian Society
Researching and Writing African American Biography: The Life of William Wells Brown
by Ezra Greenspan
William Wells Brown: A Reader Prof. Greenspan’s illustrated talk combines two stories: a narrative of the life of the most prolific and pioneering African American writer of the nineteenth century, and an account of a biographer’s journey to present that life to a twenty-first-century public.
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 ...
In 2010, the Graphic Arts department will be evaluating and re-housing its collection of nineteenth-century valentines. We have over 3,000 of these lacy, be-flowered paper objects and they are being sorted to provide better access for readers. Due to the high number and complexity of each object (some have moving parts, accompanying envelopes, etc., while ...
Henry Box Brown (b. 1816) escaped lifelong slavery in Virginia by shipping himself in a box (with the help of white and African-American abolitionists) to Philadelphia in 1849. One of the few primary sources detailing his breathtaking escape to freedom is the children’s book Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children. Written in 1849 by Quaker abolitionist ...
