Past is Present

Marbled Madness!

Washington Irving, 1783-1859. Life of George Washington. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1859. This multivolume set has colorful marbled edges done with a wide-comb pattern. — **Washington Irving, 1783-1859. Life of George Washington. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1859.** This multivolume set has colorful marbled edges done with a wide-comb pattern.

Over the last couple years, the “MarbledMonday” hashtag has taken off on the AAS Instagram feed, becoming one of our most popular regular features (competing with other favorites like “Caturday” and “Frankenbooks”). Every Monday, we show off a striking example of what are the most colorful features on historical book bindings: their marbled papers, edges, and cloths. A recent photo of some rainbow-colored marbled edges received over 1,000 likes, placing it among the all-time most-liked posts on the AAS feed. We consistently see our IG followers excited by the vivid hues and complex patterns of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century marbling; we even hear from the talented artists who are marbling papers today. People have posted countless comments noting the beauty of marbled papers and expressing enthusiasm for the #MarbledMonday feature.

[Unused marbled sheets]. These sheets were marbled by artists at The Marbler’s Apprentice. (http://www.marblersapprentice.com/) — **[Unused marbled sheets].** These sheets were marbled by artists at The Marbler’s Apprentice.

But what has inspired our audience’s “marbled madness”—this fascination with an often-overlooked book art? A lot of it has to do with the aesthetic appeal of marbling, for sure. The intricate and varied patterns certainly catch the eye. But I think part of the attraction comes from the mystery of marbled papers, edges, and cloths. How could an artist, working in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, produce such vibrant and extraordinarily complicated designs, over and over again? These patterns have repeating elements that are remarkably precise and symmetrical: How was this done, we wonder, with old-fashioned tools? Even knowing the answer to this question, the art still seems somewhat like sorcery. A marbler throws chemicals and pigments into a bath, agitates and stirs the concoction with brushes and rakes, then places a piece of paper on the surface, which is promptly removed to reveal a stunning pattern on one side—marbling magic! Nineteenth-century observers frequently commented on the mystical qualities of the craft, which was only practiced by a relatively small number of artisans. In his 1855 book on the Harper & Brothers publishing house, Jacob Abbott declared marbling to be “one of the most curious processes to be seen in the whole [printing] establishment.” Today, just as in Abbott’s time, we find marbled paper to be “curious,” as the success of #MarbledMonday shows.

Jacob Abbott, 1803-1879. The Harper Establishment; or, How the Story Books Are Made. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855. In this engraving, a marbler sprinkles pigments onto his water bath. — **Jacob Abbott, 1803-1879. The Harper Establishment; or, How the Story Books Are Made. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.** In this engraving, a marbler sprinkles pigments onto his water bath.

Joseph-François Lafitau, 1681-1746. Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains: Comparées aux Mœurs des Premiers Temps. Paris: Saugrain l'aîné, 1724. This French curl pattern was marbled in Paris in the early eighteenth century. — **Joseph-François Lafitau, 1681-1746. Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains: Comparées aux Mœurs des Premiers Temps. Paris: Saugrain l’aîné, 1724.** This French curl pattern was marbled in Paris in the early eighteenth century.

The art of marbling paper originated in Asia—with the Japanese art of suminagashi and the Turkish ebrû form—and eventually made its way toward Europe around the time of the Renaissance. By the end of the seventeenth century, marbling was fairly well established in France and Germany; from this point on, Europeans no longer needed to rely on imports from Turkey for their supply of marbled papers. In these early years of European marbling, the patterned papers were used for both fancy book bindings and for everyday decorative purposes. In Germany especially, marbled papers were used to decorate walls and adorn cherished albums. By the middle of the eighteenth century, marbling had spread to almost all of Europe, Britain included. The English became deeply interested in the craft, and quickly developed a robust marbling industry. From Britain, marbled papers would make their way across the Atlantic to reach American shores. The earliest examples of American marbling can be traced to the 1760s, but the art form did not become an industry until the first half of the nineteenth century. For this reason, most of the marbled papers in the AAS collection are from the 1830s and beyond. There are a few notable exceptions, however, including pieces of Revolutionary currency that used marbling as an anti-counterfeiting measure—an innovation championed by none other than Ben Franklin.

[Continental currency]. Philadelphia: 1775. This early American currency includes a strip of wide-comb marbling as an anti-counterfeiting measure. — **[Continental currency]. Philadelphia: 1775.** This early American currency includes a strip of wide-comb marbling as an anti-counterfeiting measure.

A Pocket Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1794. Boston: T. & J. Fleet, 1793. Overmarbled sheets—with the original text showing through—cover the boards of this early American almanac. — **A Pocket Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1794. Boston: T. & J. Fleet, 1793.** Overmarbled sheets—with the original text showing through—cover the boards of this early American almanac.

In the early republic, resources were scarce and knowledge about non-essential crafts such as marbling was not widespread. There were very few American marblers at the turn of the nineteenth century, and those practicing the craft were forced to make do with less. Nowhere is this better illustrated than with the practice of “overmarbling,” a process that involved marbling over the printed text on discarded sheets. In the AAS collections there are a number of examples of early American overmarbling; after decades of fading, you can now see the text of the discarded sheets through the marbling. Using such thrifty and practical techniques, marblers in the early republic slowly but surely built up an industry. In the 1840s and ‘50s, American marbling finally reached its industrial age, and saw its previously steady growth explode. Many of the newly created publishing houses began using steam engines and other machines to speed up certain parts of the marbling process in the 1840s. In 1856, the publication of James B. Nicholson’s A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding allowed the craft to widen its reach across America, as the book’s detailed description of marbling processes was the first of its kind to be printed in the country. After these watershed events, marbled paper soon became a mainstay of American bookbinding. Most of the examples featured on the AAS Instagram feed come from this “Golden Age” of American marbling.

