Three Opportunities to Learn More About Early African American Lives

wedding

Spring is springing, the bees are buzzing, and we are coming into the busy season here at AAS. Opportunity is knocking. This week AAS will be involved with two wonderful lectures on the lives of African Americans, so it’s a perfect time to tout the wide-range of material we have supporting the study ...

Dispatch from an AAS Intern: 19th-Century Children’s Letterwriting

dad

These days you would be more likely to encounter a young child e-mailing or texting than writing a letter to a family correspondent. Many believe that letter writing is a lost art in the digital age. It is certainly romanticized in films and books but in the 19th century household correspondence was an ...

AAS Helped Compile an Early African American Bibliography

murray1

Toward the end of his now-famous 1897 Atlantic Monthly essay, "Strivings of the Negro People," W.E.B. DuBois states that the post-Civil War years brought for African Americans “the ideal of book-learning, the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance.” Historians may note DuBois’ ultimate discontent with this ideal -- the longing to achieve freedom through ‘book-learning” -- ...

“Promiscuous Leaves” from A Convict’s Diary

Cover

AAS holds in its manuscripts collections an excerpted diary of a convict from the 19th century.  It is a small unassuming volume of just under fifty pages on plain brown paper, and doesn’t visually grab your attention. It was the title on the front page that piqued my curiosity: Promiscuous Leaves from My Diary. A glance ...

Historic Photographs and the Sharp Memory of a Local

Float representing St. Vincent's Hospital, Charity Circus, Worcester, July 15, 1909

Here at AAS we have lots of small collections that are safely tucked away, accessible only due to the knowledge of the reference staff, catalogers, or curators who bump into them occasionally when searching for other things. As we work our way through our holdings we try to increase access to these “lost” collections ...

Typefindings: Good Old College Days

rutgers

Today's university may be in need of a revolution of its own, what with its failure to create true interdisciplinary conversation and its isolation from the wider public.  The late eighteenth-century college did not exist in such isolation from the people, though few colleges became hotbeds of revolutionary activity during the war like Queen's College (now Rutgers University). ...

The Children’s Henry Box Brown

henry_box_brown

Henry Box Brown (b. 1816) escaped lifelong slavery in Virginia by shipping himself in a box (with the help of white and African-American abolitionists) to Philadelphia in 1849.  One of the few primary sources detailing his breathtaking escape to freedom is the children’s book Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children.  Written in 1849 by Quaker abolitionist ...

European Political Prints On-line

european_cartoons_bm9170_cropped

Just in time for your winter viewing pleasure (who needs football?), the Graphic Arts team is pleased to announce that an inventory of the European Political Print Collection is now on-line and is fully illustrated.  Have a look: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Europeanprints/ This is the latest work by our Graphic Arts Assistant Jaclyn Penny, who inventoried, described, re-foldered, and digitized ...

Clean out your closets!

two_penny_whist_folder_17

Recently the Graphic Arts staff at the American Antiquarian Society posted its latest illustrated inventory, a complete listing of political and social engraved satires from the Charles Peirce collection (yes, that last name is spelled correctly! Peirce, not Pierce!).  You can have a look by following this link http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Peirce/ Like many collections here at the Society, ...

The gentleman doth protest too much

lincoln_letter_cropped

Background: The books in the AAS collection began appearing long before a comprehensive cataloging system. Building on the foundational donation of Isaiah Thomas' personal library, members sent books to the Society, and according to the letter transcribed below, at times also removed them. Item: A letter from AAS member and prominent Worcester lawyer William Lincoln to statesman ...

Type Findings: Introducing the AAS Printers’ File

Avis Clarke

Avis G. Clarke, cataloger-cum-researcher of early American imprints and printers, filled hundreds of AAS card catalogue drawers with the AAS printers’ file. Detailing the lives and works of virtually every printer working in America before 1820, the printers’ file is a masterpiece of indexing. Comprising 134 drawers of biographical, printing, and publication ...

Santa Claus Exposed

chimneys

AAS's The Children's Friend: A New Year's Present is one of just two known copies of the 1821 pamphlet.  Fifteen centimeters tall and eight pages deep, the paper-covered volume stood little chance of survival in the hands of generations of American children. But there was one family fastidious enough for the task, and by chance ...

Christmas Treasures: Flip through the pages of The Children’s Friend

childrens_friend_stocking_cropped

It's that time of year. Time to take ornaments out of boxes, shake the dust from stockings, and hang wreaths on front doors.  The holiday season is no different at AAS. December is the one month when it's appropriate to pull out all of our wonderful Christmas treasures-- after all who wants to see Santa ...