Guest contributor Adam Fales grew up in Kansas and recently graduated from Fordham University. He is currently an AAS digital scholarship intern sponsored by the English Department at New York University and is a manager at Book Culture in New York City. “And, indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the ...
Nigel Lepianka is a graduate student in the English Department at Texas A&M. He recently spent a month under the generous dome researching his dissertation, "'Yet of Books There Are A Plenty': The Bibliography of Literary Data." Nigel and AAS Director for Digital and Book History Initiatives Molly Hardy co-authored this post. The trend towards using catalog ...
I had the pleasure of attending my first Association of Digital Humanities Organizations Conference last week in Montreal. The conference began with two days of workshops, and I attended the Advancing Linked Open Data in the Humanities session on Monday. Overall, the session was helpful in the reassurance that we are not alone in the ...
Little Marian. Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, [ca. 1853-1857]. The American Sunday-School Union was a pioneer in the use of the shaped book format and chromolithography, competing directly with secular firms including McLoughlin Brothers. Little Marian serves as a sequel to the Pilgrim’s Progress-inspired children’s book Little Marian’s Pilgrimage, issued by the ASSU ca. 1852. The earlier ...
The first in a two-part series, this blog post features an AAS-based undergraduate project, “Queering the Archive” at College of the Holy Cross. Under the advisement of Professor Stephanie Yuhl of the History Department, Carly Priest ‘18 and Emily Breakell ‘17 spent the summer searching for resources relevant to the history of transgender and gender-nonconforming ...
Editor’s note: Originally from Texas, Zoe Margolis is an Art History major at Smith College, slated to graduate this upcoming spring (class of 2018). Zoe wrote the first draft of this post on behalf of the students in the Spring 2017 course at Smith College “ARH291: Be My Valentine.” It was later revised by Prof. ...
The Whip (New York, New York), Oct. 8, 1842. Racy papers were scandalous newspapers mostly published in the 1840s and 1850s in New York and Boston. AAS has one of the larger institutional collections of these lowbrow papers. Opportunities to acquire additional issues of these papers are few and far between. An issue for one of the ...
"I saw the gathering tempest and heard its dreadful roarings, which seemed to me the roaring and burstings of ten thousand canons at once. Then I saw the trees of the forest torn by the violence of the winds, and dashed against each other, and against everything that stood before them, and houses and rocks ...
Recent conversations addressing the lacuna of representation of people of color in the bibliographic record have ignited a flurry of activity in our cataloging department that we hope users of our catalog will find helpful. As is often the case when we reflect on our cataloging processes and procedures, this activity has a long history ...
In this interview Chris Phillips, associate professor of English at Lafayette College, discusses his own epic adventures searching in libraries and archives for material that formed the foundation of his newest book, The Hymnal Before the Notes: A History of Reading and Practice, which Chris began working on at AAS several years ago. He also talks about his early years as a graduate student working with Jay Fliegelman, the nature of epic in America, libraries and reading, and even reads a little Milton poetry for us.
After months of preparation that included shifting stacks, boxing up objects, and countless meetings about architectural plans, the ground has finally been broken—both figuratively and literally—on the expansion and renovation of Antiquarian Hall. The Preparation As with any major building project, much of the time in the months preceding the actual construction was spent on refining and ...
Every quarter at AAS we release a list of publications by those who have researched at the library as fellows, members, or readers. If your book, article, or other achievement is not included, just let us know if you’d like to see it posted here! Books: Cohen, Michael David, editor. Correspondence of James K. Polk. Volume 13. Knoxville: ...
Esther Blackmer, Friendship Album, 1842-1846 This album looks similar to other albums from the period, with its hand-colored lithographs and manuscript poetry. The album’s owner, unlike the many students who kept friendship albums, was a chambermaid at the State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. The hospital's trustees’ report indicates that Esther Blackmer’s compensation was board plus ...
Back in 2014, I prepared a post for Past is Present that featured four photographs of newspaper print shops, two from the collection and two recently acquired. In the three years since that post, AAS has added several more occupational images featuring print shops of all shapes and sizes. These images add to our knowledge of the ...
In this episode, Ezra Greenspan discusses the research and writing of his latest book on Frederick Douglass’s family; his work as editor of Book History, the annual journal from SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing); and his lifelong relationship with the printed word. Ezra is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and an AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year.