James B. Nicholson, 1820-1901. A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1856. Nicholson’s Manual includes samples of marbled paper throughout, done by Philadelphia marbler Charles Williams. This piece is a Turkish spot pattern, done with raked color veins. — **James B. Nicholson, 1820-1901. A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1856.** Nicholson’s Manual includes samples of marbled paper throughout, done by Philadelphia marbler Charles Williams. This piece is a Turkish spot pattern, done with raked color veins.

Emily C. Pearson, 1818-1900. Gutenberg, and the Art of Printing. Boston: Noyes, Holmes, 1871. The engraving here depicts the process of marbling book edges. — **Emily C. Pearson, 1818-1900. Gutenberg, and the Art of Printing. Boston: Noyes, Holmes, 1871.** The engraving here depicts the process of marbling book edges.

Even with help from machines, marbling was (and still is) a difficult and complex process, involving many hard-to-control factors. According to Abbott, a “good marbler” must have “excellent judgment and taste, as well as great skill.” The process starts with the placing of chemicals and pigments in a water bath, but the element of “great skill” comes into play when the artist begins to manipulate the floating pigments to create patterns. The marbler needs a deft hand and fine discernment in order to create something beautiful. Many patterns require a series of precise movements to be executed properly, and many also require the application of chemical dispersants at particular stages. It is certainly a lot to keep track of! When done right though, marbled paper and cloth can be truly remarkable, as fans of #MarbledMonday have long known. Here are some notable Instagram hits (and a few sneak peeks!), along with descriptions of the patterns on display:

Top row, left to right: Tiger eye pattern, New York, 1831; Romantic pattern, New York, 1860; Gloster pattern, Worcester, 1820; Shell pattern, circa 1807.
Middle row, left to right: Schrottel pattern, Albany, 1836; Spanish moiré with gold veins, Lowell, circa 1840; Marbled cloth binding, London, 1851; Zebra pattern, New York, 1854.
Bottom row, left to right: Edge marbled in shell pattern, Philadelphia, 1844; Stormont pattern, circa 1830; Serpentine combed pattern, Boston, 1865; Peacock pattern, Philadelphia, 1856.

New Online Exhibition: From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations

In addition to paging and returning collections materials, managing the desk schedule and the reference and reception staff, answering reference questions and compiling daily circulation statistics, my typical day as head of readers’ services usually involves meeting one or more researchers who are excited to arrive at Antiquarian Hall for the very first time. After informing new readers of our policies for handling rare materials and talking to them about how to use our My Web AAS online request system, I sometimes strike up conversations with them about whether they’ve been to New England, Massachusetts, or Worcester before. I can often suggest a good lunch spot or several places they should check out while they are in town. If we get to talking, they will often ask, “Are you from Worcester?” Sometimes I reply with a simple yes. Other times I’ll tell them that my family has been in Worcester for years—hundreds of years, in fact. I’ll tell them that I am part Nipmuc, and that Worcester is my ancestral home.

To be honest, though most of my family lives in Worcester, I’ve only been in town for about six years, when I started working at AAS. For the last two-and-a-half years while I’ve been working at the AAS reference desk, I’ve begun to explore my interest in Native history with a new excitement. I’ve had the opportunity to investigate our holdings of amazing sources relevant New England Native history and language and have had the chance to meet and speak with scholars and tribal authorities (and staff) who work in indigenous studies. Out of this interest and these interactions, the idea for the most recent online exhibition from AAS was born: From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations.

The online exhibition showcases roughly a dozen texts printed in several Native American languages, including Massachuset, Narraganset, and Wampanoag—all sublanguages of the larger Algonquian family of languages spoken by natives living along the east coast of North America and west to the Rocky Mountains. The books themselves tell their own stories. The grammars and dictionaries attempt to capture a spoken language and explore its meaning, pronunciation, and structure. A 1,200 page Bible printed in Algonquian was the largest printing project undertaken at the Cambridge press in the 1660s, when printing in America was still a fledgling enterprise. These imprints serve as physical reminders of the English colonists’ desire to Christianize Native Americans, but now their contemporary use turns this colonizing effort on its head. These texts are now actively being used by New England tribes to resurrect their languages—languages that in some cases have not been spoken for centuries.

IndianGrammar2 — Eliot, John. The Indian Grammar Begun: Or, An Essay to Bring the Indian Language into Rules, for the Help of such as Desire to Learn the Same, for the Furtherance of the Gospel among Them. Cambridge, Mass.: Printed by Marmaduke Johnson, 1666.

In addition to showcasing these rare and beautiful objects, the exhibition also includes short biographies of the men who worked to produce them. Often history remembers the colonists John Eliot, Roger Williams, and Samuel Green who translated and printed many of these texts, but leaves out the obvious: these men could not have learned a language so foreign to them well enough to translate and reproduce it in print without the help of those who spoke it as a first language. As such, the exhibition also includes short biographies of those Nipmuc, Narraganset, Wampanoag, Massachuset, and other natives without whom these texts could not have been produced.

I hope you enjoy scrolling through this newest exhibition!

Time Stands Still in Collection of Family Photographs

Recently AAS was delighted to receive as a gift a large collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts from the Pike and Wright families of northeastern Connecticut. The collection came in two segments, both the gift of Susan Pike Corcoran in honor of her Pike and Wright ancestors. Caches of family records are rich resources for scholars working in all manner of historical arenas, from economics to genealogical research to social history. The curatorial, cataloging, and volunteer teams processing this donation will be producing a series of blog posts over the next several weeks focused on the Pike-Wright donation. This is the first installment, which we hope will serve as a visual “How do ye do” for several of the people whose writing and livelihoods are represented in the gift.

