Valentines Outside the Envelope

TheValentine

As has been blogged on Past is Present before, AAS has an extensive and representative assortment of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century valentines. Part of the Graphic Arts Collection, these ephemeral pieces of affection were exchanged on or before February 14, as Valentine’s Day provided the perfect opportunity to give that special someone a card. Many were ...

Adventures in Cataloging: Inscriptions

The re-stitched bindings of Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary (Worcester, Mass., 1788), Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (Philadelphia, 1803), and Russel’s Seven Sermons (Boston, 1715).

As a cataloger for the North American Imprints Program, my job is to catalogue books and pamphlets printed and published in North America between 1801 and 1820. I describe them, I put them into context with other books and pamphlets, and I become the latest person to handle an item that is two centuries old. Many ...

Instagram Redux

The Society's Graphic Arts collection is a wonderful place for browsing, looking for visual evidence of whatever topic you may be working on.  I have helped researchers hunt in the collection on such broad topics as death, food production, and dress, and as specific as orphaned children, methods of doing laundry, and book shop interiors. As ...

Did you send out your New Year’s cards yet?

new year card first image

It’s no wonder Louis Prang is considered the “Father of the American Christmas Card.” During the height of chromolithography in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s, Prang’s firm in Boston introduced the concept of the Christmas card to America and produced over 5 million greeting cards per year. While Prang’s Christmas cards are displayed often, in ...

Santa and the Christmas Tree in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Books

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Although we might think of Santa and an evergreen Christmas tree as inevitably wedded in nineteenth-century children’s book illustration, that was not necessarily the case.  Until about 1840, New Year’s Day was favored over Christmas as the family-appropriate winter holiday in the young American Republic, particularly in New England, where the descendants of the Puritans ...

A “Spirited” Collection

skeleton stereocard crop

Nothing is hair-raising quite like a chilling photograph. This month, when the occult is most heavily sought after in popular culture, we made a small collection accessible which examines death, the afterlife, photography, technology, and (naturally) print culture. AAS’s impressive collection of stereocard views includes a subset categorized as “Ghost” images. This includes approximately 31 images ...

Your Move!

Many magazines of the nineteenth century were published with paper wrappers, the purpose of which were to protect the issue as it went through the mail on its way to the subscriber’s home.  These wrappers (often on colored paper) would identify the name of the periodical.  Sometimes they would just reproduce the title page, but ...

Benjamin T. Hill Goes to the Fair

I recently scanned a few boxes of glass negatives from the collection, all made by one Benjamin T. Hill, an amateur photographer and local historian elected to the Antiquarian Society in 1901 who also served as an auditor for the Society for twenty-three years. These negatives were all made at a fair in Worcester in ...

Of Royal Interest

With all eyes in the media directed towards the new addition to the royal family, we’ve taken a look back to seek out evidence in the historical record of this subject’s proportional popularity. Unsurprisingly, American buzz on the most recent princes and princesses is anything but new. Indeed, everything about Queen Victoria’s life was reported in ...

Tracking down a Big Thing on Ice

Here in Central Massachusetts in July, readers and staff at AAS are experiencing our third heat wave of the summer.  Mind you, heat waves here in New England cannot compete with those that build in the American Southwest, Texas, or the Deep South, but we suffer all the same.  To counter the heat, I decided ...

National Nurses Week – a Trip in the Archive

March 2013 cover of AJN: The American Journal of Nursing

The March 2013 issue of AJN: The American Journal of Nursing featured on its cover a well-known AAS collection item – A Map of the Open country of a Woman’s Heart by “A Lady” published by Kellogg c. 1833–1842. Throughout the month of April, we received queries about this image from nurses around the country. We ...

When is a Valentine a Newton?

Attribution is something libraries and museums struggle with every day.  Who is the sitter in this portrait?  Who is the author of this pamphlet?  Often the objects give us clues, but not always.  Sometimes they even lead us astray.  This is the story of a pair of daguerreotypes at the American Antiquarian Society and how ...

Christmas and New Year Musical Souvenir, Richmond ca. 1863

musical souvenir cover detail

This piece of sheet music in the Society’s collection represents a handful of Confederate imprints published by George Dunn and Company (printer) and written or edited by F.W. (Fitz William) Rosier. Even before official secession, and certainly after, the Confederate States produced their own government documents and publications; there were also religious pieces and education ...

New Use of Collections: Dorothee Kocks on Rich-Media eBooks

When I got my PhD, I never pictured myself calling Jaclyn Penny at the American Antiquarian Society and saying, essentially, “You got any smutty stuff?”  The result of my inquiries at AAS and other archives is now out: Such Were My Temptations: Bawdy Americans, 1760-1830. I’m writing about it here, on the AAS blog, because ...