The month of October, marked by grey rainy days and bright orange and red foliage certainly has me feeling a bit spooky. While Halloween as we know it is generally a twentieth-century phenomenon, New England has a long history of superstitions and ghost stories. We all know the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel ...
Trade List of Books Published by Grigg, Elliot & Co….Philadelphia, s.n., 1847. This broadside listing titles for sale by the Philadelphia book publisher Grigg, Elliot & Co., includes details about their stock of poetry, medical texts, and school books. The Society has a large collection of Philadelphia bookseller and book publisher catalogues and sale ...
The last public program in our fall lineup will be delivered by one of the nation’s foremost historians of slavery and resistance, David Blight, next Thursday, November 1 at 7 p.m. In recent public programs we have discussed the bicentennial of AAS and the War of 1812. Now, Blight will shift focus to another current ...
Davis, Caroline E. Kelly. Ruth Chenery. Boston: Henry Hoyt, ca. 1867. This comic frontispiece captures the embarrassment of young Ruth Chenery; the well-intentioned young woman made a pudding only to discover that she had used a cracked and hopelessly damaged dish, and she receives a sound scolding from her maiden Aunt Keziah. The struggle of high-spirited ...
Patricia Nelson Limerick, A Western American historian at the University of Colorado, will deliver the ninth annual Baron Lecture on October 25 at 7 p.m. This lecture is named after Robert C. Baron, past AAS chairman and president of Fulcrum Publishing in Denver. This lecture invites a distinguished AAS member who has written a ...
For the first time ever, the extensive 1880s-era correspondence between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan and Sullivan’s mentor at Perkins School for the Blind, Michael Anagnos, are available online. An unusual collaboration between the American Antiquarian Society and Perkins (www.perkinsarchives.org) harnesses the power of social media to create a revealing new online exhibit that ...
Huse, Jonathan, Papers, 1795-1842. Jonathan Huse (1767-1853) was born in Methuen, Massachusetts and was graduated from Dartmouth College in 1788. In 1795 he became minister of the Congregational church in Warren, Maine. In the late 1820s a growing number of members of his congregation became interested in Hopkinsianism and a movement began to form a second ...
This just in for people looking for something to do in Worcester this Saturday…The Antiquarian Society is teaming up with the other venerable Worcester institution to be celebrating its bicentennial in 2012. That’s right, on Saturday, October 20th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the First Baptist ...
If you thought you’d learned all you needed to know about the War of 1812 from Alan Taylor’s lecture “The Civil War of 1812” last week, you would be missing out on a wonderful night of music and stories. Tomorrow night, October 16 at 7 p.m., David Hildebrand will be performing a concert, in costume and ...
The American Antiquarian Society is somewhat of a rare bird in the way we exhibit our holdings. On the one hand, the fact that we have virtually no display space means that materials are lent for other institutions to display; on the other hand, we’re just itching to show off our collections. So when the ...
The town of Oakham had a rich theater scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seemed that every week there was a theater or musical piece being presented in the Oakham Memorial Town Hall. In organizing the 250th anniversary celebrations of Oakham in 2012 I was given the responsibility to find ...
Plea for the Oppressed and Enslaved (Austinburg, OH). Feb. 3, 1847. Vol. 1, no. 3. This title was mentioned in a county history in 1878, but no copy could be located in any library or historical society. The content was mostly written by Betsey Mix Cowles and Abby Kelley Foster and was published by Jane Elizabeth ...
"Poetry, as well as History, has consecrated the achievements of Columbus. But we must leave, for the present, to History and Poetry the pleasing task of dwelling on individual characters. The appropriate researches of the Antiquary aim at objects less exposed to ordinary notice, yet illustrative often of the interests of nations." So said William ...
Second up in our fall line-up of public programs is a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Alan Taylor. Although the War of 1812 is an oft-forgotten part of American history, it looms much larger in the memory and story of Canada, along the border of which much of the fighting took place. Taylor’s lecture, based ...
Edward W. Clay, Practical Amalgamation. The Wedding. New York, John Childs, ca. 1839. This print by Edward W. Clay is one in a series of images that comments on interracial relationships in America during the 1830s. Most of the prints in the set are held by the Society. This impression is actually a second copy ...
