Past is Present

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

Cohen, Michael David. Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. (AAS Graphic Arts intern, 2004)

Fisher, Julie A. and David Silverman. Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. (Silverman: Mellon Post-Dissertation Fellow, 2001-2002; ASECS Fellow, 2005-2006; ASECS Fellow, 2010-2011; AAS member)

Furstenberg, Francois. When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation. New York: Penguin, 2014. (AAS member)

Greenspan, Ezra. William Wells Brown: An African American Life. New York: Norton, 2014. (Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence, 2009-2010; AAS member)

Pastore, Christopher. Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. (Peterson Fellow, 2010-2011)

Schoolman, Martha. Abolitionist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. (Peterson Fellow, 2006-2007)

Sivils, Matthew Wynn. American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. (Schiller Fellow, 2012-2013)

Smith, Ryan K. Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Wisecup, Kelly. “Good News from New England” by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. (Peterson Fellow, 2014-2015)

ARTICLES

Anishanslin, Zara. “Producing Empire: The British Empire in Theory and Practice.” In The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Expansion, Conflict, and the Struggle for a Continent, edited by Andrew Shankman. New York: Routledge, 2014. (CHAViC Fellow, 2013-2014)

Anthony, David. “Fantasies of Conversion: The Sensational Jewess in Poe and Hawthorne’s America.” American Literary History 26.3 (2014): 431-461. (Peterson Fellow, 1996-1997; AAS-NEMLA Fellow, 2000-2001; AAS-NEMLA, 2005-2006; AAS-NEH Fellow, 2012-2013)

Bahar, Matthew. “People of the Dawn, People of the Door: Indian Pirates and the Violent Theft of an Atlantic World.” Journal of American History 101.2 (2014): 401-426. (Legacy Fellow, 2010-2011)

Buinicki, Martin T. “The ‘need of means additional’: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Fundraising.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 31.4 (2014): 135-157.

Cohen, Joanna. “Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1800-1850.” Winterthur Portfolio 48 (2014): 163-190. (Last Fellow, 2007-2008)

Crabtree, Sarah. “Navigating Mobility: Gender, Class, and Space at Sea, 1760-1810.” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2014): 89-106. (ASECS Fellow, 2013-2014)

Fagal, Andrew. “American Arms Manufacturing and the Onset of the War of 1812.” New England Quarterly 87.3 (2014): 526-537. (Peterson Fellow, 2013-2014)

Hardy, Molly O’Hagan. “Figures of Authorship in Mathew Carey’s Transatlantic Yellow Fever Pamphlets, 1793-1795.” Book History 17 (2014): 221-249. (NeMLA Fellow, 2012-2013; AAS staff)

Keyes, Carl. “History Prints, Newspaper Advertisements, and Cultivating Citizen Consumers: Patriotism and Partisanship in Marketing Campaigns in the Era of Revolution.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 24.2 (2014): 145-185.

Keyes, Carl. “Introduction: Advertising in American Periodicals before Madison Avenue.” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 24.2 (2014): 105-109.

LaFleur, Greta. “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America.” Early American Studies 12.3 (2014). (Peterson Fellow, 2013-2014)

Rockman, Seth. “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” Journal of the Early Republic 34.3 (2014): 439-466. (AAS-NEH Fellow, 2006-2007; AAS member)

Trainor, Sean. “Fair Bosom/Black Beard: Facial Hair, Gender Determination, and the Strange Career of Madame Clofullia, ‘Bearded Lady’.” Early American Studies 12.3 (2014): 548-575. (Peterson Fellow, 2013-2014)

Wood, Kirsten. “‘Join with Heart and Soul and Voice’: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic.” Journal of American History 119.4 (2014): 1083-1116.

AWARDS

John Demos’s book The Heathen School made the longlist for the 2014 National Book Award. (Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence, 2012; AAS member)

Ellen Gruber Garvey received the Highly Commended Award of the DeLong Book History Prize at the 2014 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing for her 2013 book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. (Peterson Fellow, 2008-2009)

Britt Rusert received finalist mention for the 2014 Constance Rourke Prize by the American Studies Association for her 2013 American Quarterly essay, “Delany’s Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation.” (2011-2012 Peterson Fellow)

Fourteen Yards of Cranberries and a Paroquet: An 1870s Christmas Story

Last month we took a look at how young Marion “Minnie” Boyd Allen spent Thanksgiving Day in 1875 and 1876 (rousing renditions of popular plays and too much food were all the rage). But Minnie didn’t contain her holiday exuberance to Thanksgiving; she had plenty left over for Christmas.

Minnie says very little about the lead-up to Christmas in 1875 when she’s thirteen years old, except to note pretty frequently—beginning in November—that she’s making Christmas presents. This activity seems to keep her in the spirit throughout the season, but most of her excitement about Christmas is packed into two days. On Christmas Eve she “Did not go to school in forenoon,” but rather “The house is turned up side down, getting ready for tomorrow.” Unlike today when most people decorate for Christmas as soon as Thanksgiving is over (or earlier), most of the Allens’ decorating took place immediately before Christmas. “Grandma and I strung over fourteen yards of cranberries to trim the billiard room with….[Brother] Will and I put up the tree and hung evergreen. In evening Will and I (seated on the billiard table) filled boxes and cornicopias [sic] with candy.”

Minnie’s entry for Christmas Day makes clear exactly what kind of presents she had been making for the last six weeks: “Will fixed all the pictures that were to be given away, up in his room, and later in the day everybody came in to see the ‘Art gallery.’” Minnie, who would grow up to be a successful painter, was an enterprising artist even at thirteen. Not only did she spend hours painting and drawing these gifts for others, but she then curated them into her own art exhibit. (For more on Minnie’s background, see the previous post.)

