AAS is excited to announce the launch of an important new digital resource. In partnership with the Worcester Historical Museum, AAS has digitized both the Worcester Historical Museum’s and our own collection of Abby Kelley Foster Papers. Foster was a noted mid-nineteenth-century reformer, involved in both the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements. Both AAS and ...
Under cover of night on the Dublin docks in 1784, Mathew Carey, disguised as a woman, set sail for Philadelphia. Having spent the previous week hiding out in his friends’ bookshops along Grafton Street, Carey decided that this was the only sure way to escape the British officials who were in hot pursuit of him ...
This post will present approximately one hundred years of Irish ballads contained within the Society’s collections. The first is a fascinating 1769 broadside containing a New Year’s address by Ireland native Lawrence Sweeney (-1770), a popular figure in New York City journalism in the 1760s. Sweeney is one of the first identifiable Irish-American voices. He ...
Fanwood Chronicle (New York, NY). Dec. 1864. Vol. 1, no. 2. This periodical was published by the New York Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. One of the goals of the institution was to train its students in a vocation. In 1864 it acquired enough materials to establish a print shop for its students. The publisher ...
January 6, 2014, marked a notable acquisition here at the American Antiquarian Society. It also signaled the end of an era. When the Society’s current library building opened in 1910, it featured library tables and chairs manufactured by the Francis H. Bacon Furniture Company of Boston. For over a century, readers engaged with AAS’s peerless ...
Last week, about twenty AAS catalogers, research fellows, curators, and other staff members gathered to discuss the challenges that come with transforming the visual code of an image into a written code. The creation of metadata in the form of indexing images is an inexact science, and it is one challenge that faces us as ...
Have you already picked your favorites for the Oscars this Sunday? Here in Worcester, American Hustle is a popular choice since scenes from it were shot on Worcester streets and in the Worcester Art Museum. Captain Phillips even shot a few scenes at the Worcester Airport (yes, there is a Worcester airport!). Here at the American Antiquarian ...
I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. (p. 17-8) So Solomon Northup begins his harrowing account of slavery from the inside. In Twelve Years a Slave, Northup, a free black man from upstate ...
We know how to keep busy in the dead of winter here at the American Antiquarian Society. In late 2012 Patricia Johnston, the Professor Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J. chair in fine arts at the College of the Holy Cross, approached AAS with the idea of having one of her Holy Cross classes research and ...
Dilettante [i.e. Edward W. Clay] Lessons in Dancing, Exemplified by Sketches from Real Life in the City of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Published by R.H. Hobson, 1828. Only the second known copy of this title with eight delicately hand-colored plates of dancing couples mounted on stubs and sewn into printed tan paper wrappers with the imprint information. The ...
As has been blogged on Past is Present before, AAS has an extensive and representative assortment of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century valentines. Part of the Graphic Arts Collection, these ephemeral pieces of affection were exchanged on or before February 14, as Valentine’s Day provided the perfect opportunity to give that special someone a card. Many were ...
Bufford, J.H. Vinter dragt [i.e. drakt] fra Karasjok i Finmarken and Dragter [i.e. Drakter] fra Hitterdal i Tellemarken. Costume plates from Norway Illustrated. New York: Arthur Gilbert & Co., 1872. AAS holds an uneven medley of the pieces that made up an ambitious 1872 printing called Norway Illustrated. The set was to be issued by New ...
AAS has a large collection of serial publications with titles such as Prices Current or Market Reports. They contain the latest market prices of commodities and/or stocks and local commercial information. Sometimes people wonder why we try to get examples of everything we can. We do this because more materials tell a more complete story. ...
Barrow, Frances. New Little Mittens. New York & London: D. Appleton and Co., 1869. This wood-engraved frontispiece is a comic scene set in the culture clash between a Chinese gentleman going out for a stroll, and an ignorant American sailor who pulls his queue and says “My stars and stripes! What a long tail our pussy ...
Molly O’Hagan Hardy is AAS digital humanities curator and an ACLS public fellow. Every month on Past is Present she will be sharing news on digitization efforts at AAS, coverage of digital humanities projects using AAS materials, and ideas for such projects. Stay current with all things DH at AAS by checking out the “Digital ...
