The Acquisitions Table: The Game Fowl; for the Pit, or the Spit

509740_0002

Burnham, Geo. P. The Game Fowl; for the Pit, or the Spit. Melrose, Mass.: [s.n.], 1877. The frontispiece portrait of the “Earl of Derby” game cock provides a striking starting point to this thorough, and early, survey of American game fowl and their culinary and pugilistic applications. The poultry advice book was copyrighted by George P. ...

The missing wrapper; or, The unknown dime novel. A tale of cataloging at AAS.

Ida

In a post last January about the difficulty of cataloging dime novels, I discussed how much valuable information is lost when a novel no longer has its wrapper (paper cover).  One of the most important kinds of information lost is series information.  Knowing that a novel was in a specific series is one of the ...

Game On: AAS’s Game Collection

"The Improved and Illustrated Game of Dr. Busby." Salem, Mass.: Published by W. and S. B. Ives., [1843?].

This past summer we completed work to make the Society’s collection of over four hundred games more accessible to our readers and the scholarly community. Christine Graham Ward, the Society’s Visual Materials Cataloger, created detailed records for each game in our General Catalog. These records include a brief description of each game, a tally of ...

Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture

Revere

When a singular image is reused in various publications or shows up in more than one medium, it’s indicative of the breadth of its impact. Take, for example, perhaps the most iconic image of the American Revolution, “The Boston Massacre” by Paul Revere, which was not only first copied by Revere from someone else’s design, ...

Writing American Music: The American Vernacular Music Manuscripts Project

Manuscript Music Book Belonging to Mrs. Eliza Everett. This page comes from a calf-bound octavo volume inscribed "Presented to Mrs Eliza Everett Boston Janry 17th 1811" and "Samuel W. Everett. Jany. 24th 1838." The volume contains manuscript copies of 130 English, Scottish, and Irish jigs, reels, and music associated with the theater from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

By the mid-eighteenth century, a common rite of passage for many young people in Colonial America was to attend a local singing school conducted by some itinerant music-master. There they learned the names of the notes, time signatures, rudimentary music theory, and how to sing harmony in four parts. For the young, singing schools were ...