Here in the Graphic Arts Department, we were thrilled that the boxes of Pike-Wright family papers, charts, ledgers, and books were accompanied by hundreds of family photographs, ranging in date from the 1840s to the 1920s. Most of the images, even those mounted in photo albums, were carefully annotated with sitters’ names and dates, as well as places, genealogical information, etc. In the early twentieth century, two groups of important early photographs had been taken from their cases by family members and mounted in frames (above). Because of the weight of the daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, the wooden frames were collapsing and each image had to be carefully removed and rehoused. These early photos capture several of the contributors to the Pike-Wright archive, including a 1/6^th plate daguerreotype of Nathan Staples Pike (1819-1857), a physician who practiced in New England from the 1840s until his death from tuberculosis in 1857 (left). Dr. Pike’s ledger books, medical school notebooks, and tools will be discussed in later blog posts. Here, the light-eyed doctor sits confidently before the photographer, likely in the mid-1840s, when daguerreotypy was still a relatively new invention. His younger brother, Thomas Olney Pike (1820-1861), also had a daguerreotype taken about the same time, wearing a fancy striped waistcoat and a stylish top hat (left). Blue eyes apparently ran in the family! Thomas moved away from the homestead in Killingly, Connecticut, after his 1850 marriage and settled in Johnston, Rhode Island, where he died at age 40.

The extensive family photographic archive includes multiple examples of portraits of the same person over time. There are several images of Laura Stone Pike (1838-1922), for example, who married the younger brother of Nathan and Thomas, George Washington Pike, a civil engineer. Laura attended Normal School in New Britain and received her teaching certificate. An undated (likely circa 1860) ambrotype of Laura shows her about age twenty-five with her short hair held back by a comb, seated before a painted backdrop in a photographer’s studio (right). There are many additional images of Laura, standing with groups of teachers at meetings, in photo studios, and posed in front of family homes. The last image of her in the collection is from the 1910’s and was taken in Wakefield, Massachusetts. The now gray-haired woman is shown seated in a wicker chair holding an open book. By placing all of these images of Laura Stone Pike next to each other, the viewer can watch her mature, see her social and family connections ebb and flow, and understand the importance of place to the woman who would become the matriarch of the family.

Indeed, there are many images of place, particularly the family homestead in Killingly, Connecticut, found in the photographic collections of the Pike-Wright papers. An 1896 photograph shows Lulu Wright (who married Laura and George’s son William Kinney Pike) standing with school children along a road in front of one of the local schools in town (left). Many photographs of the homestead and surrounding parts of Killingly are also included, with trim town houses at the town center and aged farmhouses, large barns, orchards, and stone walls out in the country. Each photo is carefully annotated, often with dates and specific buildings identified. An image of Four Corners in South Killingly (below) is inscribed, “I boarded in the house at right, 1896.”

Because the descendants of the Pike-Wright family were interested in their genealogy and actively maintained and expanded this important collection of papers and photographs, the material will add to our understanding of nineteenth-century life in New England in a very personal and direct way. While unpacking the photographic material, there was a lot of oohing and aahing over the quality of the early photographs, exclamations on the annotations identifying so many sitters, and delight in the repeated recognition of many members of the family over and over. Staff and volunteers processing the papers of Dr. Pike came into the graphic arts workroom to see what he looked like, exclaiming over those blue eyes and noting his obvious physical deterioration as his final illness approached. We have said it often enough, but it is true—a picture is worth a thousand words. When you have a substantial collection of pictures taken and saved over generations, they form their own story, the narrative of an expanding, complex web of family life, love, grief, and physicality that text alone cannot provide.

This collection is the gift of Susan Pike Corcoran in honor of her Pike and Wright ancestors. A special thank you to Daniel Gehnrich, who helped facilitate the Corcoran donation.

Combining History, Graphic Art, and Modern America in the Classroom

Recent researchers and other visitors to the American Antiquarian Society have had an opportunity to view a special exhibit: “From Frederick Douglass to Ferguson: Graphic Design Projects on Race in Modern America Inspired by the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.” This is the story of the origins of that exhibit as the result of collaborative efforts between the American Antiquarian Society and two professors from Assumption College: Carl Robert Keyes (History) (AAS member, 2015) and Lynn Simmons (Graphic Design).

For the 2015-16 academic year, we are teaching two linked courses that form the “Express Yourself: Visual Messages and Historical Narratives” learning community for first-year students at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. Students simultaneously enrolled in U.S. History to 1877 and Graphic Design 1 in the fall semester and continued in U.S. History, 1877-present and Graphic Design 2 in the spring.

Although the courses meet separately, we pursue common themes important to both historians and graphic designers, thus helping students to identify interdisciplinary connections between subjects they likely considered unrelated. Two questions have guided our learning community throughout both semesters: How do we use both images and text to understand the world around us? What can we learn about American culture by studying two different kinds of communication: graphic design and history?

Our learning community also gathers outside of class to participate in co-curricular programs that further underscore the connections between the content in the two courses. Recently, we visited Firefly Letterpress in Boston, where printer John Kristensen demonstrated how several historic presses operated before giving students an opportunity to gain some hands-on experience.

This broadside was one of the items the students viewed during their visit to AAS. "Now completed and for sale! An impartial and correct history of the vigilantes of Montana Territory!" Virginia City, Mont.: D.W. Tilton & Co., 1866. — This broadside was one of the items the students viewed during their visit to AAS. “Now completed and for sale! An impartial and correct history of the vigilantes of Montana Territory!” Virginia City, Mont.: D.W. Tilton & Co., 1866.

Last semester, we visited the American Antiquarian Society for a behind-the-scenes tour—including an examination of founder Isaiah Thomas’s eighteenth-century printing press—led by Kimberly Toney, head of readers’ services. We then gathered in the Council Room for a hands-on workshop with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic arts materials selected by Curator of Graphic Arts Lauren Hewes. Students spent approximately an hour comparing and contrasting broadsides, advertising ephemera, specimen books, and a variety of other items from the collections. Lauren Hewes, Kimberly Toney, and Marie Lamoreaux, the collections manager, all fielded questions and participated in discussions with our students.

We also viewed a first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave: Written by Himself (1845), which the students read and discussed as part of their history course. Each also composed an essay in which they tested the claim by historians and other scholars that the Narrative is not solely a work of African American history but rather a broader and more general view of nineteenth-century American history. In the process of reading, writing, and discussing, students interrogated broader histories of slavery and abolition as well as race relations in American history.

