Abduction of Charlie Brewster Ross. Philadelphia: Wm. F. Murphy’s Sons, 1874.
This broadside is an early example of the use of photography on public posters. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, invented the photographic mug shot; during the 1860s and early 1870s, he often used small albumen photos on wanted posters for train robbers and outlaws. The case of Charlie Brewster Ross gripped the Philadelphia/New York metro area for months in the summer of 1874. Charlie and his older brother, sons of a wealthy industrialist, were kidnapped by two men in a carriage while playing in front of their house. The men promised the boys, ages 6 and 4, candy and firecrackers. The older boy was let go at the candy store, but the men ran off with Charlie and ransom letters soon began arriving at the Ross home.
The story filled the popular and the flash press for weeks on end. Hired after the Philadelphia police ran out of leads, Pinkerton immediately printed up over 100,000 circular letters like this one, and distributed them nationwide at railroad stations, dockyards, schools and churches. The search continued throughout the summer with the kidnappers occasionally asking for money or attempting to arrange a swap. Reward money started at $20,000 but escalated to $50,000 and higher as Charlie’s parents became more desperate. In December the kidnappers were finally cornered in a closed up summer house outside of Brooklyn, NY, but both were shot and killed before they could reveal Charlie’s hiding place. No trace of the boy was ever found. Purchased on eBay. Harry G. Stoddard Memorial Fund.
As the calendar turns to November, our thoughts naturally turn to baseball… What!? Really? Yes, this year it took until November first to crown a World Series champion. Each year it seems, the games are on later and later (in the day and in the year). Can the casual fan sustain his interest over the long season? Apparently not. Game Three of this series had the second lowest television ratings in Series history, and according to a recent New York Timesarticle, Game Four this past Sunday night marked the first time a World Series game lost to an N.F.L. game in prime time.
Baseball is not the national craze it once was, dominating sports fandom when the major competition was pugilism and horse racing. Football, basketball, hockey and, [gulp], soccer now offer sports fans a panoply of choices. With the NFL, the NHL and the NBA seasons all underway, it is little wonder television is having some difficulty bringing viewers to baseball, even for the World Series. We are left to wonder if the poor ratings will tarnish the long love affair between advertisers and baseball.
From Dustin Pedroia selling tires to Mariano Rivera selling chalupas, from Ted Williams selling soft drinks, Joe DiMaggio selling cigarettes, and Babe Ruth selling, well, everything, advertisers have long used the image of popular baseball players and baseball teams to hock their wares. If you think it’s a 20th (or 21st) century phenomenon, think again. In the American Antiquarian Society’s collections there are many examples from the 19th century of advertisers associating themselves with baseball.
Front of W.S. Hill bank note advertisement (click to enlarge)
One nice example is a bank note advertisement from 1889. W.S. Hill, Watchmaker and Jeweler from West Chester, Pennsylvania issued a flyer, made to resemble currency, with an image of Albert Goodwill Spalding and a generic Chicago White Stocking player on the front and portraits of twelve members of the 1888 Chicago White Stockings on the reverse. The White Stockings, who would become the Cubs in 1903, did not win the National League pennant in 1888 (the first World Series was still 15 years away) and came in third in 1889 so we’re left to wonder why a Philadelphia area jeweler chose a team from Chicago in its advertising.
Back of W.S. Hill bank note advertisement (click to enlarge)
Spalding, a pitching standout for Boston and Chicago in the 1870s and by 1889 the president of the Chicago franchise, was very popular, though. He was a tireless promoter of the game (and the sporting goods company which still bears his name), bringing the champion Boston Red Stockings to England in 1874 (he would bring his White Stockings on a world tour later in 1889). Also on the White Stockings was future Hall-of-Famer Adrian Constantine Anson, known to teammates and fans as Cap. Anson played 27 seasons of major-league baseball, including 19 as a player-manager, and was the first member of the 3,000 hit club, but is now notorious for his refusal to play with African-American players then in the major-leagues. Anson’s face is prominently placed in the top center of W.S. Hill’s bank note advertisement, surrounded by his teammates.
