When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...
AAS staff and fellows recently got a remarkable lesson in printmaking by Annie Bissett, who was in residence as a Jay and Deborah Last Creative Artist Fellow. Annie led a fellow’s talk one evening after the library closed, during which she shared some of her previous works and then conducted a demonstration in printmaking. She ...
A few months ago we posted an image on Instagram and Facebook that, while fun, we had no particular expectations for. It was a quite a surprise, then, when it garnered a massive amount of attention on both platforms. To this day it remains one of our most widely circulated posts on Facebook. The image was a ...
This post was co-written by AAS Digital Humanities Curator/ACLS Fellow Molly O'Hagan Hardy and AAS Head of Cataloging Alan Degutis. The New York Times recently reported the “discover[y]” of the earliest known use of the term “African American” from almost fifty years earlier than previously thought. The Oxford English Dictionary attributed it to The Liberator in ...
This past winter, while hunting in the stacks for a trade card for a reader, I spotted this intriguing advertisement for chewing gum. As editor of the Society’s Instagram account, I had been participating in an event called #bugginout, which featured posts by libraries around the world focused on illustrations of anthropomorphic insects. These posts ...
Candace Ruby is a senior history major at Assumption College and currently interns in the AAS Readers' Services Department. “Were we to select the dearest and most responsible of all relations in this fallen world, it would be that of a mother.” –The Mother’s Manual, : Containing Practical Hints, by a Mother As Mother’s Day approaches, it ...
Richard and Claudia Bushman are the AAS Distinguished Scholars in Residence for the 2014-2015 academic year. Richard is Gouverneur Morris professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and the recipient of many honors, including the Bancroft Prize. His new book, which he plans to finish while at AAS, is on American farming in the eighteenth century. Claudia ...
