Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
The Amateur Ohion, published in Cincinnati, in January of 1878, like many amateur newspapers, contains a short humor column. This little column contains a very odd little joke. It begins: Why is an elephant like a steamboat? We'd love to hear your guesses for the punchline! Send us your comments and we'll reveal the "correct" ...
Over the winter, AAS reader Jeanne McDougall spent some time with our Isaiah Thomas manuscript collection. While searching through the correspondence, she stumbled upon a letter from Hannah Weld to her daughter Mary Weld, who married Isaiah Thomas Jr. Below, Jeanne describes her encounter with Hannah and Mary. Jeanne's experience certainly demonstrates the serendipitous nature ...
At 6:30 PM on Friday, September 23, the American Antiquarian Society will take visitors back to the late 1840s, as Jay DiPrima recreates Henry David Thoreau's lecture "Economy." Thoreau originally delivered his lecture, drawn from his early writings on his year at Walden Pond, on Friday, April 20, 1849 at Worcester City Hall. A review ...
...a young man named Henry L. Joslin, from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was writing home to his mother on September 24th. Henry, born in 1843, was serving in the Civil War and was working picket duty in Poolsville. In his letter he describes his camp, what guard duty was like, and gives updates about his health, and other young ...
One way we add to our manuscript collection is through what staff and readers find within other collections at AAS. Often we will find letters, notes, or other ephemera interfiled in books, periodicals and newspapers, and often it is deemed best to move this material into the manuscript collection. These items are fun because, while ...
As the Prints in the Parlor (PIP) Project begins its last leg of digitization and access to images generated, those of us involved with it find ourselves itching to pull together some of the results into conversation with one another. The reason for this is to show how these book illustrations, sometimes independent of the ...
Although the majority of AAS’s manuscript collection is focused on New England, we do have collections that cover other parts of the country. Our Book Trades Collection and Slavery in the US Collection, for example, have a national scope, and collections such as the Louisiana Collection and the California Papers are focused outside of New ...
Recently we acquired an interesting new addition to our ever growing scrapbook collection. In 1869, Mary H. Hill of Nelson County, VA, somehow got her hands on a salesman's sample book and proceeded to use it as a scrapbook for her favorite recipes over the next decade or so. What makes her book stand out ...
On September 23-24, 2011, the American Antiquarian Society will host a symposium titled "The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Globalism & Lecture Culture in Nineteenth-Century America." This conference was organized by Dr. Tom Wright, of the University of Oxford. So what’s a lyceum, anyway? Throughout the nineteenth century, the lyceum—a scheduled public lecture that was intended to be both ...
Last week I shared a letter from Lucy Chase to a Henry Sargent, and promised more about it this week. Here’s the letter again, as a refresher! Any thoughts? Well, according to those who have studied this letter, many agree that it is, in fact, a joke! Knowing Lucy’s personality (her wit, her humor, and her ...
Carsten Junker, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies, University of Bremen, Germany Ebeling Fellowship Project: “Reading Affect in 18th-Century Abolitionist Debates” Professor Junker’s project examines late eighteenth-century texts that envisioned an end to the enslavement of African-diasporic people in the North American colonies and early republic. The struggle to overcome slavery was fought by many – ...
One of the greatest strengths of the AAS fellowship program is that researchers from around the globe, working in diverse disciplines (history, English, art, creative writing, archaeology, etc.), all live together just up the street from Antiquarian Hall. During their lunch hour and after being forced out of the reading room at 5 pm, ...
Since last October, the project catalogers creating online rare-book level records for 1801-1820 imprints have been working on United States’ federal documents. Admittedly, some government documents are boring. But much more often than I imagined they have been a source of interesting, even surprising, information. Many documents, but especially Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin’s report ...
I have always found Lucy Chase to be one of the most interesting women represented in our manuscript collection. Lucy was born in 1822 to a successful Worcester family. She spent time teaching in contraband camps and freedman schools in the South, and travelled across Europe with her sister for 5 years. She was intelligent, ...
Disclaimers always add something titillating to a post, so here goes our very own… This post focuses on reporting in the South, but the war of words worked both ways during the Civil War. The northern press could be inaccurate, hypocritical, and disingenuous. We would love to read examples you have ...
