Past is Present

From Conservation: Treatment of the Protestant Tutor

Recently, I had the opportunity to treat a very special item from our Reserve collection as part of our Save America’s Treasures grant. The Protestant Tutor for Children is attributed to Benjamin Harris and was printed by Samuel Green in Boston, 1685. Thought to be a precursor text to the New England Primer, it is the first and only known extant copy printed in New England. AAS has been in ownership of this pamphlet since at least 1885.

Upon examination, I found this rare pamphlet to be severely mutilated, with paper tears, losses, and stains. Hand-stitched into a dear little cloth wrapper, and with every page backed with glassine tape, it was evident that someone in its almost 330-year life had cared about preserving it. A missing section of the title page had been filled in with new paper and text neatly written in pencil. I imagine they probably felt they were doing a great job of it. There was ink manuscript throughout, declaring ownership (William Giddons and Joseph Ayers, specifically). Overall, charming, but in rough shape!

What is required first in treating such an object is thorough documentation. A detailed description of its condition is written up and captured visually with digital photography. In this case, every page was shot both before and after treatment. The pamphlet was then disbound, and the pages were cleaned of surface grime before washing. All of that glassine had turned yellow and obscured the text. It had certainly kept the pamphlet intact, but it had to go! Fortunately, the adhesive on glassine tape is water soluble, and was easily removed in a water bath. After the tape floated off and the acids were removed from the paper, it was alkalized with a magnesium solution, and when dry, re-sized with gelatin. It was now time to reattach all the little bits that came apart when the glassine came off. Usually we mend tears and fill losses with Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste, but due to the extent of damage this was a better candidate for a pulpfill, which tends to be more seamless. We’d just spent the month doing pulpfills, and I’d saved this one for last.

Making fills with pulp is fun, and creative, even kind of artsy – one tears into small pieces a variety of high-quality handmade papers (old and new) in an attempt to match the hue and tone for the area you are repairing. These are whirred up in a blender with water (passersby are unable to resist the smoothie joke) until you have a suitably blended paper pulp. It can take a bit of tweaking, but is highly satisfying when you’ve gotten it right. We then fill a squeeze bottle with the pulp and apply it to the wet object on Hollytex (a synthetic material which allows water to flow through, but prevents sticking) and blotters. (To see what this process looks like, click here.) It is then dried under pressure between felts.

After the paper repairs, the pamphlet was re-sewn into a new paper wrapper because the original wrapper was too fragile for re-use. Both the old wrapper, and the original threads that were cut to release it, have been saved with the pamphlet in an enclosure, along with some notes about the provenance that were found with it. The “after” photos were taken, and it was returned to our cool, dark, secure stacks, where it will remain safe and sound for generations to come.

Isaiah Celebrates the Fourth of July

Portrait of Isaiah Thomas by Ethan Allen Greenwood, 1818

Here at AAS, nary a holiday goes by without some reflection on how the same was celebrated in days past. On this Fourth of July we’re going to take a trip back 200 years and check in on how our founder, Isaiah Thomas, celebrated the holiday.

In July 1814 the United States was in the midst of the War of 1812 with Britain. Many of the events we have come to most closely associate with the War of 1812—including the burning of Washington, D.C. and the composition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Battle of Baltimore—had yet to happen. Though the war was in many ways entering the beginning of the end—just the next month peace negotiations would begin in Ghent and would be finalized in December—this was not clear to Americans at the time. Thus, it was a war-weary and politically fractured populace that celebrated Independence Day in 1814.

Support for the war had been split from the beginning. The two major political parties at the time, the Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party, were starkly opposed on the war. The older of the two, the Federal Party, had weakened in the recent years and remained strong mainly in the northeast. It supported strong central government and closer ties with Britain. The Democratic-Republicans favored a weaker central government, expansion, and a clearer independence from Britain. When Congress voted on the declaration of war in June 1812 no Federalists voted in favor, setting up a dichotomy that was to last throughout the war.