And just like Thanksgiving, Minnie made sure to capture the day in a pen-and-ink drawing at the top of her entry (above). Her drawing of a Christmas tree surrounded by presents (which appears to be placed in a bay window, common to the brownstones of the South End of Boston where Minnie lived) seems to sum up the day nicely, as after “our usual Christmas dinner (and we children had to wait till we were [half] famished before we got ours, for nearly everybody was helped first)…we heard the Christmas-tree-bell ring. We raced up stairs and soon Santa Claus answered our knocks at the door. We all went in and began to undo our presents.” Among her presents were “the Rocky Mountain series, three packs of cards, mittens, a ring, a little stuffed paroquet [an old spelling of parakeet] and so many other things that I cannot tell them. Almost everybody went away, after we had a dance, and a reading from Mr. Horace Lunt.” The entire day is strongly reminiscent of the opening of The Nutcracker, with its beautiful tree, presents for all of the children, and dancing by the guests, although the ballet was not produced until 1892. (It also leads to questions about just when these familiar Christmas traditions began, many of which are answered in a blog post from last year about the history of Santa and the Christmas tree.)

219310_0002 — From “The Night Before Christmas,” McLoughlin Bros., 1899.

After this lavish description of 1875, Minnie’s entries for Christmas 1876 are rather disappointing. The 23^rd of December found Minnie working hard all day, as “There are so many things to ‘finish up’ the last minute. Will and I did our presents together in evening. I made twenty-four of mine myself.” She then “Went down town with Will to see the evergreens.” Christmas Eve was a Sunday that year, so after church and Sunday School, she drew two more pictures for friends, decorated the tree, noted the arrival of a cousin, and then abruptly ends her diary: “I must finish up my journal now and commence a new one. I have had this a long time and am sorry to leave it. Good-bye!”

In a way, although the reader may feel cheated by missing out on one of Minnie’s detailed holiday descriptions, it seems suiting that the diary would end here. Having begun it when she was twelve, at fourteen years old Minnie is now on the eve of adulthood. Her infectious enthusiasm for celebrating holidays will begin the next diary, which she may have received as a Christmas present and couldn’t wait to use (there are quite a few blank pages at the back of this one). It’s hard to begrudge her growing up, but the rich, amusing, and rare way in which she recorded her adolescent years leaves one wanting to read more.

The People’s Choice: Prang Christmas Card Contests

Starting in 1880, the chromolithographer Louis Prang held an annual design contest for the selection of his color-printed Christmas cards. Prang, who is often called “The Father of the American Christmas Card,” helped to popularize the practice of sending cards in the United States after he made an 1864 visit to Europe. While there he studied the latest color printing techniques in Germany, and when he returned to Boston he began printing elaborately designed, multi-colored “art cards.” Although holiday cards had been around in Europe since the 1840s, it was Prang’s efforts, starting around 1873, that really got the practice going in America.

The design contests were a huge success and were widely commented on in the American press. There were cash prizes for the winning designs and public exhibitions of the contestants’ original works (which Prang purchased). Prang was a master marketer, soliciting designs from prominent American artists both inside the academy and out. His salesmen promoted the winning cards to retailers, advertisements were taken out in newspapers and magazines, and American customers responded with purchases. The Society’s Prang archive holds many examples of these prize-winning cards, including the printer’s progressive proof book for the 1881 1^st prize winner, Elihu Vedder’s young woman with ribbons (see above right and below).

The final Prang Christmas card contest was held in 1884, with cards produced for the 1885 season. By this point, Prang was running a giant Christmas contest publicity machine. First he announced the group of artists that he was planning to solicit for designs. There were 22 artists for the 1884 contest, including the painter Thomas Moran, printmaker Frederick Freer, and artist J. Alden Weir. There were also artists who had won previous years, or had produced other non-holiday work for Louis Prang & Co. Next, the 22 submitted designs were exhibited to the public at a gallery in New York in November of 1884 to great fanfare in the press. The judges were all well-known New York stationers and dealers in Christmas cards (a savvy move on Prang’s part to ingratiate his designs with the men who sold them). The public found this fitting. One reporter noted, “This mode of deciding a very delicate question seemed to promise by its simplicity the results to be desired, as the dealers might well be considered good representatives of the popular feeling in regard to those tokens of friendship and good-will which custom has now elevated to a recognized institution at Christmas-tide.” Selections were made and then announced by the judges. There were four cash prizes in the 1884 contest, with the first prize of $1,000 going to Ohio artist C. D. Weldon for his image of a young girl dreaming in front of a fireplace left).

But wait, Prang was not done yet! The 22 paintings were then packed up and shipped to Boston, with the four winners and all the others prominently featured at the gallery of Noyes & Blakeslee on Tremont Street for the 1884 Christmas holiday. At this point, Prang opened it up to the public, allowing Boston residents to vote on another winner, creating what became known as “The Boston Card.” The top four remained in place, but visitors to the gallery were encouraged to vote for their favorite from the remaining 18 paintings. In the 1884 contest, that honor went to Miss Lizbeth B. Humphrey’s design showing three children taking bows before a homemade curtain (see below).

Humphrey was born in 1841 in Millbury, Massachusetts. In 1849, when she was eight years old, her parents moved to the Hopedale Community, a religion-based utopian compound founded by Adin Ballou in 1842. According to Ballou, Hopedale stood for “temperance, abolitionism, woman’s rights, spiritualism and education.” Although the community disbanded before 1860, Lizbeth Humphrey spent most of her childhood living communally in Worcester County. After the Civil War, she became a very successful illustrator, creating images for children’s books and for the illustrated press. She won second and third prize in the 1881 Prang Christmas card contest and her work was well known to Bostonians.