Another popular place to advertise which continues to the present day is on a team’s schedule. The advertisement has lasting value, the theory goes, because the owner will want to refer to it throughout the season. Each view is another impression for the advertiser. AAS has several examples from the late 1800s, but perhaps the finest (and certainly the most bizarre) is from E. K. Brooks & Son, Boston. The piece, entitled “Judgment!” has pixies (or fairies or brownies) climbing over a baseball with the chief pixie barking out directions (alternatively, the pixie-in-chief could be an umpire making a call, hence the title). What precisely is being implied a fairy-covered ball is lost to history (although, no doubt, readers of this blog will have something to say on the topic).
Front of Brooks & Sons trade card advertisement (click to enlarge)Back of Brooks & Sons trade card advertisement (click to enlarge)
On the back of Brooks & Sons Handy Base Ball Schedule is the 1888 schedule of the Boston Beaneaters (now the Atlanta Braves, via Milwaukee). The “convenient table” shows when the local nine will be home and “abroad” and of course, “where you can get the Best MEA[sure] of VI[c]TUALS in Boston for a Little Money.”
Osgood's advertisement (click to enlarge)Another advertising ploy which continues to this day is an advertiser using baseball terminology to describe the workings of their business. We can all think of many, often tiresome, examples of these ads both on television and radio (discount furniture companies seem to be the most egregious offenders). This tactic also dates back to the 19th century. AAS’s book collections contain A History of the Boston Base Ball Club: a Concise and Accurate History of Base Ball Since its Inception compiled by George V. Tuohey. This 1897 publication includes many advertisements (the book was apparently a way for the Boston Beaneaters to raise some money in the off-season) one of which (on the first fly) is for C. E. Osgood, Co a Boston furniture company (what is it with furniture companies and bad baseball puns?). The ad is rife with baseball puns and plays on words. “We Are In The Game To Stay” is the headline. “We Play Ball All The Time” is prominently displayed in the center. The main text of the ad is one baseball pun after another, with the baseball terms in bold type (just so we won’t miss them). My favorite: “A Short Stop at our complete establishment will prove you are in the Right Field to purchase Reliable Goods at the Lowest Cost.”
Baseball and advertising have a long, intertwined, and entertaining history. It would be great to push the history back further and find earlier examples of advertisements with a baseball theme. Just how early did it all start? Is the earliest piece at the American Antiquarian Society? I don’t know but it will be fun trying to find out.
As readers of Past is Present are already aware, the Society’s Graphic Arts department is currently immersed in cataloging illustrations in our collection of gift books for the Prints in the Parlor project. Because the season of ghosts and goblins is now upon us as we near the end of October, we have been making particular note of those illustrations that have some relation to Halloween.
All Hallows Eve was not a particularly big holiday in America during the 1840s and 1850s, when most of the gift books were published, but there are a few mentions of the day. The illustration “Halloween” from The Mignonette (New York, c1856-57) is pretty typical of representations of the holiday. It depicts young people and an elderly couple gathered around a fire. The evening was more for young adults, and was one filled with roasted chestnuts and corn, storytelling, and sparking (flirtations with the opposite sex), and not costumes and candy or spook-tacular gore.
However, there are many other examples of frightening images in American gift books that are not related to Halloween but instead illustrate the Gothic-style prose and poetry of the era. These include dramatic pictures of murder, war, abuse, and revenge. An engraving of a woman with a knife entitled “Jealousy” from Gems of beauty (Boston, c1848) depicts a violent-looking woman about to stab her sleeping victim. Other illustrations include skeletons at parties, women buried alive, witches telling fortunes, and night scenes of shadowy city streets.
Finally, there is the wonderful image of “The Ghost Book,” which depicts a group of small boys gathered around a central child who is reading. Their eyes are wide with horror as they look around the shadowy yard. This image first appears in a Philadelphia annual The Gift (ca. 1839), and accompanies a story by Eliza Leslie about a diary kept by a traveler staying in a haunted bedroom. The boys have found the diary and are reading about spirits hiding in a dark closet under the eaves and pools of old blood from a murder committed long ago. In the end it turns out the diarist, an itinerant artist, was writing a rough draft of a story he hoped to have published in a “periodical of the day.” The boys are greatly relieved.