This opposition is clear in Isaiah’s account of the Fourth of July festivities in 1814. He begins his diary entry by stating simply, “Independence Celebrated by both political Parties, separately.” He goes on to explain that the “Federalists dined in a large Booth, on my land, near the north meeting house—The other party dined at Wheeler’s Tavern—Each formed in procession, and saluted each other as they passed—each had a military escort, and a band of Musick.—The federalists had their Exercises in the south Meeting house—the other in the north meeting house.” One begins to get a sense of how politics played a part in the town, not only ideologically, but also physically.

Detail of Isaiah's devil woodcut and stamp from The Halifax Gazette. February 6 to 13, 1766. — Detail of Isaiah’s devil woodcut and stamp from The Halifax Gazette. February 6 to 13, 1766.

As this entry suggests by the mention of the Federalists dining on his land, Isaiah had never been one to keep his politics to himself. When he was just 16, he got himself into trouble with the authorities in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for printing items in the Halifax Gazette protesting the Stamp Act. First, it was a woodcut of the devil (which Isaiah made himself, of course) stabbing the official stamp with a pitchfork (see above). When he got in trouble for this he decided to get around the order not to do it again by simply reprinting copy from other newspapers, a common practice in the eighteenth century. This meant that he could print an article from the Pennsylvania Journal outlined in mourning borders and skulls announcing the death of the newspaper due to the Stamp Act and claim that he was simply sharing the news.

Mass Spy Lex-Conc — Detail from May 3, 1775 issue of Massachusetts Spy

In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, Isaiah’s newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy, transitioned from one “Open to ALL Parties, but Influenced by None,” to one that, by 1774, featured the slogan “JOIN OR DIE,” and eventually, “Americans!—Liberty or Death!—Join or Die!” The Spy became such an influential Patriot newspaper, in fact, that three days before the Battles of Lexington and Concord Isaiah smuggled his printing press out of Boston to Worcester for fear of it being impounded by the British authorities. On May 3 he printed his eyewitness account of the battles, a model of non-partisan journalism: “Americans! forever bear in mind the BATTLE of LEXINGTON! where British Troops, unmolested and unprovoked wantonly, and in a most inhuman manner fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen, then robbed them of their provisions, ransacked, plundered and burnt their houses! nor could the tears of defenseless women, some of whom were in the pains of childbirth, the cries of helpless, babes, nor the prayers of old age, confined to beds of sickness, appease their thirst for blood! – or divert them from their DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY!”

Isaiah’s partisanship and rabble-rousing didn’t end with the Revolution. During late 1813 and early 1814, several British officers were taken prisoner in order to leverage an exchange for American soldiers and were paroled in Worcester. Isaiah, like many Federalists, believed these “hostages [of] government” were being mistreated and spent much time visiting them and bringing them extra comforts. In reality, their imprisonment was quite comfortable and when they found they were to be transferred elsewhere they bound and gagged the under-keeper and made their escape. Several were recaptured, but four remained free. Isaiah recorded the escape in his diary and noted that he had visited them earlier that day.

With this record it comes as no surprise that the political parties celebrated Independence Day separately, nor that Isaiah was among the leaders on the Federalist side. Despite their separation, the two factions did observe some basic civilities, although whether these civilities were intended to be sincere or facetious is difficult to determine. As noted earlier, they saluted to each other as they crossed paths on their way to their respective meeting places, and later in the entry, Isaiah relates that “Two toasts were reciprocated—with a discharge of artillery—a Com^ee accompanied with a band of Music, waited one on the other party with the toasts.”

And lest we have any doubts about where Isaiah stood in his viewpoints (although at this point that seems unlikely), his closing statement for the entry erases them: “The federal party was the largest about 400, and really the most respectable.—dined with the Federalists.”

The Acquistions Table: Chronicles of New England

Chronicles of New England. Chap. 1000. [United States: s.n., 1826-7?]

Two copies of the earlier Chapter 999 have been traced (one of which was already at AAS), but this appears to be the only copy of Chapter 1000. When it appeared at auction this fall, we had to have it. A satire written in Biblical style, Chapter 1000 of the Chronicles of New England begins: “Now it came to pass, when the men of the Boat were rejoicing and making merry in their hearts…” Both chapters describe the competition between the Hartford-based shipping merchants who plied their trade along the Connecticut River, and a rival group of New Haven investors who bypassed them with a canal to Massachusetts. The pamphlets allude to the icebound steamer Barnet, placing the date of composition in 1826.