The Boston Card win stands out among the other Prang prize card designs, however, mainly because of its modern tone. Most of the winning cards show snowy landscapes, idealized children, magical scenes, nativities, and angels. This card is different. There is a narrative that has to be filled in by the viewer, who would immediately recognize the scene, often played out in middle class parlors, of children “putting on a show” (a recent blog post talks about one such play put on in a Boston parlor on Thanksgiving in 1875). One reviewer wrote, “The design is illustrative entirely of the modern Christmas. …While all the figures are admirable drawn, the [smallest] child in pose, coloring, and expression deserves to be recognized as, it were aptly called, an idyllic inspiration. Every spectator is delighted with it, from whatever point of view it is regarded, as a poem of childhood or as a gem of art.” Humphrey used real children as her models, drawing on kids in her Milford neighborhood as Norman Rockwell would do a generation later. The three children on The Boston Card have been identified as Arthur Draper, Marjorie Humphrey (the artist’s adopted younger sister) and Annie Knight. They take their bows in front of a homemade curtain and banner, with a bouquet and a sprig of holly at their feet.

Humphrey continued to design for Prang, creating birthday and Easter cards, prints and other colorful images, usually of modern children, until at least 1898, but 1884 was the final season of the holiday card contest at Prang’s. By 1890, Prang stopped producing cards as the flood of inexpensive colored cards coming from Europe and other American printers was too great to overcome, even with clever contests and press attention. Nonetheless, we can largely thank Prang for creating a strong tradition that has managed to survive even today’s electronic-centered world!

An Old Vial of Tea with a Priceless Story: The Destruction of the Tea, December 16, 1773

Sometimes the most unassuming objects can take on powerful meaning. A small, sealed glass bottle of tea, displayed at the American Antiquarian Society, is a case in point. Donated in 1840 by the Reverend Thaddeus M. Harris (1768-1842), a Unitarian clergyman in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and a member of AAS, the tea is one of the most compelling objects for visitors touring the library. Less than five inches high, the mold-blown, pale aqua bottle filled with tea leaves is wrapped at its mouth with twill tape and sealed with red sealing wax. Its attached paper label reads: “Tea Thrown into Boston Harbor Dec. 16, 1773.”

The role its donor played in gathering the leaves the morning after the critical confrontation on December 16^th is explained in an adjacent, typed label. Harris would have been just five years old when he reportedly gathered the tea leaves carried by the tide to Dorchester Neck Flats. Perhaps he witnessed the event from the shores on the evening prior. Thousands had gathered to watch the fifty men loosely disguised as Native Americans breaking open with hatchets the wooden chests of tea and throwing the tea bales overboard.

tea label — Former label for AAS’s bottle of tea written by AAS Librarian Samuel Foster Haven in the 1860s.

A former label for the tea (now archived and shown here to the right) written in the hand of AAS librarian Samuel Foster Haven in the 1860s (as deduced by the expert eye of Curator of Manuscripts Tom Knoles) may have replaced Harris’s original label. Its text is remarkably similar to that of the label signed by Harris on another bottle of tea he gave to the Massachusetts Historical Society where he served as librarian until his death (see below). The AAS label (recently reunited by AAS conservators—the two fragments had years ago been filed in separate locations in the library’s holdings) reads: “Tea that was gathered on the shore at Dorchester neck the morning after the destruction of the three cargos. Dec. 17, 1773. From Thaddeus Mason Harris, DD.” Certainly without the story connecting the tea to this iconic event in America’s history the object would not hold the same cultural power. As an eyewitness to what was generally called the destruction of the tea, this ordinary object has been imbued with extraordinary meaning through the act of display. Harris knew that what was becoming known as the Boston Tea Party by the time he gifted the tea was being embraced by a new generation of Americans, and he wanted to make sure his story was part of a constructed public memory of the conflict.

The bottle of tea Harris gave to the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). Photo courtesy of MHS. — The bottle of tea Harris gave to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (See http://masshist.org/database/231 for more information.)

Harris was familiar with the value of objects that had a “peculiar claim to preservation,” as he described the Mather family coat of arms and whetstone, objects donated to AAS by Hannah Crocker Mather, to whom Harris wrote a letter of acknowledgment in 1814 as the Society’s corresponding secretary. Perhaps Harris saw the donation as a way to make his own claim to preservation, but he also knew that the Tea Party had gained new interest among Americans as death notices for Tea Party participants had become more frequent in the press.

Having spent many years preparing a manuscript of “the first peopling of America,” Harris considered himself a historian and frequently commemorated historic events in his sermons. By the 1830s he had gained a reputation as the source of knowledge about the Revolution, particularly as it pertained to Dorchester Neck. “Tell me what the Dorchester people did in the revolutionary struggle—and particularly South Boston. . . Anecdotes illustrative of the character or doing of men, whose deeds have not been recorded, will be particularly valuable,” wrote Dr. Samuel Van Crowninshield Smith, who was convinced that Harris was the only person from whom he could obtain these facts as he prepared for his July 4, 1835, address for South Boston, the principal celebration for the city. This was the year that George Robert Twelves Hewes, celebrated by the Boston press as a rare survivor of the Tea Party, traveled to Boston in his late nineties to participate in Fourth of July celebrations. The recognition of Hewes as a survivor of the Tea Party may have inspired for many the preservation of physical relics. Harris was not the only one to place bottles of tea in institutions to preserve a connection to this historic event; examples survive at The Old State House and the Peabody Essex Museum, among others. A huckster in Chicago even put himself and a vial of tea on exhibit as survivors of the Tea Party—and charged admission!