The image was re-used five years later in the 1844 Literary Souvenir, also published in Philadelphia, but the title was changed to “The Fright” in order to better illustrate a tale of the overactive imagination of boys written by George G. White. In White’s version, the central boy is described as
too strongly addicted to the marvelous. His brain was half turned from listening to the tales of an old nurse of the family, and reading romances and ballads.
This time the book the boys read is a cheaply printed text, purchased in town, Tales of Terror or the Mysteries of Magic. The story does not end well for the main character. He is so frightened by the words he reads aloud that
the shock had been too much for his reason. He had fallen victim to the follies of superstition, and remained an idiot for life.
Gads! What would he have made of the shrieking dementors in Harry Potter? All in all, the gift books provide us with evidence of nineteenth-century concepts of fear and darkness and ghosts and naughty boys – what more could we ask to mark the arrival of Halloween in 2010?
Scrapbooking is quite the popular hobby today, but it’s hardly a new idea. People have been compiling images, memorabilia, and the written word since these things existed. While exploring yet another of the American Antiquarian Society’s hidden gems, I found we have a wonderfully rich scrapbook collection.
The collection of scrapbooks at AAS is currently at about 300 volumes, but this number is always growing, whether through new acquisitions or discovery in the stacks. Initially scrapbooks were cataloged into the regular book collection. However, over time, many have been pulled out and we are in the process of integrating all scrapbooks into our manuscript collection. Why move them? Technically, scrapbooks are not published works. Many of them contain clippings from published works, or are sometimes even indeed published works, but with various items (photographs, letters, newspapers clippings, etc.) interfiled within the book’s pages. Scrapbooks take on their own unique identity, unlike any other published work out there. And this uniqueness is what defines a manuscript. So into the manuscript collection they shall go!
You never know what you’re going to find in a scrapbook, which is what makes them such amazing resources. The contents, nature, and character of each scrapbook depends entirely on the creator. Topics can be anything from flowers, to local history, to simply random newspaper clippings someone found interesting. Just the other day, a reader was looking for resources about P.T. Barnum, and amazingly, we have a scrapbook done by a person who was interested in what he termed “Freaks of Nature.” Hence we were able to provide a scrapbook filled with various images, newspapers articles, fliers (like the one pictured to the left) and clippings from published works, many about P.T. Barnum’s circus. On occasions such as this, a scrapbook can end up being one of the best resources for a project.
Another interesting scrapbook from our collection is a compilation of various Worcester banks’ dividend earnings in the late 19th century. While certainly not as exciting or intriguing as the “Freaks of Nature” scrapbook, it’s a great way to get a localized glimpse into the economy and banking industry of the time. Imagine the time it would take a modern day researcher to go through issue after issue of newspapers, looking for articles and statements from local banks. But thanks to scrapbooks, if you happen to have the same random interest as a scrapbooker 100 years ago, you’re in luck!
So to all you scrapbookers out there – keep it up! You could be compiling the great primary resources of tomorrow.
As it says on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired…your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” and the newly-found abandoned line “…your unwanted editions, pages uncut, spines unopened, loathed by your authors and deemed unworthy cultural capital by your countrymen…”
Okay, maybe that isn’t exactly what it says. Perhaps the line’s lack of poetic cadence destined it for the chopping block. But the fact remains that Lady Liberty had her arms open for books too. One such prized text is in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society.
In particular, I’m talking about Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Anachronistic, I know, as the Statue was given decades after Alice’s debut. But the point is this – British items, European prints, suppressed pamphlets – texts cast off and unwanted – have made their way into the American Antiquarian Society. And are here for the staying – and studying.
Lovers of Alice in Wonderland know the stormy, and at times formidable, relationship between illustrator John Tenniel (1820-1914) and author Lewis Carroll/Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) resulted in a book which – though conceived in 1862 – did not officially hit shelves until 1865. And immediately upon hitting said shelves was taken off for its printing imperfections. Tenniel, not Carroll, is responsible for the suppression of this first edition as he was very unhappy with the light printing of the pictures. Carroll, who had paid for the printing and was now in the red, decided to scrap it and please his illustrator. The official “accepted” edition was not published until late 1865 and bears an 1866 issue date. This leaves the 1865 edition as one of the most celebrated rarities of the book world.