As a companion assignment, students pursued a project that combined images and text in the graphic design course. By its very nature visual communication in all its forms offers us an opportunity to take a look at ourselves and the world around us from a different perspective. There are many examples to draw from, such as an interpretation of nature in the form of landscape painting, the use of photography in studying and documenting the world around us, the construction of sculptural forms to sit in our interior and exterior landscapes, and the use of moving images and sound to make visual narratives. We are still influenced by the impact of the use of typography and photographs from the early-twentieth-century European avant garde movements. Additionally significant is the mid-twentieth-century collage and printmaking of popular visual culture and American abstract expressionism as we’ve moved into our digital age, where the influence and practice of graphic design is exploding with advances in technology. Visual communication is a major player in the construction of our expression, sense of reality, and communication.

Another example of an AAS collection item used as inspiration. "Cheap printing at the north-east corner of Calvert and Market Streets." Baltimore: Printed by B. Edes, between 1827 and 1831. — Another example of an AAS collection item used as inspiration. “Cheap printing at the north-east corner of Calvert and Market Streets.” Baltimore: Printed by B. Edes, between 1827 and 1831.

One of the most socially engaging types of visual communication is in the form of the poster through the use of typographic elements and images. As a vehicle for delivering messages and information, the poster has its roots in the broadsides of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which were mostly type-based, using large-sized type to draw the attention of people passing by in public spaces. Broadsides are generally printed on one side of a piece of paper and distributed for a variety of public and commercial announcements, as well as government notifications. Posters continue to be a widely effective use of communication for the graphic designer and illustrator. From advocacy of social and political causes to advertising, propaganda, event announcements, and self-expression, posters are a voice for public address.

A student poster designed by Suzanne Pepe

Through the pairing of our two courses, U.S. History to 1877 and Graphic Design 1, an opportunity to speak about contemporary issues through the visual messaging of the mid-1800s could not be ignored. As mentioned above, students read and wrote about Douglass’s Narrative for their history course. In keeping with our goal of presenting connections between visual messages and historical narratives, each student created a poster by appropriating the form for the poster from broadsides of the nineteenth century through visual composition, layout, and use of typography. The content of the poster referenced graphic arts materials from the AAS collections, contemporary news quotes, excerpts from Douglass’s Narrative, quotations from Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s article “The Worth of Black Men, from Slavery to Ferguson,” and/or the Black Lives Matter website describing the escalating violence and discrimination toward African Americans during the last few years.

In preparation for this assignment students spent time learning about the history and anatomy of typography, as well as a brief introduction to the history of movable type and poster culture. There was also discussion about the importance of appropriate research and audience/viewer considerations for graphic design/visual communication projects. Our visit to AAS in November gave the students a rich exposure to actual broadsides from the nineteenth century, which allowed them to pay close attention to details in the compositions and to make sketches prior to developing their own poster for this project. Choosing the appropriate typefaces and layout was critical to these posters evoking cues and connections, creating a visual historical bridge between the period of American history when slavery was legal and the recent rise in racial conflicts in the U.S.

Specimen book collage 2 — One of the students’ favorite items from AAS was this specimen book, used to sell type to printers. “Chromatic Specimens from the Wm. H. Page Wood Type Co.” Norwich, Conn., not before 1876.

In planning for our visit to the American Antiquarian Society, Lauren Hewes was aware of these complementary assignments—essay and poster—and selected graphic arts materials intended to inspire creativity as well as educate. In consultation with other staff, after the projects had been completed, she endorsed a Black History Month exhibit in the display cases in the reading room. For much of the month of February, all fourteen posters created by our students, each accompanied by an abstract written by its designer, have been on view. They have been joined by Douglass’s Narrative, open to the title page and accompanying frontispiece featuring an engraving of the author, one of the most influential Americans of the nineteenth century.

Student posters by Hope Sutton and Julie Carpino.

We very much appreciate everything that the American Antiquarian Society has done to make our exhibit possible. This has been a rewarding experience for us as instructors and an even more rewarding experience for our students.

Spring issue of the Almanac now available!

From "Guess Again or Easy Enigmas Puzzles, for Little Folks." Philadelphia: Morgan Yeager, ca 1824. Illustrations by William Charles. — From “Guess Again or Easy Enigmas & Puzzles, for Little Folks.” Philadelphia: Morgan Yeager, ca 1824. Illustrations by William Charles.

The spring issue of our twice annual newsletter, the Almanac, is now available online! Exciting public programs (a musical performance and the return of Nathaniel Philbrick among them), new online resources, and information about the 9th annual Adopt-a-Book fundraiser are all included. Feature pieces include:

a history of the Goddard-Daniels House
the recent acquisition of a wonderful collection of thirty-six picture books illustrated by the Scottish American engraver William Charles (1776-1820)
digital projects done in collaboration with college classes

Transcribing the War of 1812: AAS Collections in the Classroom

Associate Professor of History at Assumption College Carl Robert Keyes and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American history and digital humanities in the classroom.

About a year ago, AAS launched the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. Featuring 338 broadsides, 800 images, and many contextualizing essays, the site, we hoped, gave scholars and ballad enthusiasts plenty to explore. We wanted more, however! One thing that the project lacked was transcriptions of the ballads themselves. The early type does not lend itself to optical character recognition (OCR) or the machine-reading of the texts. The example below from Juxta Editions OCR of The American Patriot’s War Song: or an Appeal to Freemen demonstrates how inadequate machine-reading is for these early texts.

This meant that we needed real people to do the transcribing. Having worked together at the Digital Antiquarian Workshop and discussed some of these very types of issues around digitization and the archives, Molly and Carl saw an opportunity to collaborate. Carl was getting ready to teach an upper-level History course at Assumption College, “From Colonies to Nation: Topics in the History of the American Revolution and the Early Republic,” and together, Molly and Carl thought through how the transcriptions of the ballads might be incorporated. The most direct benefit of a transcribed text is that it is then keyword searchable. Carl explained to his students in the assignment, “your work transcribing a ballad will make that historical document much, much more accessible to other scholars and the general public who visit the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project online.”

