On a beautiful sunny day in June, AAS Director of Outreach Jim Moran and I headed out to Historic Deerfield in western Massachusetts to meet up with a film crew from Northern Light Productions. Surrounded by the dark wood and heavy equipment of the Wilson Printing Office, it wasn’t difficult to set the stage for ...
Year: 2016
Reading the Apocalypse
Claire Jones, a summer intern from Princeton University, has previously posted about her project centered on Judaica at AAS. This is the next installment in her findings. When I started working on the Judaica collection, I’ll admit I didn’t exactly have a clear idea of what I was expecting to find. I think I was envisioning a lot ...
New Online Exhibition: The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865
During the summer of 2015, AAS hosted a two-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for School Teachers, during which twenty-five K-12 teachers from all over the country convened for an intensive institute that featured lectures and discussions with scholars, field trips, and many hands-on workshops with original material from the Society’s collections. That ...
An Odd Fellow
Claire Jones, a summer intern from Princeton University, has previously posted about her project centered on Judaica at AAS. This is the next installment in her findings. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve made plenty of mistakes while searching AAS’s online catalog, especially during my first few weeks here, when I was checking dozens or hundreds of ...
It started with a passport and ended with a duel…
Early in the summer, AAS received a generous donation of graphic arts materials from one of the Society’s members, Jim Heald, via the Worcester Art Museum. Among these items nestled on the acquisitions table was a mid-nineteenth-century passport, which stood out for two reasons. Primarily, until that moment, it had not occurred to me that ...
Now In Print from the AAS Community
Every quarter at AAS we release a list of recent publications by those who have researched at the library as fellows, members, or readers. To see this list please visit our recent scholarship page on the AAS website. If your book, article, or other achievement is not included, just let us know if you’d like to see it there! BOOKS Clapp, Elizabeth ...
New Illustrated Inventory: B. T. Hill’s Photographs of the New England Fair
As we draw towards the end of summer, we can now look forward to fair season! Town, county, and state fairs are happening around the country and are filled with plenty of food and entertainment. Luckily, our newest illustrated inventory looks at the New England Fair here in Worcester during the early 1920s through the ...
Duval and the Dime Novel; or, Adventures of a Gentleman Highwayman
I have spent just about two years working with our dime novel collection and bringing it under some semblance of bibliographic control. I have encountered poor writing, improbable plots, novels without covers, novels without title pages, and all manner of literary and bibliographic eccentricities and annoyances. But as I reach the end of my work ...
Perfect Shadows: An Illustrated Inventory of AAS Silhouettes
The American Antiquarian Society’s collection of just over two hundred American silhouettes has recently been cataloged and photographed and an inventory of these profile portraits is now available via a new digital resource. Silhouettes were popular in the United States starting at the end of the eighteenth century. Profile drawings, profile miniatures, and silhouettes all benefited ...
The Acquisitions Table: Daguerreotype Apparatus
Daguerreotype Apparatus. Boston: H.P. Lewis, 1840. The technical elements of daguerreotypy were presented by Louis Daguerre to the world in Paris in August of 1839. By September, a technical manual, in French, was for sale on the streets of Paris and London. At the end of September 1839, an Englishman named D. W. Seager was in New York demonstrating the process, and he ...
Little Lamb, Big Story
Ali Phaneuf is a rising sophomore at Fairfield University and is currently a readers’ services summer page. As a journalism major and an art minor, Ali has always been an avid book reader, and her love of books and creativity was able to grow through her experience at AAS. The story of “Mary had ...
Finding John Levy
A couple of weeks ago, Claire Jones, an intern from Princeton University, posted about her project centered on Judaica at AAS. This is the next installment in her findings. From its cover, the book looked totally ordinary. I had picked the title—The Life and Adventures of John Levy—from my list of memoirs for a few reasons. First, if the ...
So you think you can bake? Nineteenth-Century Edition
Kristina Bush is a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College. She majors in medieval studies and minors in public history, museums, archives, and digital humanities. Kristina is currently working at the American Antiquarian Society as a summer page in readers’ services. Being an avid book-lover and history nerd, Kristina has greatly enjoyed her time at ...
From the Mixed Up Files of Avis Clarke
Dylan McDonough, an AAS summer staffer working on the Printers’ File, attends Harvard College, where he is a rising junior with a concentration in history. A native of Worcester, he graduated from Bancroft School in 2014 and has returned to the area each of the last two summers. Here, he shares a glimpse of his ...
The Acquisitions Table: Steel Printing Plate for “Echoes of the Woods”
Nicolas Valstin, engraver. Echoes of the Woods and Shepherdess and the Birds. Saint Louis: Kunkel Brothers, ca. 1871-1878. This steel printing plate was used to create sheet music covers. The two tunes that would have been found inside this cover were both popular in the United States until about 1900. Both were reissued multiple times by the publishing ...