Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
The record-breaking price for a double elephant folio edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America in London on December 9, 2010, prompts the question: Does the Society own a copy. The short answer is no — not the double elephant folio edition — but the story is more interesting than that. Indeed, AAS ...
Making beer, hard cider, and other spirits at home has long been part of American culture. Most students of American history know this and know that both genders consumed alcohol and that children did as well. I was surprised though, to learn how much alcohol was consumed. According to Sarah Hand Meacham in her ...
One of the most interesting aspects of the manuscript collection here at AAS is its collections focused on the book trade in America. And one of the most interesting collections concerning the book trades is the business records of the Boston publishing firm, Lee & Shepard (for a PDF of the collection finding aid, click ...
Abduction of Charlie Brewster Ross. Philadelphia: Wm. F. Murphy’s Sons, 1874. This broadside is an early example of the use of photography on public posters. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, invented the photographic mug shot; during the 1860s and early 1870s, he often used small albumen photos on wanted posters for ...
As the calendar turns to November, our thoughts naturally turn to baseball... What!? Really? Yes, this year it took until November first to crown a World Series champion. Each year it seems, the games are on later and later (in the day and in the year). Can the casual fan sustain his ...
Scrapbooking is quite the popular hobby today, but it’s hardly a new idea. People have been compiling images, memorabilia, and the written word since these things existed. While exploring yet another of the American Antiquarian Society’s hidden gems, I found we have a wonderfully rich scrapbook collection. The collection of scrapbooks at AAS is currently at ...
As it says on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired…your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and the newly-found abandoned line “…your unwanted editions, pages uncut, spines unopened, loathed by your authors and deemed unworthy cultural capital by your countrymen…” Okay, maybe that isn’t exactly what it says. Perhaps the line’s lack of poetic ...
While Thanksgiving is still more than a month away, it’s never too early to begin planning. And since this year I will be hosting my first Thanksgiving, and cooking my very first bird, I thought I’d begin to look for some advice from the past. We all have our passed down recipes from family members ...
One of the hidden treasures at AAS is its sheet music collection. The collection numbers about 60,000 pieces of music, all printed before 1880, including instrumental, vocal, secular and religious music, by both American and foreign composers. You might be thinking, I can’t read music, what’s in it for me? The sheet music collection is ...
With Election Day fast approaching, it seemed like a good time to have a look at the Society’s holdings of American election ballots. This is a collection of around 700 mostly New England imprints, dating from about 1815 to the 1880s. Most of the ballots are small in size and are arranged by political party, ...
Ever feel like running on a tread-mill is some kind of horrible punishment? Turns out, it is! According to a pamphlet titled The History of the Tread-Mill by James Hardie (1824), the tread-mill was first invented as a form of labor for prison inmates. The tread-mill had a dual purpose, in that it was used ...
The following conundrum for Past is Present readers comes from AAS reader Mary Fissell. I’m writing a book about Aristotle's Masterpiece, and have just spent a couple of very productive and happy weeks working with the AAS’s collection of 50+ editions. This book, neither by Aristotle, nor a masterpiece, is one of the longest-running popular medical ...
The following post comes to us from AAS reader Peter MacInerney. Early in January 1855, a Concord-based free-lance writer, occasional surveyor, and sometime lecturer, visited the American Antiquarian Society at its then-new building. This second Antiquarian Hall had been completed little more than one year before, after the Society outgrew its original building. The visitor recounted ...
With all of the media buzz around the recent nuptials of Chelsea Clinton, I thought of another presidential wedding: the marriage of Nellie Grant to English aristocrat Algernon Sartoris in 1874. Eighteen year-old Nellie Grant was the only daughter of Ulysses S. and Julia Grant. She met Sartoris, the son of the famous singer Adelaide Kemble (sister of Fanny) ...
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, ...
