Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
We are going to brave the waters of wartime Christmas. In the next few days, there will be three posts examining Confederate-printed items in the Society’s collection. This season of festivities is also one of commemoration and reflection as we are squarely in the War’s sesquicentennial. A glance over the pages of the nation’s most popular ...
If you navigate your way to the AAS online content webpage, you’ll find a link to the Society’s digital image archive, GIGI. In GIGI you’ll discover a searchable database of over 50,000 images from the society’s collection - from maps to manuscripts, war images to newspapers, cartoons, illustrations and more. My personal favorite is the ...
Although now a full-time employee of AAS, my love for the Society began years before I started working here when it first introduced me to the thrill of researching in an archive. As a senior History major at the College of the Holy Cross, I was introduced to AAS by my thesis advisor, who suggested ...
Every Wednesday before Thanksgiving for the past fifty years, the Wall Street Journal has published excerpts from Nathaniel Morton's 1669 history of the Plymouth colony, New Englands Memoriall, on its editorial page. While Morton's history does contain the first published list of those who signed the Mayflower Compact, it features only a negligible account of ...
The month of October, marked by grey rainy days and bright orange and red foliage certainly has me feeling a bit spooky. While Halloween as we know it is generally a twentieth-century phenomenon, New England has a long history of superstitions and ghost stories. We all know the gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel ...
For the first time ever, the extensive 1880s-era correspondence between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan and Sullivan’s mentor at Perkins School for the Blind, Michael Anagnos, are available online. An unusual collaboration between the American Antiquarian Society and Perkins (www.perkinsarchives.org) harnesses the power of social media to create a revealing new online exhibit that ...
The town of Oakham had a rich theater scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seemed that every week there was a theater or musical piece being presented in the Oakham Memorial Town Hall. In organizing the 250th anniversary celebrations of Oakham in 2012 I was given the responsibility to find ...
"Poetry, as well as History, has consecrated the achievements of Columbus. But we must leave, for the present, to History and Poetry the pleasing task of dwelling on individual characters. The appropriate researches of the Antiquary aim at objects less exposed to ordinary notice, yet illustrative often of the interests of nations." So said William ...
Edward W. Clay, Practical Amalgamation. The Wedding. New York, John Childs, ca. 1839. This print by Edward W. Clay is one in a series of images that comments on interracial relationships in America during the 1830s. Most of the prints in the set are held by the Society. This impression is actually a second copy ...
This month Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010 opened at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries in New York (September 12, 2012 to February 3, 2013). You can learn more about the exhibition here. Two former AAS fellows, Matthew Wittmann and Brett Mizelle, contributed essays to the related (and very substantial) publication, The American Circus (New ...
It is probably not news to readers of this blog that The New York Times recently, and favorably, reviewed the American Antiquarian Society's Grolier Club exhibition "In Pursuit of a Vision." But readers familiar with the two societies neither will be surprised that the AAS has exhibited at the Grolier Club in the past (in ...
The Iris, or Orleans Evening Post (New Orleans, LA). June 27, 1823. Vol. 1, no. 57. This is an unrecorded daily New Orleans newspaper that appeared on eBay. It was started by the New Orleans Typographical Association in May 1823. According to an article in the Salem Gazette (MA) of June 3, 1823, this paper was ...
A Cheap Primer for the Blind. Louisville, Ky.: American Printing House for the Blind, 1874. This primer is printed in large oblong format with raised-letter type known as Boston line. AAS has some thirty titles printed in Boston line; about half of which were actually published for the blind, as opposed to providing samples of the ...
Without a doubt, many amazing people arrive daily on the doorstep of Antiquarian Hall. They bring research early in its infancy, artistic projects, personal histories, obligations of library pilgrimage – all in need of the AAS touch. In 1813, Isaiah Thomas made clear the intent for the doors and collection be open to all who ...
“Did he say anything about politics?” “Not a word. We talked mostly about books.” “Books! What does he know about books?” From Henry Adams, Democracy One of the more enjoyable aspects of working with old books all day is having the chance to see what past owners have tucked away for safe-keeping in the leaves of those books. Just ...