Metadata and the Right to Own an Archival Collection

I left off last month promising details of how the work of early nineteenth-century American antiquarians has, over the last two centuries, morphed into the work of cataloging, archiving, and collecting, of how the “science” of antiquarianism has become the “science” of information. To address this shift, we might start by looking at how the work of librarians in creating metadata was understood as these organizing and ordering processes emerged in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Specifically, the work of metadata creation became a performance of ownership of the “data” it describes, a way of asserting an institution’s right, not in the legal sense, but in the realm of cultural preservation and humanist endeavors, to own a collection. Let me offer an example.

As I wrote about a few months ago, we are hard at work here at AAS making the Mathew Carey financial records more accessible online through the creation of a name index turned relational database that will take users to the exact images of the account records they seek in our digital image archive, Gigi. To answer the question that started to vex me when we embarked on this digital project—How did these papers end up in Worcester anyhow?—I turned to the AAS Records to learn about their provenance.

LettersSample — A Sample of the Letters between AAS and HSP Librarians, 1928 (AAS Records, Box 95)

In the Records, I came across the exchange of letters between AAS Librarian Clarence Brigham and Thomas Montgomery, Librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), about each institution’s acquisition of Carey materials. The year is 1928 and AAS has just purchased 40 plus Carey volumes. The exchange begins with Brigham inquiring after details of the sale of about a hundred volumes of Carey’s correspondence (later the firm of Lea and Febiger, the collection’s title at HSP). Montgomery responds, explaining that HSP “secured the collection through Mr. Lea,” but also noting his displeasure at being not the successful bidder, but the “bidder-up” at the sale of the financial records. In a subsequent letter, Montgomery expresses “a good deal of disappointment over the fact that the Lea and Febiger papers should be separated.” HSP already has all of Carey’s correspondence, and the Library Company, also in Philadelphia, has Carey’s book collection. Montgomery therefore suggests to Brigham that Carey’s financial records should also be in Philadelphia. Brigham also laments the separation of the collection, but from the opposite perspective. He writes, “We were exceedingly anxious to obtain [the correspondence] as they were the accounts of a firm of printers who had dealings all over the country with engravers, binders, publishers and book purchasers. We already had the Accounts and Correspondence of five similar firms and the lot fitted exceedingly well into our collection.” Today, those of us who work on Carey and the early American book trade might also bemoan this separation, though we can also hope that the digital surrogates of these collections will one day be united.

It is the way in which Brigham makes his argument to Montgomery that I want to linger on here. Ostensibly, I must admit, Montgomery is kind of right: Carey was a Philadelphian, the letters that the HSP had just purchased are extensive, and the Library Company already had Carey’s library: it really does make sense that his financial records would remain in his beloved city. And yet, Brigham will not see it this way for one “chief” reason: metadata. He writes: “Although I agree with you in believing that these papers might well have been kept together, I still believe that the Accounts Books would be of more use to students throughout the country if they were here … chiefly because we will make an exhaustive catalogue of the entire series—50,000 names or more, and I doubt if any other library would do this for a lot of business ledgers which to most people would seem of very little value.” Though this number should be understood as more an overly enthusiastic boast than a carefully reasoned estimate—the number is more like 10,000 than 50,000—it is the fact that Brigham turns not to the records themselves, but to the work done to the records to justify AAS’s ownership of them. Legally and ethically, AAS owns these records because they purchased them, but Brigham makes an argument that addresses another sphere altogether: he wants AAS’s right to the papers to also be justified in the world of humanist endeavors that aim in part to preserve and make useful the historical record. In his mind, it serves a greater good for AAS to have the financial records because of the work they will do to make them accessible, because of the metadata they will attach to them.