The lack of physical trauma to the bottle of tea lends itself well to the perception of the Tea Party as a non-violent act, though the destruction that led to the tea’s salvage bears resemblance to the acts of mob violence surrounding this event. A political cartoon published in New York by H.R. Robinson circa 1837 (a copy of a cartoon published in London in 1774) shows the Bostonians “paying” the exciseman, who is already tarred and feathered and is being forced to drink tea as the Tea Party takes place in the background (right). Numerous images of the destruction of the tea were reprinted or created during the 1830s and 40s when public interest in the event was revived. One of the most familiar is Nathaniel’s Currier’s 1846 lithograph, shown below.

No blood was shed (or at least no one died) on December 16, 1773, but from that rebellious act a few relics survive as remembrance of this iconic event. For Harris, the tea thrown into Boston Harbor seems to have signified an act of patriotic rebellion and a reminder of how fragile, like the ephemeral tea itself, “peace” was. It could be harbored within a glass bottle, but that too could break. Some during Harris’s lifetime saw the event as destructive and lawless, but by the time Harris donated his tea it had become an event to commemorate as a cornerstone of the Revolution.

If the tea leaves were indeed salvaged by the young Harris, he apparently kept them until close to the end of his life when the veil of secrecy surrounding the destruction of the tea had been lifted and the event had become romanticized as an act of national patriotism. Harris’s manuscript on the first peopling of America remained unpublished at the end of his life, but his story as it relates to this signature event is remembered through his decision to place the encapsulated tea in two revered institutions for safekeeping and memory-making well into the future.

Editor’s note (3/2/2018): Since this post was written, further research and discussion has illuminated the fact that, although the twentieth-century exhibit label accompanying the tea says that Harris gathered the tea on Dorchester Neck himself, the remaining textual evidence never actually states that. Samuel Foster Haven’s note uses the passive voice, simply stating that it “was gathered,” and it came to AAS “from” Harris, but it never says that Harris was the one to gather it. Furthermore, Harris was actually living in Charlestown at the time and later moved to Dorchester. It seems more likely that one of Harris’s Parishioners gathered the tea and later gave it to him once he had earned a reputation as a local Revolutionary War historian. Likewise, the bottle post-dates the event by several decades, suggesting that Harris bottled it for display purposes. These corrections are intended to further ground the story of the tea and its history as a commemorative object, but in no way prove or disprove its authenticity.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Archives

“All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know.”
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“Archive” has become an incredibly capacious word. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the word’s meaning and level of precision it describes greatly depend on the context in which it is deployed. Practitioners trained in library information science (LIS) usually reserve the word to refer to institutional records. In this context, AAS President Ellen S. Dunlap has been known to remark that AAS in fact only holds one archive: that of the AAS institutional records. This might confound some who refer to the total holdings of AAS (or any other special collections library) as an archive, thinking that anything in special collections (and I am using “special collections” to mean non-circulating print and manuscript materials) is an archive, or perhaps that anything that is not in a codex is an archive. One reason that I find the definition that Dunlap and other LIS practitioners have in mind useful is that it helps to distinguish between collections that are vetted for content worth keeping and those that are preserved in full. An archivist’s job, in this context, is not only to inventory materials to create finding aids and catalog records, but it is also to winnow: to sort through the copious correspondence, records, etc. of an institution and decide what is wheat and what is chaff. Archival “appraisal” in this context does not mean determining how much an object or a group of objects are worth in the monetary sense, but rather whether they should be preserved. It is worth knowing, therefore, when one approaches such a collection if it is in fact an archive in this sense, if it has been winnowed or if it is being preserved in tact, just as it was acquired.

In Archive Fever (1994), Jacques Derrida very much has this institutional dimension of archives on his mind. “A science of the archive,” he says, ”must include the theory of this institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it.” It is Derrida’s explication of the word and the “notion” of the archive through Freudian psychoanalysis that has secured this lecture’s place as a watershed moment in the theorization of archives. The word then became a signifier in new ways. For humanities scholars, archive might now refer to the historical record, to any and all things preserved, to non-things that undergo a sort of process of preservation (I’m thinking here of what Ann Cvetkovich calls for in her seminal work An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), in which she takes her cues very much from Freud and Derrida), to objects in closed stacks, and to institutions that contain such objects.

I write less to nail down a definition and to delimit the meaning of the word than to begin to map the word’s capaciousness. Even when we mean archive in a specific sense, a meaning of which we are certain, we have no assurance that our interlocutors will take the term to signify the same exact thing. The scale of the term and the processes that might define it as such have been lost, and some might argue that without such precision the word is now useless. In other words, if what is signified by the word comes to include too much, then might the word lose its usefulness? If any object or collection of objects can be an archive, then is anything really still an archive in a meaningful way?

I end where I began then: with Raymond Carver on love. I wonder if we might say the same about archives, that we know that archives have to do with memory and that which we can know about those memories (what Derrida calls “impressions”), but that it constantly behooves us to define what we mean when we use these terms. To further riff on Carver’s title then, we might need to point out that which the “what” of our talking signifies when we talk about archives. This act of definition is more imperative than ever as scholars trained in the humanities and those trained in library science are increasingly working together on digital humanities projects and initiatives. Such collaboration facilitates the collapse of disciplinary boundaries in new and exciting ways, but we all risk talking past each other if we do not take time to define our terms and to know how others might think about them differently.

The Acquisitions Table: A Complete Treatise on the Mare and Foal

Mitchell, Conrad. A Complete Treatise on the Mare and Foal, at the Time of Delivery, with Illustrations. Middleburg, Pa.:Volksfreund, print., 1869.

AAS member David Doret spoke at the Fall 2013 annual meeting about his strategy of acquiring en masse later nineteenth-century titles, which do not command a premium in the rare book market, to fill in gaps in AAS’s holdings. Proving his point that this is an area where donors and dealers can make a real impact on AAS collections, Doret and his wife Linda Mitchell gave AAS over 100 such books – and a full 80% of these turned out to be wants!