So what happened to this ill-fated edition?
Enter New York harbor.
William D. Appleton of D. Appleton and Company of New York bought up the discarded copies of Alice, gave them a new title page and issued them as the first American edition in 1866. While debate still rages over which issue of the Appleton came first (there are two title pages), this copy is one of those rejected pieces – with light illustrations and all.
Why such a big deal? A couple copies where the blocks weren’t printed correctly? Who cares? Perhaps. But take a peek at Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice to get an idea of much back and forth went into the illustrations between Carroll and Tenniel – how exacting and meticulous each artist was in his craft.
A light printing of something as subtle as a caricature or satirical illustration could make the difference between seeing and not seeing for viewers and readers. As Gardner highlights (and compiles), the text is exceedingly loaded and rich in its likenesses, parodies, and intricacies – and if you’re going to be the seminal subversive children’s literature text, you might as well get it right.
Other Carroll finds at the Society? Three other editions of Alice in Wonderland, several Through the Looking Glass-es, a version of the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stage play, and The Hunting of the Snark. Oh, and what good nineteenth-century popular foreign text would be complete without its American-pirated counterpart? The serial Merryman’s Monthly is also in the Society’s holdings which printed the first pirated Alice in 1867 (interestingly, without its last five paragraphs).
Though this copy was not approved of by Tenniel, aren’t we glad he was such a perfectionist? After all, Alice has had numerous illustrators in her 145 years, both in print and on screen, and yet Tenniel’s version remains the most accepted visual for the text which is noteworthy for inspiring a ‘liberty of thought’ in children’s books.
Ever wonder what Lady Liberty is holding? Perhaps it’s a rejected copy of Alice.
Interested in Learning More?
See Flodden W. Heron, “The 1866 Appleton Alice,” Colophon 3:1 (Winter 1936), pp. 422-427 and Selwyn Goodacre, “The Nineteenth-Century American Alice” in Proceedings of the Second International Lewis Carroll Conference (NY: Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 1994), pp.68-74.
Thursday, October 21, at 7:30 p.m. Reflections on A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The Seventh Annual Robert C. Baron Lecture
The book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 quickly became a model of social history when it was published in 1990. The book examines the life of one Maine midwife and provides a vivid examination of ordinary life in the early American republic, including the role of women in the household and local market economy, the nature of marriage, sexual relations, family life, aspects of medical practice, and the prevalence of crime and violence. The book won many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize. A Midwife’s Tale was also developed into a film of the same name which aired on The American Experience television program.
The book even became the basis for a website called DoHistory (http://dohistory.org/). The site invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past. It is an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went into the book and film A Midwife’s Tale. The website aims to help users learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in history, and to become inspired by Martha Ballard’s story to do original research on other “ordinary” people from the past.
In tomorrow night’s lecture, Professor Ulrich reflects upon some of the scholarly, popular, and political responses to the book and considers its impact on her own more recent work. Further information, including directions, can be found on the Public Programs page on the AAS website.
Please note:
This lecture is part of the Antiquarian Society’s annual meeting, and it is anticipated that this will be a well-attended event by both the general public and AAS members alike. Unfortunately, our seating is limited. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m., so please plan accordingly.
The library will close early at 4:30 to set up for the lecture and will remain closed to the public Friday, October 22, for the Antiquarian Society’s annual meeting.
Laurel Ulrich Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University, where she teaches in the History Department. She is also the author of Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Early New England, 1650-1750 (1982); The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2001); and Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007).
Named in honor of Robert C. Baron, past AAS chairman and president of Fulcrum Publishing, the annual Baron Lecture asks distinguished AAS members who have written seminal works of history to reflect on one book and the impact it has had on scholarship and society in the years since its first appearance.
While Thanksgiving is still more than a month away, it’s never too early to begin planning. And since this year I will be hosting my first Thanksgiving, and cooking my very first bird, I thought I’d begin to look for some advice from the past. We all have our passed down recipes from family members that become staples in our holiday dinners. My family, for instance, has an amazing stuffing recipe from my grandfather, which is always the highlight of the meal. This year, however, I’m going to look for some additional inspiration from the past from AAS’ cookbook collection.