535_cards — A sample of the name index cards for the Mathew Carey Collection

In short then, Brigham figures the work of organizing, of ordering these volumes as an exercise of the cultural right to possess, to claim one’s self or one’s institution as the best proprietor. Walter Benjamin reminds us in his essay “Unpacking My Library” that “…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” Digital humanities projects often heavily rely on metadata that institutions such as libraries and archives have created, and the institutional perspective on the labor that created it might be instructive as we remediate that metadata to suit our various ends. The antiquarians who have fueled AAS for over two centuries now—people such as Isaiah Thomas, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, Clarence Brigham, Waldo Lincoln, Mary Robinson Reynolds, Avis Clark—found lives for themselves in the objects held at AAS and the work they did with them and, in a sense, for them. And understanding their work as Brigham posits here—as the exercising of a right to own an object—might cause us to trouble some of the ideology of the open access movement, when we stop to wonder about this traditionally deemphasized, if not unmarked, intellectual labor that created the metadata on which we in the digital humanities so heavily rely. For that labor justified ownership, and ultimately, the preservation without which many valuable collections would not now be available to us.

The Acquisitions Table: Elliot Cowdin Letterpress Copy Book

Cowdin, Elliot. Letterpress Copy Book, 1861-1869.

Elliot C. Cowdin (1819-1880) was a well-known merchant in New York. As a young man he was greatly involved with the Mercantile Library Association, where he learned much about his trade. Later in life he became involved in politics, especially during the Civil War. This letterpress copy book contains copies of letters he wrote primarily during his politically active time, from 1861-1869. Included are letters addressed to Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, and Abraham Lincoln. He traveled to Europe frequently for business, especially to Paris, which is where he wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln at the outbreak of the Civil War 1861 assuring overseas Americans’ support – “Rest assured, Sir, that our citizens abroad feel deeply grateful to you for the energetic manner in which you are prosecuting the war, and will stand by you to the end.”

Filling in a Gap: Reporting Lincoln’s Assassination

9420_0001 In May I picked up a large collection of newspapers from the Indiana State Library. It took 20 book cart loads to unload the back of the 26’ truck. There were a number of bundles of miscellaneous newspapers of single or scattered issues.

While going through one of the bundles, I came across an issue of the Daily Morning Chronicle from Washington, D.C., dated April 15, 1865.

This is an Abraham Lincoln assassination issue. What caught my attention was it was the second edition with the headline “Death of the President” between two thick black bars. I checked our holdings and discovered we have the first and third edition, but not second. This issue filled in the gap and completed our set of the various editions printed that morning.

9420_0004 One thing that makes this set of papers interesting is that the newspaper was located on the same block as Ford’s Theatre. They were getting the news directly and not by telegraph. The first edition has the headline “Murder of President Lincoln.” Underneath it and inside there are a series of ongoing reports as they were received with the last one at 6 a.m.: “The President is still alive, but is sinking rapidly. He cannot survive much longer. No change in the condition of Mr. Seward.” Lincoln died 9420_0003 the next hour. The compositors must have stripped out the original columns of text and set the new reports as they came in. The second edition is later that morning and other material was removed or shifted on the front page. The third edition was at noon and has the news that Andrew Johnson has been sworn in. The three editions differ on the front page, but pages 2 through 4 stay the same throughout. On page 3 there is also an advertisement from Ford’s Theatre announcing there will be no performance that night.

These issues gives you the feeling of immediacy that a history book can’t convey. You can read the news as other Washingtonians did that fateful morning.

The Acquisitions Table: Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin. New York: J. Dalton, for the New York Albion, ca. 1860.

Large format engravings were distributed in several ways in pre-Civil War America. They could be ordered from a publisher by subscription, purchased directly through book and print dealers, or awarded as premiums for membership in an organization, such as the American Art Union. Many newspapers and periodicals also distributed prints to their subscribers, usually sending inexpensive lithographs as year-end thank-you’s to customers. The weekly New York Albion eschewed lithographs completely and instead sent their subscribers an annual (and more expensive) engraving. This image of Benjamin Franklin is an example of one of the Albion’s subscription premiums. The Albion started publishing in 1822 and began issuing engravings in 1837. The majority of the prints are British in subject matter, which was fitting for the paper’s Anglophile audience (although printed in New York City, the paper described itself as a “British, colonial, and foreign weekly gazette”). AAS holds eleven of the twenty-five engravings distributed by this paper.