One highlight from the gift was the 6 ½ inch orange pamphlet described here. In its first few months at AAS, it has already been used by a fellow working on the treatment of animals in nineteenth-century America. Of particular interest to AAS, though, is its publication history and extremely low survival rate. We were able to track down only one other copy of this pamphlet –the deposit copy at the Library of Congress (although there is also one copy of a different edition at the University of Virginia). Prior to receiving this gift, the only specimens of printing from Middleburg, Pennsylvania, at AAS were a handful of newspaper issues. In fact it was the office of one of those newspapers that printed this pamphlet (the Middleburg newspaper Volksfreund was published until 1869).

Billed as a guide for horse midwifery, the treatise also covers cows and calves, as well as the sexually transmitted diseases of stallion and mare, and also diarrhea and costiveness in colts. At the very end there are even hints about sheep and about fattening hogs. Mitchell’s introduction, dated July 1869, New Berlin, Pennsylvania, claims: “Not a single engraving, illustrating this subject has ever been handed to the public, and very little has been written on the treatment of the mare and the foal at the time of delivery… At the earnest request of numerous dealers in horses, I was induced in the Spring of 1869, to offer this work to the public, for the benefit of the farmer and breeder, and in mercy to the mare and foal.”

Big Data in Early America: Bibliometrics and The North American Imprints Program (NAIP)

In recent years and in a variety of different ways, librarians are considering how different methodologies brought to bear on historical inquiry might shift their practices. Recent examples include Meg Phillips’s post in which she asks whether distant reading practices should inform archival appraisal practices to support more distant reading. Doing so would mean that archivists would still appraise, but “at a different level of granularity.” Catalogers have also been asking themselves how the uses of online public access catalogs (OPACs) are changing. The work of digital humanists has also in part sparked such questions. The innovative work of Head of Collection Information Services at the Folger Library, Erin Blake, and Curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center, Mitch Fraas, model what we might do with machine-readable cataloging (MARC) records. Humanists’ ability and desire to work with large data sets means that the systems in which that data are generated are being considered anew.

For early American bibliometrics, The North American Imprints Program (NAIP), which is part of our General Catalog, is the place scholars will turn for distant reading and big data, as it contains records for United States imprints published from the beginning of American printing in 1639 through the centennial of American independence in 1876. For 35 years, this deep cataloging work has progressed in a series of phases, funded by generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Most of NAIP is best understood as a union catalog because it does not only include records for imprints held at AAS, but prior to 1801, it seeks to be a comprehensive catalog for early American imprints by also including imprints held at other libraries. Our catalogers are currently at work on the 1801-1820 segment of the file, which likewise includes entries for titles held at AAS and at other libraries.

In other words, NAIP is the equivalent of the English Short Title Catalog (and AAS has contributed mightily to the ESTC since its inception) for North American imprints. Both of these composite catalogs have amazing potential to serve the work of digital humanities, as they can, to some extent, be understood as large-scale datasets related to both the people and the products of the book trade in the English speaking world up to 1800. Such work should not be undertaken without a healthy amount of skepticism and caution, however, because catalogs were not originally conceived for these purposes, but instead are now being used for such bibliometrics. Scholars such as Stephen Karian (see The Age of Johnson 21 (2011): 283-297) have pointed out the limitation of using the ESTC for such purposes, and NAIP too has been the subject of debates when used as a dataset rather than as a catalog.

In his “Note on Statistics” in the first volume of The History of the Book in America, editor Hugh Amory offers a cautionary note on extracting such conclusions from NAIP. The graphs in this appendix are generated from statistics pulled from NAIP, and Amory warns that because “NAIP was never intended to provide reliable and useful statistics of printing or publication…our statistics may be a better measure of modern American library economy, collection policies, and cataloguing practices than of books.” Amory cites a number of reasons why he ultimately agrees with Thomas Tanselle that “though the data of such union catalogs may give some ‘suggestive’ measures of relationships, their absolute value is of little worth.” Among these is the fact that a single book may have more than one record and one record might cover more than one book. In addition, “any consistent treatment of books and ephemera is impractical, given the haphazard formation of the library collections on which NAIP is based.” I read Amory’s comments less as critical of NAIP than cautious about using NAIP, or any catalog for that matter, in a way that was not what it was intended for. Such catalogs were constructed for the purpose of recording a library’s holdings, and when we use them to derive statistics, we will encounter inconsistencies that result not from the catalog’s failings, but from its construction with another aim in mind.

And yet, might statistical analysis derived from catalogs still be meaningful? Editor of volume two of the same series Robert Gross thinks so. He offers a different perspective on NAIP: “Thanks to a sophisticated classification of imprints that goes beyond the standard record…and identifies items by genre, series, illustrator, printer, bookseller, publisher, place, date, and language of publication, the [NAIP] catalog allows us to trace the volume and distribution of printed works over time and space and to gauge the relative importance of different types and their makers in the total output.” Gross admits that such tracing and gauging can be more accurate in certain decades than in others, but he still presents a much more optimistic view of the value of such statistical analysis than Amory, of using the catalog as a dataset from which bibliometrics can be extracted.

My purpose here is not to adjudicate, but to point out that the uses of catalogs are changing. As humanists develop appetites for and abilities to process large data sets, we are putting new demands on catalogs and the records they contain. The catalog records holdings of material objects, but they also reflect the ways in which these objects exist within “library economy, collection policies, and cataloguing practices,” to return to Amory. Under the sagacity and innovation of Carl Stahmer, Benjamin Pauley, and others, the ESTC is leading the way in designing a union catalog for the twenty-first century, and we at AAS are watching their work closely.

