Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
This post will present approximately one hundred years of Irish ballads contained within the Society’s collections. The first is a fascinating 1769 broadside containing a New Year’s address by Ireland native Lawrence Sweeney (-1770), a popular figure in New York City journalism in the 1760s. Sweeney is one of the first identifiable Irish-American voices. He ...
Have you already picked your favorites for the Oscars this Sunday? Here in Worcester, American Hustle is a popular choice since scenes from it were shot on Worcester streets and in the Worcester Art Museum. Captain Phillips even shot a few scenes at the Worcester Airport (yes, there is a Worcester airport!). Here at the American Antiquarian ...
I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. (p. 17-8) So Solomon Northup begins his harrowing account of slavery from the inside. In Twelve Years a Slave, Northup, a free black man from upstate ...
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 ...
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. ...
Halaina Demba, our guest author here, is a third year student in the Buffalo State College Program in art conservation. She spent this past summer, the final one of her graduate studies, interning in the Society’s book and paper conservation lab. This summer the American Antiquarian Society received a unique gift of an 1854 broadside with ...
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 ...
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 ...
Whenever it's a damp, drizzly November (or January) in your soul, where do you go to keep from knocking people's hats off? In Melville's Moby-Dick Ishmael goes to sea, while the novel's sub-sub librarian (Melville's fictional assistant, assistant librarian who scours the earth for the "Extracts") apparently retreats to literary references to the Leviathan. The sub-sub ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
At this time of year, when shopping becomes a constant (and sometimes stressful) preoccupation, it’s easy to forget that for many people it’s a pleasurable pastime. Not just because of what you actually buy, but also because of the searching, comparing, matching, and imagining that all make up the act of shopping. As it turns ...
It has been a big year for some of the country’s most important documents. January saw the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and just last week was the 150th anniversary of the reading of the Gettysburg Address. This Thursday in the United States we celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving, and so are looking back, ...
“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 ...
