Inadvertently, three graduate students were responsible for the creation of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAVic). Two appeared at AAS asking if we had 18th century prints or lithographs of wedding ceremonies. Another spoke of the struggle to convince her dissertation committee that a history thesis could focus successfully on stereographs. Between the ...
Category: Good Sources
Suggestions for interesting & useful collection materials
It’s all in the timing
Proof that humor is not a modern invention: a joke to lighten our Wednesdays direct from John Davis to AAS Librarian Christopher Columbus Baldwin in the close of a February 4, 1832 letter. Can you tell why a catterpillar [sic] is like a woman churning butter? Do you give it up? Because she makes butterfly. No groans ...
Halloween Terror: The Glass-Eyed Ghouls
In the mid 1800s, people began appearing with eyes so clear they were nearly invisible. The ghostly faces stared straight ahead without a hint of shame in their alien faces. They haunt us still, following us from countless daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and cartes-de-visite, warning us of a different time. A fearful era when to be photogenic ...
One more thing about me…
An online fad became a journalistic obsession with a late-winter craze known as “25 Random Things.” Members of the social networking site Facebook began crafting lists about themselves: personal histories, likes, and dislikes -- self-identified quirks describable in a sentence they then displayed for others to see. The only thing that seemed to equal the number ...
The Original Balloon Boy: Edgar Allan Poe?
Have you heard the one about the balloon boy? No, not that balloon boy. On April 13, 1844, the New York Sun printed an extra edition reporting that man had finally flown across the Atlantic. In a balloon. A postscript in the April 13th morning edition of the Sun taunted readers, We stop the press at a late hour, to ...
Your Daily Dose
What’s the world coming to? John Quincy Adams is tweeting from 1808 and our own anonymous blacksmith’s apprentice is blogging away right above these very words. Following Adams’ debut on Twitter, one of the librarians from the Massachusetts Historical Society explained that, “We want to get it out there to the technophile generation ... We ...
Sensational Images
At parties, when people discover I work at the American Antiquarian Society, they often ask: what’s your favorite item in the collections? To my mind, this is akin to asking a parent to choose his or her favorite child. I’ve heard curators answer this impossible dilemma simply: whatever I received ...