A Nineteenth-Century Tween’s Thanksgiving, 1875-1876

“Went to school in forenoon for the last time. Vacation! Vacation!! no school for three months,” begins the diary of twelve-year-old Marion (“Minnie”) Boyd Allen on June 15, 1875. This first entry—one which we would expect to find in a twelve-year-old’s diary now as then—is the perfect opening to a volume that proves to be as fascinating for its mundaneness as for its extraordinary in-depth look into the everyday life of what we now call a “tween” in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Minnie was born in Boston on October 23, 1862, to Stillman Boyd Allen (1830-1891), a lawyer, and his wife, Harriet Smith (Seaward) Allen (1831-1922). The Allens lived in the South End of Boston, which in 1875 was nearing the end of its heyday as a fashionable precursor to the Back Bay neighborhood that was then being built. Census records indicate that the Allens were well off, her father’s house being estimated at $50,000 and his personal property at $450,000 in 1870. Her diary paints a vivid picture of her comfortable upper-middle-class childhood, full of playdates with friends; games of croquet, billiards, and pitch; summers in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee; and frequent trips out of the city to “Hillside,” most likely her grandparents Seawards’ place in Melrose, Massachusetts, where she climbed trees, jumped rope, and put on plays.

This last activity, which was common among the middle class of the period, was a particular favorite of Minnie’s for Thanksgiving celebrations. On Thanksgiving Day that November, Minnie—with the help of some cousins and her brother, Will, who was seven years her senior and a student at Harvard—presented a performance of “Cinderella” (with a script she adapted herself) to her gathered family. She and Will spent the morning setting up the stage, making the curtain out of some sheets and sewing “keys on the back for rings and our strings broke twice before our curtain would pull up and down.” She then had “some trouble getting the prince, fairy godmother, and Arabella (alias Bertie, Katie and Will) ready,” but “At last all was ready.”

A version of Cinderella by Lydia L. A. Very, published in 1863, probably by L. Prang & Co. This is one of many versions circulating in the era.

Minnie goes on to describe the plot of the play, the outlines of which remain unfailingly familiar to us today, and which Minnie would have known through the many iterations circulating the children’s literature market of her day:

I sat crying, by the fireplace, and Will commenced pulling up the curtain; he got it up two inches when,—the string broke. The proud sisters came in, as soon as the curtain was fixed, and scolded Cinderella for some time; then they go to the ball. After they had gone out the godmother came out on the stage and after sending Cinderella for a pumpkin, changes her rags and pumpkin into ball-dress and coach. One time as Will was raising the curtain, the fireplace tipped over and the candles nearly set fire to Grandma’s shawl. The rest of the play went off nicely and our spectators were much pleased.

Other than that pesky curtain that just wouldn’t seem to work properly and almost set grandma on fire, the play was a rousing success.

Accompanying this thorough description of Thanksgiving is a pen drawing that features a small, cooked turkey, a slice of pie, and what look like some fruits or vegetables (below). This small drawing, while cute and quite good for a thirteen-year-old, does not convey the true depths of Minnie’s talents. It is in fact a childhood doodle of one who would grow up to become quite a renowned portrait and landscape painter. In 1902, at the age of forty, Minnie entered the Boston Museum School, where she studied oil and watercolor painting under Frank W. Benson and Edmund Tarbell. In her sixties, she headed out West, where she painted the Rockies and the Grand Canyon. Her work was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Academy of Design in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Design in Philadelphia, and the Art Institute in Chicago, among other venues. Knowing the end of her story, these drawings in her diary, which she did for many holidays, take on an entirely new meaning.

Before becoming a professional artist, however, Minnie was in many ways a typical tween girl. The beginning of Minnie’s Thanksgiving the following year in 1876 sounds very familiar to our own. She “Got up at half past six and crimped my hair.” Dinner was served at 1 o’clock, at which “I don’t believe I ever ate so much at one time in my life.” But whereas our gluttonous dinners are bookended by parades of giant balloons and football games today, theirs was followed by an elaborate performance of “Mrs. Jarley’s Wax-works.”

A combination of tableaux vivant and monologues, “Mrs. Jarley’s Wax-works” was a take-off on a minor character in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop named Mrs. Jarley, who is the mistress of a waxworks show and helps Nell and her grandfather. One of the most popular renditions of the spinoff play was Mrs. Jarley’s Far-Famed Collection of Waxworks (1873), arranged by George Bradford Bartlett, a contemporary Concordian of Louisa May Alcott’s with whom she participated in amateur theatricals. Bartlett’s arrangement was often used to put on charitable fundraising events, and it’s very possible that Minnie saw it performed or read about it and now wished to recreate it.

Minnie’s performance of the play called on the talents of three generations:

Mrs. Jarley (alias Mamma) was truly magnificent in a dress with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and an enormous bonnet. Will was George. The first scene represented was “a villain disarmed by a smile.” Horace with a red table-cloth thrown over his shoulders, was the Villain. I was the Smile. How I ever kept my countenance I don’t see. I did it though. Then followed “Maid of Athens,” “Fat boy,”…“Indian pursueing [sic] the girl,” “Bo Peep” and the “Man who tickled his wife to death.” The crowning act of all however was “Jack Spratt and his wife.” Grandpa and Grandma took these parts beautifully and caused us much fun.

"Portrait of a Woman in a Pink Dress." Painted by Marion ("Minnie") Boyd Allen in 1916. Image from Wikimedia Commons. — “Portrait of a Woman in a Pink Dress,” 1916. An example of Minnie’s work as an artist in her later years. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

All in all, Minnie’s entry gives the sense of a loving family that’s game for anything, humoring the whims of the children and relishing the chance to dress-up and perform. (The questionable titles of some of these tableaux are another thing.)