Carl surveyed the collection of ballads in the collection and selected those that directly related to the War of 1812. In an effort to be as comprehensive as possible, he chose ballads from three categories: causes of the War of 1812, maritime battles on the Atlantic, and skirmishes in the North American interior (including campaigns against Canadian forces in the Great Lakes region). In addition to transcribing and tagging a ballad, each student researched and wrote an essay about the significance of the events depicted. In addition, they used Early American Newspapers to identify contemporary accounts of each incident. Eventually, these nineteenth-century newspaper accounts may be linked to the relevant ballads, further enhancing the site for visitors..

Molly had two goals for the transcription process: that the ballads could be easily transferred into XML files complete with TEI tags and that they could be doubly transcribed. TEI refers to the Textual Encoding Initiative, an international scholarly collaboration to produce encoding guidelines for the representation of texts in digital forms for optimal use in research, teaching, and preservation. AAS adopted TEI for the first time with its Just Teach One: Early African American Print project, and it is excited to continue its adherence to Guidelines for Scholarly Editions set out by the Modern Language Association. Molly decided to use an open, web-based tool called T-Pen that allows for transcribing and tagging of digital images. Though created for medieval manuscripts, T-Pen could work for the broadside ballads project as well (with a little tweaking, of course). Molly created the tags that the students would use as simple buttons:

When students highlighted a word during their transcribing process, they would then select the relevant button, and the following tags would be created around a person or place name, a change in the font, a title, a paragraph, or a word that is unclear.

The students were broken into teams, so each broadside had two students independently transcribing the same ballad. When they were finished, Molly collated the two transcriptions to decide on any differences. Molly then placed a TEI-header and validated each XML file, and they are now available in a fully searchable, TEI-encoded document. At the bottom of the metadata associated with each ballad, a user will now be given the option to either view the transcription or to download the XML file with TEI encoding. The display is thanks to the interoperability of TEI Boilerplate with Omeka, the platform for the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project. The TEI-tagging is fairly basic, and it is our hope that users will download what we have done and expand on it for their own purposes. The following broadsides now contain these additional features:

Molly visited Carl’s class both at the start of the semester and at the close of it. In her first visit, she explained the importance of this work in terms of the ballads’ accessibility. She also encouraged the students to consider the relationship between their work as historians and their work as transcribers and researchers in digital environments. In addition to the more formal analysis of the ballads that the students wrote, they also composed reflections on their experiences.

“By doing this kind of project,” one student wrote, “I feel like I am not doing something in the vacuum of college.…This outside connection gave it more meaning.” Several students indicated that sense of meaning derived from performing a service that “will help other scholars and students of History find the sources they need for their own work.” In addition, students recognized they further developed fundamental skills in the process of completing the project. For instance, one noted that XML tagging “helped me to get better at reading early American documents.”

The students verbalized many of these excellent insights in their final class meeting with Molly, and they also offered incredibly helpful feedback on the tagging system she had set-up. Not only have these Assumption students begun the transcription process, but they have also helped considerably to improve the project overall. Some might call such efforts “crowd sourcing,” but the spirit that emerged from this collaboration would much more aptly be described as “community sourcing.”

AAS hopes that this is the start of a number of public transcription projects, both of the ballads and of other collections, to come. As one student discovered, “I wrote it off as something only professional historians could do, but with a little training and practice, everyone is capable of transcribing.” Stay tuned!

Now In Print from the AAS Community

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 us know if you’d like to see it there!

BOOKS

Green, Sharony. Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015.

Manion, Jen. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. (Peterson Fellow, 2005-2006; AAS-NEH Fellow, 2012-2013)

Mulford, Carla. Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. (AAS member)

Raphael, Ray and Marie Raphael. The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began. New York: The New Press, 2015. (Ray Raphael: AAS member)

Ratcliffe, Donald. The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824’s Five-Horse Race. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. (Haven Fellow, 1983-1984; RA, 1998-1999; AAS member)

ARTICLES

Goodman, Glenda, guest editor. American Music 33.3 (2015). (Peterson Fellow, 2010-2011)

Gordon, Adam. “Blithedale Revised: Nathaniel Hawthorne, E.P. Whipple, and the Author-Critic Feedback Loop.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 41.2 (2015): 26-47. (Hench Fellow, 2011-2012)

Gray, Myron. “Renaud de Chateaudun’s ‘Queen of France’ and the Royalist Lament in Federal Philadelphia: A Study in Atlantic Musical Politics.” American Music 33.3 (2015): 283-306. (Peterson Fellow, 2012-2013)

Hench, John. “The Publishers Who Lunch: The Social Networking of American Book Publishers.” Book History 18 (2015): 273-301. (AAS staff)

Luskey, Brian. “Chasing Capital in Hard Times: Monroe Edwards, Slavery, and Sovereignty in the Panicked Atlantic,” Early American Studies 14.1 (2016): 82-113. (Peterson Fellow, 2003-2004; Tracey Fellow, 2012-2013)

Moody, Joycelyn and Eric Gardner, guest editors. American Periodicals 25 (2015). (Moody: Peterson Fellow, 2002-2003; AAS member)

Rusert, Britt. “Disappointment in the Archives of Black Freedom.” Social Text 33 (2015): 19-33. (Peterson Fellow, 2011-2012)

Schinto, Jean. “Good Fellows: The Walpole Society.” Maine Antique Digest 2016. (Baron Fellow, 2015)

Winship, Michael. “Directories of American Bookstores to 1950: Addenda & Corrigenda.” Studies in Bibliography 59 (2016): 319-322. (Peterson Fellow, 1989-1990; AAS-NEH Fellow, 1993-1994; AAS-NEH Fellow, 2009-2010; AAS member)

AWARDS

Mary Fuhrer was awarded the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize for her book A Crisis of Community: Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848. (Last Fellow, 2013-2014; AAS member)

The Thoreau Household in 1840

We recently announced a new web resource consisting of four journals kept by Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. between 1837 and 1840, when Sewall was between nine and twelve years old. Of particular interest is a journal kept in March and April 1840, when the boy was a student at John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and a boarder in the Thoreau household.

