Have you ever wanted to catch a ride on the Flying Dutchman? Or wondered what people ate at Faneuil Hall to celebrate the 4th of July? Would you like to attend a nineteenth-century séance? Earn ten cents from your teacher? Or shop for a tombstone? You can learn about all those activities (and more) from the ...
One lesser-known collection at the American Antiquarian Society is a group of broadsides printed on textiles. Broadsides are ephemeral, single-sheet items that are usually printed only on one side. Some topics typical of broadsides include advertisements, official proclamations, theater announcements, and opinions. AAS has approximately 148 textile broadsides that showcase the breadth and type of these ...
Today we continue a series of blog posts highlighting items from our upcoming Adopt-a-Book event, slated for Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 6PM in Antiquarian Hall. You can read the entire Adopt-a-Book 2011 catalog on the AAS website, where you will find descriptions of all 176 items up for adoption this year. Our second ...
It is perhaps not surprising that we can be a little obsessive about our paper here at AAS. However, a recent influx of interns reminded me how strange all the paper shuffling that goes on at the desk can appear to an outsider. People new to doing research at AAS, upon being asked ...
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Assistant Reference Library Tracey Kry comments on her impressions of AAS as a newly-arrived employee. A couple of months ago now, we had a post about creating an AAS Glossary that would talk about terms and collections unique to AAS (http://pastispresent.org/category/aas-glossary/ ). The first post was about people’s confusion with the ...
How about hoary, pigtaily, brontosaurian, rusty-dusty, mossy-backed, or square-toed? If so, then you belong with us! Each of these terms were once synonyms for Antiquarian, according to AAS's recently acquired copy of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. A recent New York Times article described the historical thesaurus: "Archaism, it ...
The American Antiquarian Society is almost 200 years old. I guess that's not entirely shocking, given that "Antiquarian" is in our name, but sometimes it's easy to forget that when we were founded there were no functional steam-locomotives, no sewing machines, no modern matches. Napoleon was still fighting his way across Europe. Even "The Star-Spangled ...