As we already know, cooking is definitely a different art now than it was in the 19th century, especially where cooking meat was concerned. Many of the turkey recipes from the 19th century include information on the keeping, picking and slaughtering of the turkey, something most of us need not worry about. Take for example some advice from Mrs. Stephen J. Field’s Statemen’s Dishes and How to Cook Them, 1890 –
The turkey should be cooped up and fed some time before Christmas. Three days before it is slaughtered, it should have an English walnut forced down its throat three times a day, and a glass of sherry once a day. The meat will be deliciously tender, and have a fine nutty flavor.
Definitely a creative way to enhance the flavor, but I wonder how effective it really was. And I wonder how difficult it was to wine and dine the turkey as Mrs. Field proposes!
While there is only so much I can glean from the actual steps for roasting the bird itself, I found some interesting recipes for stuffing. Many call for oysters or anchovies, and there’s always of course the staple of sausage. The boling and roasting recipes are from Mrs. Marie Eliza Randall’s American Domestic Cookery, 1822. I’ll likely skip the boiling option, although the stuffing for the boiled bird looks quite appetizing!
Finally, I’m always looking for creative ways to use up all those leftovers, and there are only so many turkey dinners and turkey sandwiches one can stomach. So I’ve included Mrs. Randall’s recipe for pulled chicken, and a recipe for turkey hashed from Mrs. Lee’s The Cook’s Own Book, 1832. Hopefully these will inspire new ways to prepare your leftover turkey.
If you have any great recipes that have been passed down through the generations, please share! And happy cooking!
One of the hidden treasures at AAS is its sheet music collection. The collection numbers about 60,000 pieces of music, all printed before 1880, including instrumental, vocal, secular and religious music, by both American and foreign composers. You might be thinking, I can’t read music, what’s in it for me? The sheet music collection is actually an amazing resource for research, not only for those lucky enough to be able to pick out a tune, but for anyone doing research at AAS.
Glancing through sheet music is an interesting, and very entertaining way of learning about popular issues and ideas of the time. What topics were important enough to compose a song for the general public for? What were people singing about? What ideas and morals were being instilled in people through music? Temperance, women’s rights and slavery are but a few of the issues being discussed through music in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Titles and lyrics say so much, and so do the images on the covers of the sheet music. AAS has separately indexed sheet music with pictorial lithograph covers and pictorial engraved covers. Covers can be found illustrated by some of the nation’s most famous artists, including Winslow Homer, David Claypool Johnston, and James McNeill Whistler. These pieces are used extensively by readers and fellows, as the cover images in and of themselves make excellent research material. Click here to see the topical classification of the pictorial covers – http://www.americanantiquarian.org/sheetmusic1.htm
The sheet music collection is one of the few collections left at AAS that is only accessible through its card file, located in the card catalogs in the Reading Room. The card file is organized as a title index for the general sheet music collection. There is also a separate card file for the pictorial covers, organized by subject and by lithographer. So if you’re ever at AAS and need to fill that final research gap, why not try looking at some sheet music!
With Election Day fast approaching, it seemed like a good time to have a look at the Society’s holdings of American election ballots. This is a collection of around 700 mostly New England imprints, dating from about 1815 to the 1880s. Most of the ballots are small in size and are arranged by political party, with candidates and offices listed on each sheet. Some have national or state symbols, such as eagles, seals, and flags, while others feature no-nonsense design of lists of names and offices. For a brief inventory, click here http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/electionballots.htm
Election ballots have been used in political and other types of elections for centuries. Sometimes called a ticket, these ballots list the names of people who are hoping to be elected. In early American political elections, ballots were specific to a party, listing every person from that party who was running for office. The voter would turn in the party ballot to the voting station. By 1888, many states began instituting secret ballot voting by supplying voters with ballots that listed several parties in columns, allowing the voter to choose a particular party of individual. They could then drop the ballot in a general ballot box and keep their election choices secret.
