News, events, website updates from AAS
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 ...
While most library collections are printed or written on paper, hundreds of historic objects at the American Antiquarian Society -- including broadsides, children's books, and ribbon badges -- were printed onto cloth. Often produced as keepsakes, souvenirs, commemorative objects, or teaching tools, cloth printings in the AAS collection include texts and images printed onto silk, ...
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 ...
Tom Thumb takes center stage as both a sword-wielding hero and object of royal curiosity in this early nineteenth-century picture book. Although this rhymed tale is set in the early Medieval court of King Arthur, the ladies and gentlemen of the court are dressed in Regency Era attire that would have been familiar to the ...
At least these two issues of the Roll Call newspaper from the Civil War were edited by “Three Ladies. Two of the War, and One of the Treasury Departments.” There is only one other known issue of this title, which may have begun in February 1864. It was apparently published during one of the many ...
Almanacs, pregnancy, and dodging fines are all contained in this one-page testimony to the Court of General Sessions of Massachusetts from 1710. Unmarried Ruth Copeland became pregnant with a child by a man named Samuel Hayden, who promised to marry her after finding out she was to have his child. Samuel subsequently rescinded his offer after ...
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 ...
The thoroughbred racehorse Longfellow was known as the “king of the turf” and won nearly every contest he ran in the 1870s. The horse was born in 1867 in Kentucky and began racing as a four-year-old. His jockey was the young John Samples (d. 1912) who was born to enslaved parents in Midway, Kentucky, around ...
