Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
Book sales may be up overall this year due to the introduction of e-readers (see the New York Times report here). But strange fears about the demise of the book still abound (read the New York Times on old-fashioned book covers and e-readers here). Are Americans simply afraid to buy books, or afraid that we’re, ...
An earlier post about bibliographies on everything from the California Gold Rush to tomatoes got me wondering about the impetus behind that heady experience (the Gold Rush, not the tomatoes). How did a man who heard all the fairy-tale stories of incredible wealth just waiting to be picked out of the rivers make the difficult ...
In an age of inter-connectivity, mobility, and Librarything.com that purports to bring us together in a digital utopia, whither will the truly personal library go? Do we risk having a network of Gatsbys present and past, interested in books more essential for their social value than their literary or historical merit? A social networking database ...
Over two hundred years ago Elizabeth Inchbald wrote and published the three act farce Animal Magnetism. Heavily criticizing Mesmer’s magnetized baths and healing wands, this typical eighteenth-century afterpiece farce features befuddled lovers, lovers’ ruses, and battle of the sexes. Two hundred years later, befuddled lovers remain but Animal Magnetism is now carefully housed in AAS's ...
A recent reference question reminded me just how many amazing bibliographies there are, and it also sparked a memory of a wonderful cache of letters in AAS's manuscript collection that give an insider's view of the '49er experience. (The entire Grant-Burr Family Papers are fully transcribed online, including the letters on the California ...
The first of the books about the history of the American Antiquarian Society to mark the 2012 bicentennial has arrived. It is A Place in My Chronicle: A New Edition of the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin, 1829-1835, co-authored by Jack Larkin and Caroline Sloat. We always call it “diary” in the singular, ...
Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent AAS fellow, discusses the game “Who did it? The Maine Question” (described in an earlier Past is Present post) in the context of children's games generally. In the array of AAS materials about young people's play and ...
Returning the occasional game to the AAS graphic arts department does not usually result in discovering the explosives that blew up the USS Maine in 1898. Well, it never does, actually. But when Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent Jay and Deborah Last ...
It is an atmosphere both festive yet filled with curiosity. It is an arrangement of tables filled with the written word of America. The words and images spill out across the tables with humor, with poignancy, in rhyme and in the marketing jargon of the day, dressed in color or black and white, yet all ...
When Diann Benti, former AAS assistant reference librarian, created our now (nearly) complete anonymous blacksmith blog, she was inspired to do so by the Massachusetts Historical Society’s tweeting John Quincy Adams. Past is Present would never have a tweeting blacksmith, Diann informed us in her blog post when the blacksmith initially forged his way ...
In a New York Times Book Review article last month, Jennifer Schuessler quoted Bob Brown, an early proponent of electronic reading devices. In his prescient manifesto, "The Readies," Brown declared: “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age.... Writing has been bottled up in books since the start." Brown called for no less than ...
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Many institutions are planning exhibitions, activities, and publications around the events which tore the United States apart between 1861 and 1865. Some organizations have already contacted AAS regarding the possibility of borrowing or reproducing material from our collections. ...
When I first saw the front page of our convict's little excerpted diary (the one I wrote about in a previous post), I thought to myself, what a curious title. The title was, of course, one of the main things that encouraged me to poke my nose into it in the first place. If ...
I recently spent a week in Salt Lake City on vacation. One of the sites I visited was the FamilySearch library at Temple Square, run by the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints. I’ve found most of my family history with the genealogical resources at the AAS, but I thought it would be fun to ...
When I first told people I'd decided to nurse my twins I was asked jokingly, "So you're going to hire a wet nurse?" followed by "too bad they're not around anymore." Of course they are, I thought - just ask Salma Hayek. For awhile I didn't think about nursing history, until I recently saw ...
