These days it is rare to see someone pay with cash. Usually debit or credit cards are swiped or phones are tapped at checkouts and funds move invisibly between accounts. Apps like Venmo mean a group can easily move digital money around in real time to split a restaurant bill. Parking meters use apps, laundromats ...
The recent purchase of the Western Investor, an 1890 newspaper from Aberdeen, South Dakota, brought an unusual level of excitement to the newspaper office at the American Antiquarian Society. Despite sporting a slightly whimsical masthead, the paper appeared to be a standard, somewhat dull financial newspaper interesting only for researchers of bank and stock market ...
The American Antiquarian Society already preserves over four million books, newspapers, graphics and manuscripts, but new acquisitions are still being added to the collection every month. How are newly acquired collection materials made accessible to researchers in the AAS reading room? This post examines the detailed process by which AAS staff acquire, receive, process, pay ...
Rachel Wall (née Schmidt) was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on October 1, 1760. She was 29 years old on October 8, 1789, when she was executed by hanging on the Boston Common. According to some accounts, Wall may have been America’s first female pirate; it is certain that she was the last woman to be ...
Last year, the American Antiquarian Society received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support the reorganization, rehousing, and digitization of 655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people. The new digital resource Letters from Freedom provides additional context to the materials and to the stories of the people ...
As a cataloger at the American Antiquarian Society, one of my current projects involves updating bibliographic catalog records for American women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. AAS prioritizes cataloging for marginalized groups through the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) initiative, and I find it rewarding to contribute to a more inclusive and diverse ...
Publishers of amateur newspapers devoted a significant amount of their limited space to critiquing other amateur papers -- sometimes constructively, but often not. Two amateur publishers from Dassel, Minnesota, Allison C. Brokaw and Reno L. Hayford, grew tired of the critical nature of amateur journalism and wanted publishers to focus their efforts on literary pursuits. ...
Thanks to a generous grant from the Pine Tree Foundation of New York, newly digitized Hawaiian-language materials are now available through Printing in the Hawaiian Language, a digital resource on the American Antiquarian Society website. The resource contains a digital library of 115 digitized Hawaiian materials, as well as background information on the Hawaiian collection ...
Recently, I had the privilege of making a display that is now exhibited in the American Antiquarian Society reading room, as you enter through the main glass doors of Antiquarian Hall. My exhibit focuses on manumissions in 1800s America. Originally, I planned to highlight the freedom suit as a legal means of resistance to slavery. ...
Has bound with it: Alfred Ely, A Sermon, Occasioned by the Late Death of Mrs. Charlotte Sprague (Hartford, 1821) and Absalom Peters, Memoir of Mrs. Charlotte E. Sprague (New Haven, 1821). Although the original leather and gilt binding has been worn down by much handling over the years, this bespoke volume provides a physical tribute to ...
During my residency at the American Antiquarian Society as a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellow in the fall of 2021, the AAS acquired a letterbook from the New England Type and Stereotype Foundry. The letterbook is now transcribed and available for AAS researchers, offering much for scholars of nineteenth-century print culture, especially those ...
Now a ghost town, Granite, Montana, was once a thriving mining town after the discovery of silver in the 1870s. The Bi-Metallic Mining Company operated there from 1887 until 1893, when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act made the price of silver so low that the mines were abandoned. This album contains numerous photographs including cyanotypes, Kodak ...
This summer, I had the pleasure of curating a reading room display on the language of flowers. As a cataloger, much of my recent work has been focused on enhancing bibliographic records, but with spring and summer in full bloom outside my window, I found myself captivated by the beautiful illustrations featured in many books ...
As I work through cataloging the American Antiquarian Society’s collection of amateur newspapers, I’m often amused by both the content of the material and the stories of the people who published them. The Acorn (Catalog Record), published in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, by Fannie Hamilton, delights on both accounts. Hamilton published the first issue of the Acorn ...
This 1620 Mexican imprint – once in the library of AAS member and prominent Mexican bibliographer Joaquin García Icazbalceta (1825-1894) – arrived at AAS just in time to cause a stir among the students in the 2024 History of the Book in America summer seminar on multilingual cultures of print. Printed well before there was even ...
