Learn from the best! AAS curators discuss their collections
To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, American Antiquarian Society curators created an online gallery of AAS collection materials related to the American Revolution. The featured materials include documents, newspapers, prints, maps, and books that reflect the wide-ranging opinions and positions surrounding the path to independence. Among gallery highlights are: ...
In celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, the American Antiquarian Society’s new online gallery showcases printings of the Declaration of Independence produced between 1776 to 1876. The selection includes the Declaration’s first appearance in a newspaper, broadsides printed in the summer of 1776, official facsimiles, and commemorative printings for the centennial. While the original handwritten ...
Newspapers in early America were an essential part of connecting communities with the latest news from Europe and other colonies. They “enabled readers to imagine themselves as part of a shared culture of ideas, investments and events that spread beyond their local world,”[1] helping to unite the distinct geographic regions that would later become the ...
Did you ever wish to visit the American Antiquarian Society but have no clue where to start? Have you ever felt intimidated by the marble columns and brick building, thinking that the library is just for professors or scholars? Did you ever go on a public tour on a Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. and want ...
These days it is rare to see someone pay with cash. Usually debit or credit cards are swiped or phones are tapped at checkouts and funds move invisibly between accounts. Apps like Venmo mean a group can easily move digital money around in real time to split a restaurant bill. Parking meters use apps, laundromats ...
While most library collections are printed or written on paper, hundreds of historic objects at the American Antiquarian Society -- including broadsides, children's books, and ribbon badges -- were printed onto cloth. Often produced as keepsakes, souvenirs, commemorative objects, or teaching tools, cloth printings in the AAS collection include texts and images printed onto silk, ...
Last year, the American Antiquarian Society received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support the reorganization, rehousing, and digitization of 655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people. The new digital resource Letters from Freedom provides additional context to the materials and to the stories of the people ...
Has bound with it: Alfred Ely, A Sermon, Occasioned by the Late Death of Mrs. Charlotte Sprague (Hartford, 1821) and Absalom Peters, Memoir of Mrs. Charlotte E. Sprague (New Haven, 1821). Although the original leather and gilt binding has been worn down by much handling over the years, this bespoke volume provides a physical tribute to ...
Now a ghost town, Granite, Montana, was once a thriving mining town after the discovery of silver in the 1870s. The Bi-Metallic Mining Company operated there from 1887 until 1893, when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act made the price of silver so low that the mines were abandoned. This album contains numerous photographs including cyanotypes, Kodak ...
Tom Thumb takes center stage as both a sword-wielding hero and object of royal curiosity in this early nineteenth-century picture book. Although this rhymed tale is set in the early Medieval court of King Arthur, the ladies and gentlemen of the court are dressed in Regency Era attire that would have been familiar to the ...
At least these two issues of the Roll Call newspaper from the Civil War were edited by “Three Ladies. Two of the War, and One of the Treasury Departments.” There is only one other known issue of this title, which may have begun in February 1864. It was apparently published during one of the many ...
Almanacs, pregnancy, and dodging fines are all contained in this one-page testimony to the Court of General Sessions of Massachusetts from 1710. Unmarried Ruth Copeland became pregnant with a child by a man named Samuel Hayden, who promised to marry her after finding out she was to have his child. Samuel subsequently rescinded his offer after ...
This 1620 Mexican imprint – once in the library of AAS member and prominent Mexican bibliographer Joaquin García Icazbalceta (1825-1894) – arrived at AAS just in time to cause a stir among the students in the 2024 History of the Book in America summer seminar on multilingual cultures of print. Printed well before there was even ...
The thoroughbred racehorse Longfellow was known as the “king of the turf” and won nearly every contest he ran in the 1870s. The horse was born in 1867 in Kentucky and began racing as a four-year-old. His jockey was the young John Samples (d. 1912) who was born to enslaved parents in Midway, Kentucky, around ...
Although Ann Taylor's poem begins with the line, "Who fed me from her gentle breast …," very few American illustrated editions show a mother actually breastfeeding her child, due to modesty concerns, making this image published in an edition issued by New York publisher Solomon King (1791-1832) a great find. Several scholars have recently used the ...