In the opening entry in his Concord journal, written a few days after his arrival, Edmund wrote, “There are three other boys who board here and go to the school – Charles Jesse & Joseph. Charles came up with me in the stage.” Charles was Charles Cummings, later a silversmith. We also know that Jesse’s surname was Harding, but we know nothing more about him or Joseph.

The presence of four active boys in the house led to predictable consequences. In the entry quoted above, Edmund continues:

This was a day of misfortunes. At noon Charles & I fired upon a party of boys going by in the road. A skirmish ensued and we being inferior in force although Joseph and Jesse had joined us were driven into the house except Charles who was chased away by the boys. We boys in the house being desirous of seeing the marauders ran into the entry where there was an open window and (as we afterwards found) a pudding cooling to look out of the window. None of us saw the pudding till it was lying bottom upwards on the ground and each declared that he was not conscious of knocking it over….Just before supper Joseph who was leaning the back of his chair against the wall slipped down hurt him self some and the chair more for one of the upright rods at the back was started. I believe nobody knows of this but us boys and I hope it will not be discovered before its time. In the evening a small bottle of blue ink was upset on the table cloth.

The U.S. census of 1840, taken nominally on June 1, listed a total of twelve people in John Thoreau Sr.’s house. Only heads of households were listed by name in the census, with other persons enumerated by only gender, race, and age range. However, it is possible to identify seven of the individuals by name. The nucleus of the family consisted of John and Cynthia Thoreau and their sons John and Henry. The other residents included Cynthia’s sister Louisa Dunbar, and Edmund’s aunt Prudence Ward and her mother Prudence (Bird) Ward.[1] There are also three boys aged between ten and fifteen; these were undoubtedly students at the Thoreau brothers’ school and one of them may have been Edmund. The census also lists two “free colored” women aged between ten and twenty-four in the Thoreau household. These were likely servants, perhaps two of the twenty-three African Americans listed as residents of Concord in the 1840 census, and as we shall see they were no longer in the Thoreau household by October.

A newly available letter provides some details about servants and boarders in the Thoreau household in this period. On October 8, 1840, Prudence wrote to her sister Caroline:

Page of letter from Prudence Ward to Caroline Ward Sewall, October 8 1840

Some change has taken place in our family—besides the coming & going of girls, & the doing without, as at this present— Mrs. T. has consented to take Mrs. Brown to board, & she is expected shortly, & she will also take a Dr. & Mrs. Prescott— an old gentleman and his wife, that is if they assent to terms— then we are to have no boys. Mrs. T required a q[uarte]r of a dollar more for their board if they stayed this winter in view of being obliged to keep an extra fire for them— The parents are not willing for this, & another place has been found for them. — At present Jessey & two little brothers are here, the latter because of their mother’s sickness— Jessey will leave when his brothers go away. He would like best to remain – & could stay— as one could be accommodated at the parlor fire— but the family where the others have gone choose to have three or none. [2]

All of this activity and “coming & going” appears to have been a source of stress for Henry. While Edmund was in Concord, Henry wrote in his journal “How shall I help myself? By withdrawing into the garret, and associating with spiders and mice—determining to meet myself face to face sooner or later….The most positive life that history notices has been a constant retiring out of life—a wiping ones’ hands of it—seeing how mean it is, and having nothing to do with it.”[3]

Readers, if you can identify Edmund’s fellow boarders Joseph or Jesse, or Mrs. Brown and Dr. and Mrs. Prescott, please let us know!

[1] Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 21-22.

[2] Prudence Ward to Caroline Ward Sewall, October 8 1840, Sewall Family Papers, AAS.

[3] Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. John C. Broderick et al., vol. 1, 1837-1841 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 121 (entry for April 8, 1840).

A New “Portrait” of Henry David Thoreau?

Carte-de-visite of Samuel Rouse's 1854 portrait of Henry. From the AAS cartes-de-visite collection. — Carte-de-visite of Samuel Rowse’s 1854 portrait of Henry. From the AAS cartes-de-visite collection.

Last week we announced a new AAS web resource consisting of four journals kept by Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. between 1837 and 1840, plus an introductory essay. The journals include a description of Edmund’s life in Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1840 while he was attending John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and boarding in the Thoreau household.

Although both of the Thoreau brothers appear in the Concord portion of Edmund’s journals, John is mentionedmuch more frequently than Henry. It was John who took Edmund boating, walking, studying birds, and shooting, whereas Henry’s involvement with the boys was generally only in the classroom. Horace Hosmer, who was a student at the Academy at the same time as Edmund, later recalled, “John was a genuine athlete. He would throw somersaults, wrestle with the boys, jump high, walk on his hands, laugh, shout, and roll over on the grass in mock fights at recess, but in the school room the discipline was almost military, but no boy was ever struck or scolded so that any other scholar could hear what was said.”[1] Conversely Hosmer thought that “as a teacher Henry was ‘merciless’ i. e. the thing to be done must be done correctly. He was rigidly exacting…he was hated.”[2]

The boys’ dislike for Henry resulted in at least one prank, when the boys cut the schoolhouse bell’s rope and rang the bell from the belfry while Henry was walking to the school.[3] In 1886, Concord native John Shepard Keyes recalled that “the boys made much fun of [Henry]. A picture of a booby in an almanac [in 1839] resembled him so much that it was cut out and shown round among his scholars as a likeness! and it did resemble him more than most caricatures.”[4] A search in AAS’s preeminent collection of American almanacs quickly yielded the image in question, in The Old American Comic Almanac: 1839 (Boston: S. N. Dickinson, 1838).[5] The image is in a piece called “Ornithology,” which depicts four men as birds (see below).

Left: "Ornithology" — Left: Full page with “Ornithology” piece. Right: Detail of the “Booby” image.

