Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
On the evening of June 26, 1799, a major summer thunderstorm passed through Worcester. One result was that a warehouse that Isaiah Thomas used to store printing materials was struck by lightning, causing damage. Of course something like that was newsworthy and a detailed report appeared in the next issue of Thomas’s paper, the Massachusetts ...
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 ...
At the July 4, 1818, anniversary of its founding the New York Typographical Society celebrated with one of its typical ceremonies. Since its establishment in 1809, the Society had commemorated its anniversary every year with an evening of toasts and odes dedicated to the art of printing. Those in attendance at ...
In show business timing is everything. It is the same at the American Antiquarian Society. Sometimes you acquire a piece when a researcher is here and it is just what he or she needs. Other times you acquire an item and you think it would have been perfect for that person that was here the ...
Former AAS intern Melissa Lydston worked in our Manuscript Department, processing a collection of family papers. The Warfield Family resided in Providence, Rhode Island in the mid-nineteenth century. The patriarch of the family, Daniel Warfield, was a soap maker and dye maker. The collection proved to have more than just letters. Read below for her ...
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 ...
Over the past few weeks, we've been featuring posts by former AAS intern Lucia Ferguson (Smith College) about her experience identifying an unidentified diary (Part I, Part II, and Part III). This week she shares her concluding thoughts. Researching the Martin family proved mysterious and frustrating. And still, as I researched the lives Henry’s family lived ...
Last week, former AAS intern Lucia Ferguson brought us through some of Henry Martin's (a previously unidentified diarist) daily routines. Read on to learn about his experience as a soldier in the Civil War, and a miner in a goldmine. After working as a farmhand in his teenage years, Henry served in the Civil War. He ...
Last week we featured a post by former AAS intern Lucia Ferguson (Smith College) about her journey into an unidentified diary. Read on to learn more about the diarist's day to day life as he recorded it in his diary. During 1867, when he kept this diary, Henry made his living by selling pictures and books, ...
Former AAS intern Lucia Ferguson (Smith College) worked with a manuscript collection of unidentified diaries. Her charge? Identify the diarist. Lucia was very successful with one particular volume, which she discovered belonged to a young man named Henry Martin. Although no last name was listed anywhere in the volume, a poem from the diarist’s sweetheart ...
For museum and park enthusiasts, the green and gray uniforms of the National Park Service (NPS) symbolize respect, knowledge, and public service. They’re recognizable and serve as a reminder of the continuing preservation of our national heritage and landscape. But all too often people only associate the NPS with the large outdoor wildlife parks such ...
As many scholars of American history are aware, for many decades before 1840 the largest winter holiday in the nation was New Year’s Day, not Christmas. Christmas was perceived by many Protestant Americans as too closely linked to Catholicism. New Year’s Day, on the other hand, was a secular family holiday often marked by travel ...
Nineteenth-century American publisher McLoughlin Brothers pioneered the use of chromolithography in the production of color picture books starting in the 1860s. Until that point, most children’s books were illustrated with wood engravings that were locked into the printing press form along with set type. Coloring these images generally entailed using hand-colored stencils or employing a ...
It is often hard to find diaries written by young men and boys. So today I’d like to highlight a great diary kept by a young man, Thomas Whitaker, of Waltham, Massachusetts. Thomas began recording daily entries in 1874, when he was 17 years old, and the volume continues through 1878. He filled the entire ...
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 ...