Give Pieces a Chance

Hannibal Journal, and Native American. May 28, 1842. Vol. 1, no. 21.

A dealer recently sent me a box with pieces of newspapers. Some of them were either the front or back page, and many of them were just half of one page. Still, I waded through the large mound of fragments to see what was there.

Why should I spend time going through them considering the dealer gave them to me because they had no market value? I spent time because discoveries can be made. This example of the Hannibal Journal, and Native American is the only known issue with this title in an institutional library. Old references refer to the newspaper as starting out with this title, then later becoming just the Hannibal Journal. This fragment of the top half of the front page confirms the old references and preserves the bibliographic evidence.

509236_0001 Even though this is just one-eighth of the complete issue it tells us a lot. It lists J.S. Buchanan as publisher and proprietor. The paper is published weekly, which gives the starting date as around the beginning of January. There are 15 different advertisers that can be found on the front side of the fragment. On the back side are a variety of articles copied from newspapers such as the Louisville Journal, Cincinnati Chronicle, Quincy Whig (IL), St. Louis Republican, Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, Boston Post, and the New Orleans Picayune, showing it exchanged issues with a number of newspapers.

Part of the prospectus is also extant. It states that the main audiences of the paper are farmers and merchants. Old references recorded the Hannibal Journal, and Native American as the successor to the Journal and Price Current. The prospectus also states that the Hannibal Prices Current will also be published weekly. Even though no issues are recorded, here is evidence that a separate publication was being published from this office.

AAS added a number of fragments to the collection. Each fragment added a little more to the sum total of information we can provide readers, and we are giving these pieces a chance to be used.

The Acquisitions Table: Afternoon Tea

Afternoon Tea: Rhymes for Children. New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons; London: Frederick Warne and Co., ca. 1880.

This delicate color-printed illustration of children at play is taken from a book of children’s poetry published jointly in New York and London by the England-based houses of Thomas Nelson and Sons and Frederick Warne. Both publishers were direct competitors of New York titan McLoughlin Brothers, whose massive press runs of brightly colored chromolithographed children’s books soundly dominated the late nineteenth-century American picture book market. Although this illustration was designed by John G. Sowerby and H.H. Emmerson, it clearly was influenced by the quaint antique style of Kate Greenaway. The girls are dressed in empire waist gowns from the early nineteenth century, and the grandmother is sitting at a spinning wheel, which had been largely rendered obsolete by late nineteenth-century textile factories.

Now in print

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!

March-May 2014

BOOKS

Barreyre, Nicolas. L’or et la liberté: Une histoire spatiale des États-Unis après la guerre de Sécession. Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2014. (Tracy Fellow, 2011-2012)

Ben-Atar, Doron S. and Richard D. Brown. Taming Lust: Crimes against Nature in the Early Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (Brown: AAS-NEH Fellow, 1977-1978 and 1992-1993; AAS member)

Berkin, Carol. Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. New York: Knopf, 2014. (Daniels Fellow, 1976-1977; AAS member)

Buell, Lawrence. The Dream of the Great American Novel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. (AAS member)

Calloway, Colin G. Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. (AAS member)

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Knopf, 2014. (AAS member)

Dayton, Cornelia and Sharon V. Salinger. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (AAS-ASECS Fellow, 1991-1992; Mellon Fellow, 2004-2005; AAS member)

Demos, John. The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic. New York: Knopf, 2014. (Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence, 2011-2012; AAS member)

Garrett, Matthew. Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (NeMLA Fellow, 2011-2012)

Pacheco, Derek. Moral Enterprise: Literature and Education in Antebellum America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. (Packer Fellow, 2013-2014)

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America and Abroad. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. (AAS member)

ARTICLES

Altschuler, Sari and Aaron M. Tobiason. “Playbill for George Lippard’s The Quaker City.” PMLA 129.2 (2014): 267-273. (Altschuler: Legacy Fellow, 2011-2012; Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow, 2013-2014)

Cohen, Patricia. “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s.” Journal of the Early Republic 34.1 (2014): 1-20. (Daniels Fellow, 1977-1978; AAS-NEH Fellow, 1987-1988; Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence, 2001-2002; AAS member)

