News, events, website updates from AAS
Periodically, C-SPAN2 Book TV and C-SPAN3 American History TV profile regional American cities through a series they call C-SPAN Cities Tour. Working with their local cable partners, special C-SPAN production crews explore the literary life and history of these cities by interviewing local historians, librarians, authors, and civic leaders. Last Autumn C-SPAN visited Worcester and ...
Our newly released annual report covering September 1, 2014, through August 31, 2015, is now ready for perusal! It's been an exciting year, with wonderful new acquisitions, the development of digital initiatives, the addition of two multi-day summer workshops, and more. You can read the full issue here, or click the image below.
Every quarter at AAS we release a list of recent publications by those who have researched at the library as fellows, members, or readers. To see this list, as well as a list of works published from 2000-2014, please visit our recent scholarship page on the AAS website. If your book, article, or other achievement is not included, just let ...
!["The Improved and Illustrated Game of Dr. Busby." Salem, Mass.: Published by W. and S. B. Ives., [1843?].](https://pastispresent.org/wp-content/uploads/Dr.-Busby.jpg)
This past summer we completed work to make the Society’s collection of over four hundred games more accessible to our readers and the scholarly community. Christine Graham Ward, the Society’s Visual Materials Cataloger, created detailed records for each game in our General Catalog. These records include a brief description of each game, a tally of ...
The fall issue of our twice annual newsletter, the Almanac, is now available electronically! In addition to all of the usual items—upcoming public programs and conferences, book reviews, and other Society news—this issue has some great features: updates about the future of digital humanity projects at the Society reports about the acquisition of a unique set of daguerreotypes and ...
It seems as though many studies of James Fenimore Cooper begin on the defense. Mark Twain's severe treatment of Cooper in the 120-year-old essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" leaves many a poor Cooper critic to battle with Twain before easing into the comforts of Cooper. Never mind that Melville called him "our national novelist" or ...
In addition to the $1 million dollar gift to the Society from Jean McDonough last spring, we have this wonderful news to share about the extraordinary generosity of the McDonough family. We have shared the press release below. CONTACT: John F. Hill, Communications Specialist Office of City Manager Edward M. Augustus, Jr. hillj@worcesterma.gov, 508-799-1175 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 2, 2015 Myles & ...
Every quarter at AAS we release a list of recent publications by those who have researched at the library as fellows, members, or readers. To see this list, as well as a list of works published from 2000-2014, please visit our recent scholarship page on the AAS website. If your book, article, or other achievement is not included, just let ...
We recently hosted twenty-five educators who came to the Society from across the country to participate in a two-week Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Titled The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865, the program examined—through twenty-one seminar sessions and eighteen library workshops—how news was defined, reported, and disseminated ...
Policy changes frequently will fall under the un-glamorous category. But we are hoping that our newest one will fall under the hooray-for-AAS tally marking. When books have included images from our collection, we’ve been providing photographic reproductions and permission to use them in the form of a licensing agreement; I’ve signed a few (read: thousand) of ...
We are in the final days of the online portion of the Adopt-a-Book fundraiser before the night-of event on May 5. To encourage participation in the event, we’ve added a few more items to our online catalog. They highlight some vice up for adoption, as well as items in French, German, and Latin (oh my)! From ...
Patriots' Day offers us a chance to reflect on heroism, on sacrifices large and small, those historic and contemporary, and those made by Revolutionary soldiers and those by star football players. I am of course thinking of our own New England Patriots. One of their former stars showed kindness and concern for me in a ...
Although many think of public libraries when they hear National Library Week, we couldn’t resist celebrating our special collections library as well! Through social media we’ve made sure there have been plenty of pictures of old books and #shelfies, as usual, and our annual Adopt-a-Book event, which raises money for acquisitions, also launched this week. ...
This year the American Antiquarian Society will be holding its 8th annual Adopt-a-Book event on Tuesday, May 5, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. This fundraising event supports the library’s continued acquisitions of historic material and has been very successful in the past, with over $100,000 raised to date. The funds help curators buy more books, pamphlets, ...
We're finally starting to see some melting and hear some birds singing after this never-ending winter, which also means we're gearing up for the start of our Spring Public Program series! This series begins with newly published books about Lincoln, set to coincide with sesquitennial of the end of the Civil War and the 150th ...