While not actually a portrait of Thoreau, the 1839 “booby” image in the Old American Comic Almanac was a sufficiently good likeness that Concord Academy students could see their teacher in it. This image is some fifteen years earlier than the earliest known portrait of Thoreau, the drawing made by Samuel W. Rouse in 1854, and thus a significant piece of visual evidence regarding Henry Thoreau as a young man.

Next week: What was the Thoreau household like in 1840 when Edmund boarded there as a student?

[1] Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones, ed. George Hendrick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 15.
[2] Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus, 131.
[3] Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 86.
[4] “John Shepard Keyes on Thoreau,” Thoreau Society Bulletin 103, Spring 1968, 2.
[5] I found the “booby” image in this way in 2002 while in the early stages of researching the Thoreau brothers’ Concord Academy for background information for Edmund’s journals. While preparing this blog post I discovered that the image had been found independently by Mark Gallagher, editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin, and published in the Summer 2015 issue of the Bulletin (Mark Gallagher, “The Identification of Thoreau’s ‘Booby,’” Thoreau Society Bulletin, 290 (Summer 2015): 6-7.)

New Web Resource: The Journals of Edmund Q. Sewall Jr., 1837-1840

Thoreau scholars have long been aware of the journal kept in Concord, Massachusetts, during a period of seven weeks in 1840 when twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. was attending John and Henry David Thoreau’s Concord Academy and boarding in the Thoreau household. One reason Edmund’s journal is of interest is that it contains one of the most detailed surviving contemporary accounts of the school then being run by the young Thoreau brothers. Another reason is that a few months after Edmund’s time at the Concord Academy, first John and then Henry proposed unsuccessfully to Edmund’s eighteen-year-old sister Ellen.

While in Concord Edmund went for walks with the Thoreau brothers, and he was also taken to musical performances and lectures. On March 20, 1840 he wrote, “Went to a lecture from Mr Emerson in the evening. It was on Literature. I was not at all interested. He is a tall man with piercing blue eyes. One of his ideas was that everyone should think for themselves.”

Edmund’s manuscript journal of 1840 was given to the American Antiquarian Society in 1945 but only recently has it become possible to present this diary alongside the three earlier journals Edmund kept between 1837 and 1839 mostly detailing his home life in Scituate, Massachusetts. Two of them are the recent gifts of Edmund’s great grandson Quincy S. Abbot; the other is reproduced courtesy of the Thoreau Society. Together these diaries offer a boy’s eye view of what it was like to grow up in a social circle of New England’s progressive intellectuals and reformers.

The new resource contains images and complete annotated transcriptions of all four of Edmund’s journals, plus three essays he wrote while a student at Concord Academy. Also included is an illustrated introduction by Thomas Knoles, Marcus A. McCorison Librarian and Curator of Manuscripts at AAS.

Next week we’ll explore the journals of Edmund Quincy Sewall Jr. further in Part 2: A New “Portrait” of Henry David Thoreau?

The Acquisitions Table: William H. Bryant, Letter, 1858

William H. Bryant, Letter, 1858.

This entertaining letter between friends was written from Boston by William H. Bryant to his friend Nathaniel in 1858. The letter is self-confessed by the author to be of little significance: “As I have a little spare time I thought I would improve it by writing you. Do be sure news are not very plenty.” Bryant goes on to recount recent social events, including a wedding and a concert, and reports that his boot and shoe business is dull. What is most striking about this seemingly ordinary letter are Bryant’s illustrations and comics. Bryant drew a rather risqué caricature of the bride and groom on the front of the letter, and the entire back page of the letter is filled with two comic scenes. One shows a man asking a shop girl for tobacco in an elaborate manner at J. J. Barrows’s dry good’ store. While again probably killing time, as he was doing with his letter writing, Bryant was amused by his own illustrations, asking Nathaniel, “If you can without any trouble, I wish you would show Bugbee these pictures.”

Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print: AAS Collections meet DH Pedagogy

Assistant Professor of English at University of Maryland Baltimore County Lindsay DiCuirci and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American labor history and digital humanities in the classroom.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the latest Omeka exhibition from AAS: Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print. We hope that you will find this site another innovative and exciting glimpse into our collections. The production of this site differed from our previous model, in which AAS staff served as exhibition curators. This time, AAS partnered with Lindsay’s advanced-level English seminar Women and American Periodicals at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the students themselves curated the exhibition. The students were given some basic Omeka instruction and the topic to investigate: depictions of young women working in factories in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers. Through screencasts and videoconferencing with Molly, the students were also given a crash-course in metadata and how the rich metadata in the AAS Catalog could be transformed into their item descriptions. The students then researched the topic in various online and print sources, came up with an organizing schema for their exhibition, conferred on site design, selected the final pieces, wrote labels, and reflected on their work.

Student process:

Lindsay crafted an assignment for the students that was at once detailed (in terms of expectations and deadlines) and at the same time gave them a lot of room for research discoveries and project building. We aimed to ensure the students’ full immersion into the curatorial process. Within a single semester, we wanted the students to experience the winnowing process inherent in any curatorial work, as well as the creativity afforded by and constraints imposed from a given content design platform. The students were told that the exhibition would draw upon the AAS holdings to highlight the powerful and often controversial presence of the female mill worker in American periodicals and newspapers. Ranging from romantic and whimsical depictions of the “factory girl” to stunning critiques of poor conditions, writings about women’s labor in America’s mills were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century magazines. Women of leisure were frequently confronted with stories, images, or representations of women at work. This juxtaposition, Lindsay explained to them, makes the study of mill girls in American periodicals and newspapers particularly fraught. The exhibition, the students were told, aimed to include a broad range of forms and genres, from editorials to poems to short stories to engravings, and a comprehensive range of periodicals from niche industry newspapers to national literary reviews.

Students were assigned weekly tasks across the fifteen-week semester, broken up into three major phases: initial archival research; selection and organization; writing and design. First, students focused on finding pieces relevant to the exhibition and generated a spreadsheet of over one hundred items.

