Last week we announced a new AAS web resource consisting of four journals kept by Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. between 1837 and 1840, plus an introductory essay. The journals include a description of Edmund’s life in Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1840 while he was attending John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and ...
Thoreau scholars have long been aware of the journal kept in Concord, Massachusetts, during a period of seven weeks in 1840 when twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. was attending John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and boarding in the Thoreau household. One reason Edmund’s journal is of interest is that it contains one of ...
Assistant Professor of English at University of Maryland Baltimore County Lindsay DiCuirci and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American labor history and digital humanities in the classroom. It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the latest Omeka exhibition from AAS: Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print. We ...
In December 2014, AAS member Joanne S. Gill gave the Society a copy of Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art, published in 1897. The work, in four volumes, describes the collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics collected by William T. Walters of Baltimore, now housed along with some of the original Prang watercolors in the ...
By the mid-eighteenth century, a common rite of passage for many young people in Colonial America was to attend a local singing school conducted by some itinerant music-master. There they learned the names of the notes, time signatures, rudimentary music theory, and how to sing harmony in four parts. For the young, singing schools were ...
The North American Imprints Program makes the AAS Catalog ideal for bibliometric analysis in the North American colonies and in the early United States before 1820, as I have noted before on Past is Present. In this screencast, I walk you through how to export Machine-Readable Catalog (MARC) records from our General Catalog and then ...
It seems as though many studies of James Fenimore Cooper begin on the defense. Mark Twain's severe treatment of Cooper in the 120-year-old essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" leaves many a poor Cooper critic to battle with Twain before easing into the comforts of Cooper. Never mind that Melville called him "our national novelist" or ...
I’ve written previously about my experiences cataloging the AAS dime novel collection. I was still fairly early in the process when I discussed the relative quality of three publishing houses: Beadle and Adams, George Munro, and Elliott, Thomes & Talbot. As I have continued working with the collection since, I have had a chance not ...
After two years of working under the generous dome, I will no longer be the ACLS Public Fellow and Digital Humanities Curator at AAS. Instead, I will be the Digital Humanities Curator, a full-time staff member. My work will not change much, but this transition from fellow to staffer offers a chance for me to ...
It is hard to believe that after a year of preparations the Digital Antiquarian Conference and Workshop are now behind us. What began as a twinkle in my and Thomas Augst’s eyes when he was an NEH fellow here blossomed into a 10-day extravaganza here at AAS, starting with the largest academic conference the Society ...
When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...
This post was co-written by AAS Digital Humanities Curator/ACLS Fellow Molly O'Hagan Hardy and AAS Head of Cataloging Alan Degutis. The New York Times recently reported the “discover[y]” of the earliest known use of the term “African American” from almost fifty years earlier than previously thought. The Oxford English Dictionary attributed it to The Liberator in ...
A year ago today, we announced work on a database that would make the extensive financial records of Mathew Carey, a Dublin native who came to Philadelphia in 1784, navigable. One St. Patrick’s Day later, we are happy to announce that this resource now exists. Carey’s records include receipts, bills, memoranda, invoices, bills of lading, ...
We at AAS have figured out one way to beat the winter blues: Omeka! Thanks to the generosity of Jay Last (member since 1987), we held a two-day training session for our staff to learn this content management system for online exhibitions of special collections. Omeka is not archival software, but it was developed at ...
What do Red Jacket, Pompey Fleet, James Macpherson, Mary Washington, and Geoffrey Chaucer have in common? They all are depicted in, influences for, or creators of the 300 (give or take a few, depending on how you count them) broadside ballads Isaiah Thomas collected from Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly in 1814. Mostly printed in Coverly’s ...