Coward, John M. “The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press.” American Journalism 31.1 (2014): 71-99. (AHPCS Fellow, 2010-2011)

Fisher, Linford D. and Lucas Mason-Brown. “By ‘Treachery and Seduction’: Indian Baptism and Conversion in the Roger Williams Code.” William and Mary Quarterly 71.2 (2014): 175-202. (Peterson Fellow, 2007-2008; AAS-NEH Fellow, 2014-2015)

Malanson, Jeffrey. “ ‘If I Had It in His Hand-Writing I Would Burn It’: Federalists and the Authorship Controversy over George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1808-1859.” Journal of the Early Republic 34.2 (2014): 219-242. (Peterson Fellow, 2009-2010)

O’Brien. Donald. “The Engravers of Philadelphia’s Port Folio Magazine.” Printing History 15 (2014): 3-31. (AAS member)

Thompson, Catherine L. “ ‘If They Smile He Will Flourish’: Mothers, Doctors, and Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature.” Literature and Medicine 32.1 (2014): 148-168. (Peterson Fellow, 2006-2007)

AWARDS

Wendy Bellion was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for her book Citizen Spectator. (Last Fellow, 2011-2012; AAS member)

Ansel Elkins won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for “Blue Yodel.” (Hearst Fellow, 2012)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was awarded a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress. (Baron Fellow, 2009)

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy won the Washington Prize for his book The Men Who Lost America. (Peterson Fellow, 1986-1987; AAS member)

Public Program: Poet Tess Taylor on Researching at AAS

We’ve had an interesting lineup of public programs so far this spring, exploring everything from nineteenth-century theater and attitudes towards alcohol to what life was like for free and enslaved African Americans in Massachusetts during the prelude to the Revolutionary War.

Tomorrow, Thursday, May 29, at 7:00 p.m., we’ll continue our series with a talk by poet Tess Taylor called “Sifting the Uneven Archive: Researching the The Forage House.”

Tess Taylor In this program, Taylor will recount how a residency here at AAS helped her as she researched and wrote her latest book of poems, The Forage House. Her poems layer oral histories, documents, and folksongs to craft an exploration of her ancestors- a mix of New England missionaries and Southern slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson. Taylor’s poems are as much about the imperfect material of family stories as they are about the politically charged material of history. Natasha Trethewey, our current poet laureate, described The Forage House as “a brave and compelling collection that bears witness to the journey of historical discovery. Sifting through archives, artifact, and souvenir, Taylor presents dialectic of what’s recorded and what is not, unearthing the traces that give way to her own history – and a vital link to our shared American past.” Taylor researched The Forage House as a Robert and Charlotte Baron Creative Artist Fellow in 2006.

Tess Taylor’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. She currently reviews poetry for NPR’s All Things Considered and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley. You can listen to some of Taylor’s spots on NPR here and here.

This spring’s public programs series will conclude on Tuesday, June 10, with a talk by John Demos titled “On the Trail of the ‘Heathen School’: Local History, American History, and World History” about his new book.

AAS joins the Worcester Revolution of 1774

On September 6, 1774, 4,622 militiamen from 37 towns marched into Worcester, shiretown for the county, closed the Royal courts, and forced each court official to resign. Forming WorcRevLogo (2) two lines, they forced each court official, hat in hand, to disavow the recent Massachusetts Government Act, which revoked the Province’s charter and disenfranchised its citizens. With this dramatic action, all British authority vanished from Worcester County, never to return. While the actual war for American independence started in Lexington and Concord, the revolution – the actual transfer of political and military authority – occurred here in Worcester nine months earlier.

Page from the Ebenezer Parkman diary showing the list of militia units

Now, AAS has joined a coalition of individuals and organizations to commemorate this historic event with a series of public programs culminating in a reenactment of the event on September 7, 2014. The project, called The Worcester Revolution of 1774, is planning a region-wide celebration that will include activities across the cultural and historical organizations of Worcester and the 37 towns that participated in 1774. The project has received funding from the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, the Worcester Arts Council, and Mass Humanities.