From this large collection, they began to winnow the items and noted thematic patterns emerging in the materials. These patterns—culture, conditions, and activism—became the three main exhibits and students signed up to serve on an exhibit team. After Ken Albers visited UMBC’s campus to train the class on using Omeka, students began to refine their exhibit holdings and input them into a shared metadata spreadsheet. This became an essential tool through which the class and Molly could communicate about exhibition items. As students found primary sources on various digital databases, Molly would then locate the print source at AAS and request photography. Though at times students ran into roadblocks—items that were unavailable or didn’t fit the exhibition criteria—they continuously went back into the archive to find appropriate and accessible items for inclusion. In the last third of the semester, students drafted exhibition labels and, in teams, composed mini-essays for the exhibit landing pages. They collaborated on their writing and used opportunities both in and out class to make revisions. With the help of the AAS staff members who are also curating online Omeka exhibitions, Molly and Lindsay also developed a “Dos” and “Don’ts” handout to aid students in writing for digital platforms. Much of the design and page layout was finalized in the last two weeks of the semester. One of the graduate students, Ging Shamberger-Sandosky, designed the masthead image and a design sub-group made some layout and color scheme decisions using the CSS editor. Students were then asked to reflect on the process and identify their specific contributions in a three-page analytical reflection essay, submitted at the last class meeting.

The result:

The results, we hope you will find, display the students’ impressive curatorial skill. After much debate and reflection, the students structured the topic around three major categories: mill girl culture, working conditions, and activism and reform. Each of these “exhibits” has subcategories with items from well-known nineteenth-century periodicals such as the Lowell Offering, but also lesser known ones such as the Man and the Southern Rose. The students also looked at the artistic expression of the workers and about their conditions: in ballads, poems, and songs. Though the exhibition highlights only primary sources, the students certainly read a lot of secondary material to prepare their labels. These and other relevant sources can be found in the “Further Reading” section of the exhibition.

Students found this project both challenging and rewarding. Flexibility and problem solving proved to be two of the most essential skills in building the exhibition. The students almost universally remarked that the group collaboration was a highlight of the project. They also became more comfortable with the trial-and-error nature of this project as the semester wore on, learning to make adjustments and executive decisions and to rely on their peers’ knowledge when needed. Every student found his or her niche, whether in the area of research or writing, organization or design. One student remarked that working on the exhibit had taught her “more about research, group work, and productivity than any other experience thus far during [her] undergraduate career.” Students also observed that they had not known of the mill girls prior to their work on this project; their sense of the industrial revolution and early labor movements was vague. Many students observed similarities between laborers’ activism in the nineteenth century and today; for one student, the readings made her recognize that “working conditions have improved, but in other ways, we still need to change the way a woman’s work is valued and compensated.” This exhibition paints a multi-faceted picture of the mill girls, the sentimental subject of poems and songs and the agitators in a burgeoning reform movement.

Out In the Open: Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art

L. Prang & Co., “Plate XVI. Transmutation Splash Vase.”

In December 2014, AAS member Joanne S. Gill gave the Society a copy of Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art, published in 1897. The work, in four volumes, describes the collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics collected by William T. Walters of Baltimore, now housed along with some of the original Prang watercolors in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. Though many institutions have copies of Oriental Ceramic Art, as far as we have been able to tell, our new resource in the Louis Prang online exhibition shows together, for the first time online, all 116 color plates included in the set.

L. Prang & Co., “Plate XXXI. Green and Yellow Vase.”

Oriental Ceramic Art came about as Baltimore businessman William T. Walters searched for an art house to recreate his collection of Asian ceramics in printed form. After years of disappointment in the European printers, Walters searched back in the United States for a printer. In 1889 he commissioned Louis Prang and Company to reproduce his physical collection as chromolithographs after Prang showed him samples of what the work would look like. Prang sent British ceramic painters James Callowhill and his sons James and Percy to Walter’s house in Baltimore to paint original watercolors that would be used by the chromists in Boston to reproduce them as chromolithographs, sometimes using as many as forty stones, or colors. After more than eight years (and Walters’ death in 1894), the set, along with text by Dr. Stephen W. Bushnell and 437 black and white lithographs of the rest of Walter’s collection, was ready to be published. Walters had given Prang $500,000 to produce this work, and only 500 copies were made, at a price of $500 per set, meaning only half of the production costs were recouped in sales. Prang considered this work the pinnacle of his career, and retired from the printing business in 1897.

L. Prang & Co., “CX. Sake-bottle and Censer of Hirado Blue and White.”

The Acquisitions Table: Lilies from Lebanon

Miss Graham, Lilies from Lebanon. New York: J. C. Riker, 1849.

Striped cloth bindings are fairly rare, and this is a magnificent example, especially given the fact that it is a children’s book (children tended to be harder on their books than adults). This is a collection of Old Testament stories told in the guise of conversations between parents and their children. New York publisher John C. Riker specialized in issuing handsome albums and annuals that had beautiful bindings like this one.

C-SPAN’s profile of Worcester is now available online!

The C-SPAN crew filming AAS President Ellen Dunlap.

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 then broadcast nationally the programs they created during the weekend of December 19 and 20, 2015. These segments are now available for viewing on their website.

In addition to showcasing Worcester, the American Antiquarian Society was featured on both channels. For C-SPAN Book TV the crew created a segment on the Society that featured our president Ellen Dunlap, our librarian and curator of manuscripts, Thomas Knoles, and the Society’s curator of books, Elizabeth Pope. Each of these individuals shared treasures from the AAS collections, many with important connections to Worcester, while also describing the history and mission of the organization. C-SPAN Book TV also created another segment about AAS’s digitization initiatives and our growing involvement with the field of digital humanities. This segment featured Molly O’Hagan Hardy, the Society’s digital humanities curator, as well as various staff from Readex/ Microprint Corporation, one of our digital partners.

Additionally, C-SPAN 3 American History TV profiled various local stories with connections to national history, including a segment on the role the region played in starting the American Revolution that featured AAS Director of Outreach Jim Moran. AAS materials relating to the abolition of slavery and the early women’s rights movement were also featured in a segment on Abby Kelley Foster.