A recent research inquiry about a ballot for the 1864 Lincoln v. McClellan presidential campaign revealed that the Society holds a ticket for the race from San Francisco, California. The ballot is for the National Union Party, the party name under which Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson ran. The Union Party was the name used by the national Republican party from 1864 to 1868 (it was not used in state races). The national re-naming was both in reaction to a split in the Republican party itself (the supporters of John C. Frémont had formed the Radical Democracy Party in May of 1864), and an attempt to attract pro-war Democrats to the Republican candidates. The Society’s ticket, from November of 1864, is designed with elaborate borders and colored inks and includes the names of the candidates for local office at the bottom. The verso of the ballot features a nautical view of the Union ship Kearsage attacking the Confederate ship Alabama, a Civil War battle which occurred in June of 1864. Perhaps the renaming of the party worked . . . Lincoln won the election with a 400,000 vote majority.
Of course, the Society’s ballot collection does not begin to cover all the election races held in the United States. For that, you should familiarize yourself with a wonderful digital resource, A New Nation Votes (http://elections.lib.tufts.edu/aas_portal/index.xq) A New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy, 1787-1825. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can enter names of candidates, the state, or the name of office, and organize your results by year. A quick search on “Hewes,” for example, revealed that one of my husband’s relatives ran for the State Auditor of Pennsylvania in 1822. Alas, he did not get enough votes to win – it looks as if the seat went to the incumbent.
Ever feel like running on a tread-mill is some kind of horrible punishment? Turns out, it is! According to a pamphlet titled The History of the Tread-Mill by James Hardie (1824), the tread-mill was first invented as a form of labor for prison inmates. The tread-mill had a dual purpose, in that it was used both as a way to prevent idle minds and bodies in prison, and was used to generate power or grind grain (hence the “mill” part of the word). According to the image from the pamphlet below, the original tread-mill more resembled our current day stairmaster.
The tread-mill was invented by William Cubitt in England in 1818, the first erected in the House of Corrections in London. Penitentiaries in the United States adopted the idea after hearing reports from the House of Corrections in 1822 that the presence of the tread-mill had “in every instance, proved highly useful, in decreasing the number of re-commitments, as many prisoners have been know to declare, that they would sooner undergo any species of privation than return to the house of correction, when once released.” That’s one powerful torture device!
When used in the United States, it was thought that the tread-mill would lead to moral reformation of the prisoners. Unfortunately, according to Hardie, all were “sadly disappointed.” While prisoners never experienced miraculous revelations of the evils of their ways while walking without really moving, the tread-mill did serve as a deterrent from returning to prison. Always looking for ways to prevent prisoners from having the time to “[indulge] in talking over their exploits in the paths of guilt” and “[suffer] to form new schemes for future execution”, the tread-mill certainly kept the prisoners busy, and made the idea of returning to prison far less appealing. Prison was a long, endless day at the gym, and who would ever want to return to that!
So next time you’re on a tread-mill thinking how torturous it is, remember you’re not alone. Hardie describes the act of being on a tread-mill as “constant and sufficiently severe; but it is its monotonous steadiness and not its severity, which constitutes its terror, and frequently, breaks down the obstinate spirit.” If prisoners from the 19th century could see us now, what would they think of our voluntary work outs on their prison provided forced labor machinery?
Sarah Arndt, PhD Candidate in History at Trinity College, Dublin, describes one of the treasures she found during her recent fellowship at AAS.
Click to see full-sized image
Have you ever wondered what your shopping receipts say about you? What sort of conclusions would someone make about you by examining the sorts of food, clothing or books you purchased? Recently, I had the opportunity to explore some 200 year old receipts, to try and find out what books the citizens of Baltimore were buying. During my stint as a short-term fellow of the AAS I was able to spend some time with the Mathew Carey papers, a collection of 27 boxes of accounts from the various Carey publishing firms of Philadelphia, to see if I could trace the books available for sale in early nineteenth century Baltimore. In these papers I found something unexpected but amazing. Mathew Carey opened a branch of his bookstore in Baltimore during the first few years of the nineteenth century, the daily sales of which survive nearly intact from 1804 to 1808.
