One feature that makes working at the American Antiquarian Society a joy is the number of resources available at our fingertips. Our reading room abounds in reference books and bibliographies. Our stacks are filled with county and local histories, city directories, genealogical publications, and other publications. We have access to numerous online databases. When an ...
The Philadelphian (Philadelphia, PA). February 1846. This is a scarce monthly publication filled with stories, tidbits of information, and small jokes for the entertainment and amusement of the reader. What makes this particular issue interesting is an advertisement on page 2 that takes up almost two-thirds of the page. It is for drugs, medicines, chemicals, paints, oils, ...
The People’s Pathfinder (St. Louis, MO) Spring 1853. Edited by William H. Keevill. This is a rare advertising piece for the dry goods palace of Hubbell & Hunt at Corinthian Hall in St. Louis, Missouri. As can be seen from the large woodcut on the front page, this publication is about hats. The articles are about ...
The Matrimonial Bazar. A Monthly Journal, Devoted to the Interests of Love, Courtship and Marriage (Chicago, IL) May 1876. Long before there were online dating services there were singles ads. Local or community newspapers often have a section of advertisements for men seeking women, women seeking men, and a variety of other combinations. SWF and DBM ...
Penny Yankee Doodle (New York, NY). November 2, 1850. This is one of a number of illustrated humor newspapers and periodicals that appeared in the 1840s and 1850s. The editor says they are not an imitation of Punch from England, but, “I am myself alone – the original Genius of American Humor.” There are the usual ...
Graefenberg Gazette (New York, NY), August 1847. The first thing that should grab your attention about this advertisement sheet is that it is printed in red ink. This was a marketing trick by the Graefenberg Company that put out a wide variety of pills and elixirs. This particular sheet promoted their vegetable pills, sarsaparilla compounds, eye ...
In May I picked up a large collection of newspapers from the Indiana State Library. It took 20 book cart loads to unload the back of the 26’ truck. There were a number of bundles of miscellaneous newspapers of single or scattered issues. While going through one of the bundles, I came across an issue of ...
Hannibal Journal, and Native American. May 28, 1842. Vol. 1, no. 21. A dealer recently sent me a box with pieces of newspapers. Some of them were either the front or back page, and many of them were just half of one page. Still, I waded through the large mound of fragments to see what was ...
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 ...
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. ...
AAS has one of the largest collections of nineteenth-century amateur newspapers in the country. These were little publications printed on table-top hobby presses and often done by children and young adults. They became popular in the 1870s and by the 1880s hundreds of them were being published all over the country. Their publishers even had ...
Tippecanoe Banner and Spirit of Democracy (New-Albany, IN) Oct. 15, 1840. No. 27. Here is an example of a presidential campaign newspaper supporting the election of William Henry Harrison. The hotly contested presidential election of 1840 produced a lot of campaign newspapers produced by local newspaper offices to promote candidates and platforms. This example was published ...
As Thomas Jefferson put it, “I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Here at the American Antiquarian Society all of the curators work very hard in acquiring new items for the collections. Every year thousands of items are added to our holdings. Sometimes ...
The News-Letter (Otterville, Missouri). Jan. 27, 1862. Vol. 1, no. 1. Newspapers published by Civil War regiments are scarce. One scarce genre of newspapers is Civil War regiment publications. Sometimes a regiment had printing equipment at a fort or took over a printing office at an occupied town and produced its own newspaper for the amusement ...
“The newspapers are making morning after morning the rough draft of history. Later, the historian will come, take down the old files, and transform the crude but sincere and accurate annals of editors and reporters into history, into literature. The modern school must study the daily newspaper.” - The State (Columbia, SC) December 5, 1905 On ...