And therein lay the magic I find in Minnie’s diary. Through her childish schemes, emotions, and recording of her daily activities, she makes her world come alive in an amazingly relatable way. Perhaps this is a consequence of having myself kept a thorough diary at this age, which, while painful to reread the awkwardness at times, I cherish. Or maybe it’s because Minnie’s upper-crust upbringing in the late nineteenth century reminds me of my first American Girl doll, Samantha, whose stories revolve around her strict grandmother’s Victorian mansion and summers on a lake. (Although set in 1904, Samantha’s fictional world bears a strong resemblance to Minnie’s real one of thirty years earlier.)

An entry from the summer of 1876 with a friend's name redacted. — An entry from the summer of 1876 with a friend’s name redacted.

Or possibly it’s as simple as Minnie representing so many universals of girlhood. She concludes this Thanksgiving entry by writing that “After supper went over to Grandma Allen’s and had a pleasant evening. Slept with Annie. We went to bed at eight and to sleep at half past one.” In another instance, she wrote about a friend making “a peculiar remark to me in the evening,” but carefully cut out the friend’s name at a later date, leaving us to wonder who this “Miss” is.

Visiting multiple family houses on holidays, having sleepovers with friends (in her case a cousin) at which you stay up all night talking, and writing about disagreements with friends only to worry about someone reading it later—these are clear-cut memories of my own childhood. As was jumping rope until dark, climbing trees, and playing pitch. But I’ve never performed a play on Thanksgiving—perhaps it’s time to rethink that.

We’ll revisit Minnie around Christmastime, with more descriptions of lavish celebrations and drawings of decorations.

The Acquisitions Table: The Southern Pictorial Primer

The Southern Pictorial Primer. Richmond, Va.: West & Johnston, 1864.

We are always on the lookout for Confederate imprints, and through the generous book scouting of AAS member Rich West, we were alerted to the eBay presence of this copy of The Southern Pictorial Primer. It was published by West & Johnston, a firm which also issued Edward Boykin’s The Boys’ and Girls’ Stories of the War (ca. 1863-1865), and Brown and Arthur (an abridgment of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days by “a mother”). Although most of the reading lessons on its poorly printed pages are fairly common, it does sport this wood engraving of the Confederate flag, with the ironic lines, “Forever float that standard sheet, Where breathes the foe but falls before us! With Freedom’s Soil beneath our feet, and Freedom’s Banner streaming o’er us!”

New Acquisitions: Early Bookplates

The American Antiquarian Society has an extensive collection of pre-1800 American bookplates, with representative examples engraved by famous patriots like Paul Revere, or commissioned by founding fathers such as George Washington (left). AAS founder, Isaiah Thomas, had two different bookplates made by Revere and AAS, of course, has several examples of each ( below). These objects are elegant and intimate reminders of the private libraries formed in the colonies and the young nation, and mesh well with the Society’s focus on the history of the book in America.

The earliest bookplate in the collection dates from 1642. This plate for Steven Day (below) has been the object of study by bookplate historians for decades and is considered by many to be the first bookplate printed in North America. The Society’s entire bookplate collection includes just over 41,000 examples from 1642 on up to about 1930, but the pre-1800 era is an important focus for the institution.

The Society’s bookplate collection was started in 1915 by the Reverend Herbert F. Lombard and relies heavily on Charles Dexter Allen’s seminal work American Book-plates: A Guide to their Study with Examples, first published in 1894. I knew the collection was astonishingly good, but two recent acquisitions have underscored just how strong it is. Last quarter a generous donor sent us a listing of over 100 bookplates in his collection that he wanted to donate to the Society. He asked me to check the list for duplication and let him know which plates we lacked. There was exactly one, yes that is right, one, pre-1800 plate that we needed, out of the dozens of early plates on his list. We are very pleased to add the armorial bookplate for George Livius, 1790, listed as number 506 by Allen (see right).

A month later, I was at a book fair where a dealer had generously set aside an album of pre-1800 bookplates for me to see. I took quick photographs of each page in the album (thank you iPhone!) and checked them against our holdings. Again, out of about thirty beautiful early plates, we lacked just one. This engraved bookplate was issued as a blank for gentlemen to use by filling in their name in manuscript. Allen, who amusingly terms this a plate for “promiscuous use,” lists the design under the name of Jacob Brown, as that is the copy he saw and recorded in his bibliography. Our plate is filled out for a N.B. Baldwin, but features the same reclining man reading on a sofa, a scene engraved by Peter Rushton Maverick (1755-1811) who was at work in New York and is well-represented in the Society’s print and ephemera collections.

And so the hunt continues for any other pre-1800 bookplates not already in the Society’s collection. If you have one, let us know! It is always a pleasure to check, as it requires looking through numerous volumes of beautiful, intricate bookplates, all tidily organized by last name. Far from an onerous task, believe me!

The Acquisitions Table: Newell Family Papers

Newell Family Papers, 1817-1925.

Robert Ralsten Newell (1843 – 1883) left Harvard College in 1863 to join the Union Army as second lieutenant for the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first northern regiment of African American soldiers. He was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant, then captain. He was discharged in 1865, returned to Harvard to complete his law degree, and practiced law in Boston. Robert’s sister Jane Hancox Newell (1857-1930) attended Radcliffe College and published a two-volume text book, as well as a volume of poetry. This collection of family papers primarily includes letters written to and by the two siblings, but also features correspondence among other family members as well, including other siblings, parents, and children. The letters exchanged among multiple generations of family members discuss the war, family matters, education, missionary work, and travels to Asia.

Mocked by its own title.

One feature that makes working at the American Antiquarian Society a joy is the number of resources available at our fingertips. Our reading room abounds in reference books and bibliographies. Our stacks are filled with county and local histories, city directories, genealogical publications, and other publications. We have access to numerous online databases. When an unusual imprint or unrecorded publication arrives, we are able to find out some information about the publication, publisher or printer.