The Society’s collections contain the key evidence of this historical event, including the diary entry of the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman, which recorded the event and listed each of the towns and the place their militia stood along the “gauntlet” to hear the recantations of the court officials.

The short film below (or here) promotes the project and features Timothy Bigelow, a local blacksmith and leader in the Whig movement. Bigelow assisted AAS founder Isaiah Thomas in taking his press out of Boston on the night of April 16, 1775. They set the press up in the basement of Bigelow’s home and it was here that Thomas printed his famous May 3, 1775 issue with his eyewitness accounts of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The Society is participating in this project by sponsoring workshops and lectures and providing digital facsimiles of AAS collection materials. Additionally, I have been commissioned to write a play about this event that will be the centerpiece of the September 7, 2014, celebration. For more information see http://www.revolution1774.org/.

The Acquisitions Table: The Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin

The Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin. Philadelphia: Davis, Porter & Coates, ca. 1866-1868.

This poignantly humorous image of the owl digging departed Cock Robin’s grave is taken from an “indestructible” picture book that had its pages reinforced with cloth for the hard use of young and eager hands. This hand-colored wood engraving is characteristic of American children’s picture books of the mid-nineteenth century. When Davis, Porter & Coates issued this book New York picture book publisher McLoughlin Brothers was starting to publish picture books mechanically printed using color lithography, revolutionizing the economic production of multi-colored picture books.

Who is that Book-Clad Man? William Jenks on the Science of Early American Antiquarianism

This image, a favorite around AAS, is part of a series a lithographs that circulated in the late 1820s and early 1830s, depicting people as an amalgamation of various objects: shells, vegetables, paintings, and in this instance, relics. This graphic motif harkens back to the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose portrait heads made of similar objects were popular in sixteenth-century Italy. Where Arcimboldo created a head made of books and titled it “The Librarian,” the artist here depicts “The Antiquarian,” made up of manuscript materials and of ancient relics and statutes. Engrossed in his reading, this figure turns away from the viewer, not looking to engage us in any way, but instead, perhaps encouraging us to examine the ancient artifacts that constitute him.

“The Antiquarian” begs many question, not the least of which is who is this book-clad man? What is the cultural type he represents? And more broadly, who was the early nineteenth-century American antiquarian? And what, if anything, might he (and the antiquarian in the period is always coded male) tell us about our current practices of collecting, organizing, and processing the materiality of the past? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the early documents of AAS. Founding members gave considerable weight to the term “antiquarian,” thinking and writing about the mission that they understood it to embody. They did not consider themselves historians, or even humanists really, but rather, for them, “antiquarianism” was a scientific line of inquiry, with a discrete methodology. In our present moment, their understanding of antiquarianism might help us to challenge disciplinary practices and assumptions that organize scholarly engagement with the past.

As tied to the nationalist project as these founding “American” antiquarians imagined themselves to be, they acknowledged, from AAS’s inception, the precedents for their understanding of themselves and their labor as borrowing from a longstanding British tradition. In their 1812 petition to the Legislature of Massachusetts, the six incorporating members hoped to model themselves after the College of Antiquaries in Ireland, which is, they conjecture “probably the most ancient institution, now existing in the world.” The tradition of antiquarianism is an inherited one, an imported drive to collect and to organize. That impulse, that drive, is, also true to its Enlightenment roots, understood as systematized, as a “science,” though it would take another year before AAS articulated it as such.

In the first annual address to the Society, Reverend William Jenks, who fulfilled several key roles at AAS and who would go on to be a founding member of the Asiatic Oriental Society, defined antiquarianism as part of, but not the same as, either history or poetry. Echoing Aristotle’s definition of Rhetoric as the discipline that allows all other disciplines to do their work, Jenks positions antiquities as so ubiquitous as to ”belong to almost every art and science; and they, who have cultivated art or science with attachment and diligence, may be often benefited by the history of its progress.” The progress of the antiquarian is not “the pleasing task of dwelling on individual characters,” for that is the work of history and poetry, according to Jenks. The antiquarian “aim[s] at objects less exposed to ordinary notice.” The antiquarian is then in part a detective as they “investigate their causes,” laboring in service to time rather than to scholarship or creative enterprises per se. Ten years later, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, AAS’s first fulltime librarian, would make this point in his loving description of time as “the antiquary’s best friend, his right hand man” (Letter to Reverend George Allen, October 20, 1832).

