Jack Downing was a comic character created in 1830 by Seba Smith, who developed the country dialect-speaking character in a series of letters for the Portland Courier. As Downing became famous, Charles Augustus Davis imitated the style and wrote under the same name for New York papers. Davis started Major Downing’s Advocate on Mar. 12, ...
In the intervening week or so since my post on this mysterious image appeared on the AAS blog, I contacted Alexander Anderson scholar and AAS member Jane Pomeroy. She graciously sent me this scanned copy of the full image found in her copy of the Mahlon Day 1830 edition of Divine Songs. According to Jane, she ...
A previously unrecorded satirical cartoon printed in Lowell, MA, by J.H. Varney, possibly a relation of (or pseudonym for) local newspaper publisher Samuel J. Varney. The cartoon references the 1840 repeal of a Massachusetts state law which regulated the sale of alcohol in quantities under 15 gallons. A large railroad carriage full of drunken men ...
Tuesday, November 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the American Antiquarian Society Carolyn Eastman will be talking about Books and the Imagined World of Travel in the Eighteenth Century. For more information, including directions, click here. In the eighteenth century, lavishly illustrated travel narratives quickly became one of the most popular book genres for American readers. These books ...
AAS intern Katrina Ireland (Simmons College GSLIS program) recently came across a wonderful letter as she was processing our collection of Isaac Shepard Papers. Shepard (1816-1889) was a Harvard graduate and a commander of the 52nd US Infantry during the Civil War. In addition to his military life, Shepard was also a poet, author, and a ...
This weekend bibliophiles from all over will be converging in Boston, and those of us at AAS will be among the first in line. Join us this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Boston Book Fair. Friday (11/11): 5pm-9pm Saturday (11/12): 12pm-7pm Sunday (11/13): 12pm-5pm There will be a number of fair activities, including a collectors' roundtable and tips on ...
A very rare self-published collection of poems by Holmes, a farmer in Greene County, OH east of Dayton. Most of the poems are short and predominantly religious in theme. Preceding these is Holmes’s 20-page “Dialogue on Slavery,” which offers an unusual poetic recapitulation of the religious, economic, and political arguments for and against slavery. Firmly ...
Recently, I was catching up on cataloging the nineteenth-century editions of Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs given to us by the great collector of early American and English children’s books Wilbur Macey Stone (1862-1941). One of them, a well-worn edition issued by New York publisher Mahlon Day in 1830, contains a mutilated frontispiece depicting this interesting ...
Looking for something new to read? Listed below are some suggestions, just a sampling of the most recent books to come across our desk that were researched here at AAS. If you have recently published a work based on research at the Society, let us know so we can add it to our list. Information on ...
This mathematic exercise book belonged bears the name of Samuel Geer, who was probably from Groton, Connecticut. The book is filled with mathematical calculations and problems, as well as solutions, written in a very neat hand. Questions involve liquid, cubic, long and square measurements, time (“How many minutes since the creation of the world...”), percentages, ...