Then there are the rare times when we are flummoxed.

At a recent ephemera fair at Boxborough, Massachusetts, a dealer sold us some issues of The Sucker, published in Belleville, St. Clair County, Illinois in 1843. They are small pieces (7 ½” x 5”), crudely printed. Under the masthead is the cry, “Give me Liberty, or Give me Death.” Two of the pieces are complete and have as the editor “Devil & Co.” There is one fragment dated July 29, 1843, that has P.F. Coghlan & W. Orr as editors. Some of the content is political, poking fun at candidates. There are some pretty good jokes among the issues. For example:

‘My dear,’ said a gentleman to a lady whom he thought to have married, ‘do you wish to make a fool of me.’
‘No,’ replied the lady, ‘Nature has saved me that trouble.’

Spunky. – If a man is rude to a lady in Pittsburg, she smacks his mouth with her hand. If he is civil, she gives the smack with her pouters. Sensible and spirited.

One of the scraps has two crude woodcuts; one of a donkey and the other of a rooster. For some reason, one page is filled with nothing but stock illustrations, as if the editor ran out of things to write and used them to fill up a page (below right).

Only one other library—the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois—has any issues of this short-lived oddity.

When it arrived I spent some time researching it. It isn’t listed in any bibliography of Illinois newspapers and periodicals. The title and the editors are not mentioned in the county histories. No mention of the paper could be found in contemporary newspapers by searching the Readex America’s Historical Newspaper database. Every resource at my fingertips turned up no information on this publication. It is as if the title was mocking me for daring to try and find out who was behind “Devil & Co.”

Gentle readers, do you dare take a crack at this puzzle while the masthead sits there waiting to mock your efforts?

The Acquisitions Table: The Album

The Album. New York: F. & R. Lockwood, [between 1818 and 1822]

Primarily used for recording poetry, this album consists of an engraved title page followed by blank sheets, all bound up in a bespoke binding personalized for Adeline Morgan. It appears to be one of the earliest albums issued thus (in a decorative binding, with a title page) in the U.S. The paper is watermarked 1818 and the earliest date in the book is 1822. AAS acquires such volumes for both their insides and their outsides. The manuscript content of such commonplace books or friendship albums sheds light on education practices and print and manuscript circulation patterns. The binding complements others already at the Society, especially from the Michael Papantonio collection. It is three-quarters crimson straight-grained morocco with marbled paper boards and endpapers, and generous gilt tooling. The wove paper is watermarked “Butlers & Ward 1818,” indicating it is the product of Simeon and Asa Butler’s Eagle Paper Mill in Suffield, CT.

Under Their spell: The AAS Collection of Halloween Postcards

In the same vein as last year’s ghostly stereocards blog post, we offer another Halloween treat for you! Have you thought about sending someone a light-fright this October? If you’ve been in any stationary or card aisle recently, you would notice most holidays serve as an excuse to send a greeting. Although conservative in number (sixteen unique; seventeen in total), the AAS collection of Halloween postcards documents another era of this fad. Many are between members of the Weir Family of Worcester, Mass., dated 1910-1913. Here, the fronts and backs (including some charming drawings of pumpkins) have been digitized and linked in our digital image archive, GIGI.

These postcards illustrate a snapshot in time between Halloween as a belief in spirit possession (i.e. the All Hallows Eve events) and the costumed-candy-revels of the twenty-first century. In these images, participants are no longer attempting to frighten roving souls, but rather join them. The cards are more than just pretty images of youthful flirtation with the spirit world; they also have historical depth.

The postcards are representative of what Daniel Gifford, author of American Holiday Postcards, 1905-1915 (2013), refers to as the cards’ Golden Age. The Society’s collection is American, British, and German in origin. Gifford describes the international exchange of these objects, which was disrupted by World War I when the printing and import of cards from Germany ended. In the Society’s collection are several beautiful German examples – “A Jolly Halloween,” “With All Halloween Greetings,” and the hand-embossed “Halloween” postcard by the firm H. L. Woehler. The choice of Halloween lends itself to the riches of color printing; the holiday, paired with autumnal festivals and harvests, provides a bountiful palette of colors, including reds, gold, oranges, blues, blacks, and greens.

The picture postcard, as historian David Henkin puts it in his text The Postal Age (2006), shows a “traveler’s implicit claim to have encountered scenes of interest” (Henkin 129-30). Without a doubt, holiday postcards are an entirely different animal from picture postcards (for interested readers, Gifford’s monograph does include a treatment specifically of these holiday postcards). Likely no one sending a Halloween postcard encountered a witch, devil, goblin, or ghost, but these images offered the opportunity for the creator to explore these subjects visually (subjects the sender/recipient might hope to encounter only in print!).

In his article “Star-Spangled Turkeys” Gifford states, “at the peak of their popularity billions of postcards were circulating through post office networks of kin and friends, and into boxes and albums” (Gifford 14). Since the AAS collection of uncatalogued postcards includes both picture postcards and holiday pieces interfiled together, it allows us to study one small network in action as we can see through the grouping how they were selected, sent, received, and ultimately collected.

The Society’s collection of postcards is an area of the Graphic Arts Collection that extends beyond the 1876 cutoff date (how devilish!). So be sure to browse the digitized cards to send something spook-tacular to someone who might like a Halloween greeting! They’re so beautiful, it’s almost scary!

Works Cited

Gifford, Daniel. American Holiday Postcards, 1905-1915: Imagery and Context. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013.

—. “Star-spangled Turkeys: Patriotism in Thanksgiving Postcards.” Ephemera Journal. Sept 2014, 17:1, 14-18.

Henkin, David M. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006.