There is much more to be said here about how the work of the antiquarian morphed over the next two centuries into the work of cataloguing, archiving, and collecting, of how the “science” of antiquarianism has become the “science” of information. In the month ahead, as I look at the history of metadata creation here at AAS, I intend to trace some of the genealogy of the organization and preservation of the documentary record in the hopes of elucidating how that genealogy informs and at times disrupts some of the prevailing tenets of the digital humanities.

Preservation Week Redux: Saving a Collection

Those of you who follow the Society’s blog are aware that the last week in April was Preservation Week, a period set aside by the American Libraries Association to focus on the care and conservation of collections material.

We take preservation seriously at AAS. The word is part of our core mission, in fact. We have a conservation lab on site and the curators regularly review priorities with the head conservator in order to plan actions and treatments for the coming year. We budget for materials and supplies like archival boxes and folders, Mylar pouches, matte board, etc. Surveys and rehousing projects are scheduled at this time, as well.

Wohl4 — Here is Wohlbruck himself, with his wife. The negative for this image was in one of the very worst boxes, at the bottom of the wet cardboard box.

All this planning and budgeting and discussion is well and good, but occasionally a collection will arrive at AAS unexpectedly. This was the case in early April of this year when I received a phone call from a Worcester County resident who had been planning for years to donate his grandfather’s glass plate negatives to AAS. We had some email correspondence back in 2013, but at that point he was not ready to place the material with us. The negatives were made by Theodor C. Wohlbruck (1879-1936), a Worcester photographer whose early professional archive was already housed at the Society, having arrived here before 1960. The Society’s collection includes over a thousand plates and prints by Wohlbruck, primarily views of towns in Worcester County and photographs of prominent Worcester buildings made between 1890 and 1910.

The donor said he had more negatives, mostly family photographs made in the studio, as well as images related to family trips. His April phone call was stimulated by the unfortunate fact that a springtime flood resulted in water in his basement and the negatives had been impacted. Could we come and get them and preserve them immediately? Without promising much (water and glass plates do not mix well), we agreed to have a look at the damage and see if there was anything we could do. Our conservation lab is a paper based lab. Serious photographic preservation would have to be handled offsite if needed.

Upon arrival at the donor’s home we navigated the dumpster, the box fans, and the quickly laid wooden planks that often accompany a flooded basement here in New England. The negatives were all laid out on a stone wall, in their original paper board boxes. They had been stored on the floor of the basement stacked in a wooden fruit crate and had sat in the water for a couple of days before the flood was detected. It did not look good. We encouraged the donor to contact a conservation center that could handle the negatives, but he wanted them to go to AAS only.

We ended up loading the 148 negatives and their soggy boxes and the fruit crate into the car. A quick phone call to our chief conservator confirmed that the negatives needed to air dry. The negatives were removed from the sodden boxes and were spread out immediately, emulsion side up. Some were completely bonded together, and the ones at the bottom of the box looked to be a total loss. We placed fans strategically and hoped for the best. Preservation, triage style! Our conservator consulted with the regional photography expert and he agreed that air drying offered the best hope for salvation of the plates. It was a stressful 36 hours but the majority of the negatives came through the ordeal intact.

The end of the preservation story for this group of Wohlbruck negatives has not happened yet. The plates are now safely in climate control at AAS and the transfer from the donor is complete. Supplies have been ordered and each negative will be individually foldered and placed in acid free boxes after they have been cleaned. Our photographer made a couple of test scans of the negatives and they appear to be mostly intact, although some are covered in grit and others have losses of emulsion at the edges. Twenty or so are a complete loss, but will be retained as teaching tools.

This portion of Wohlbruck’s work will be preserved alongside the rest of his archive. Making fragile glass plates accessible is another role of a library, along with preservation. The majority of the new donation will be digitized after cleaning and made available to the world through our website. We will continue to post about this fascinating collection as the preservation and digitization moves forward. And one last preservation tip: if you can help it, do not store historic photographs in your basement!