These ledgers record the purchases of books and stationery by everyday citizens and other retail booksellers day by day and week by week over this period. They also include lists of stock sent to the store by Carey from Philadelphia. These types of records are quite rare, and are the only items I know of their kind for Baltimore. Here we have a glimpse into the purchasing habits of early Americans. What these records reveal is a very practical approach to book buying. Most of the books sold to individuals were educational: school books, dictionaries, primers, or catechisms. Even the other retail booksellers were mostly just purchasing larger numbers of these same items from Carey. Bibles and small chapbooks were also common purchases along with wax, paper and quills. Most purchases cost less than $1, with many costing less than fifty cents.
What then does this tell us about the readers of Baltimore? They purchased books which served practical purposes in their home, books which could be passed down from one family member to the next: primers, spelling books and dictionaries to teach children to read and Bibles and catechisms to instill religion. These books were relatively inexpensive, and it seems that many people were unwilling to spend too much on the purchase of books. If these individuals were interested in reading the latest novels they were unlikely to purchase them from Carey’s shop. Perhaps instead they rented them from a local circulating library, or borrowed them from friends. This unique source opens up a world of opportunities for exploring the purchasing decisions of Baltimore’s book-buying public, one in which I intend to continue my investigations.
One of the gems of the AAS newspaper collection is its Caribbean newspaper holdings. During the summer of 2009, we took advantage of an opportunity to purchase almost 130 issues of early Cuban newspapers. The titles, dates, and number of issues we acquired can be found at the end of the online list of newspaper acquisitions for 2009.
Many of these Cuban newspapers highlight the mercantile activities (including slavery) of the region. Because of the harsh climate, the survival rate of early Cuban newspapers is very low and chances for acquisitions very rare. Besides Havana, AAS’s Cuban newspaper collection includes newspapers from the towns of Santiago de Cuba, Trinidad, Matanzas, and Puerto Principe.
Collection purchased from Adolfo Sarrias Enriquez. Harry G. Stoddard Memorial Fund.
So I must confess. I didn’t make the chocolate ice cream. I had my eggs and cream and, well, not the best French chocolate, but chocolate nevertheless, ready to go, when I read an even more intriguing recipe that I just couldn’t pass up. Fellow AAS staff member Paul Erickson sent along the following recipe for parmesan ice cream from Frederick Nutt’s The Complete Confectioner, 1789, and I just had to try it! (If anyone did give the chocolate recipes a shot, let us know how it turned out!)
Parmasan [sic] Cheese Ice Cream.
Take six eggs, half a pint of syrup,*
and a pint of cream; put them into
a stewpan and boil them until it begins
to thicken; then rasp three ounces
of Parmasan cheese, mix and pass
them through a sieve, and freeze it.
The preparation of the ice cream was surprisingly easy. Ice cream has always been the kind of dish I never imagined preparing myself, but when I pulled it out of the freezer, I was amazed that it actually looked like ice cream. Who knew I could make my own ice cream! Perhaps because there are appliances specifically for making ice cream, I’ve always imagined it was a much more complicated process than it really is. Granted the machines likely help with the whipping of the ice cream, thus adding air and making it more true to the ice cream consistency we’re used to, mine was pretty close to the real thing, no whipping or cranking necessary.
Then again, this is all coming from a cook in 2010. What truly made ice cream both difficult and novel in the 18th and 19th century was the work needed to actually freeze the ice cream. The hand cranking necessary, and needing to have the means to store ice and freeze the ice cream brings it to a whole new level. Combining the ingredients and popping it into the freezer and letting it sit overnight is nothing compared to what had to be done.
Now about the flavor. The combination of cheese and sugar didn’t seem too far fetched at first. Even though parmesan isn’t exactly a mild cheese, my initial expectation was that it would taste a bit like cheesecake. When I finally tasted the final product, at first it simply tasted like ice cream. No particular flavor, but the consistency and sweetness was there. But then a moment later was the flood of cheese flavor. Not horrible, but definitely not what I was expecting – frozen cheesecake it certainly was not! When ice cream was still a novel dish, I wonder if expectations were not dead set on a sweet treat. Perhaps folks were more experimental with their ice cream, as opposed to my expectations, having grown up with the soft serve twist.
Now that I know how easy is it to make home made ice cream, with our modern conveniences, of course, I’m certain I’ll be trying out many more recipes. I’ll just be staying away from the cheese!
Tuesday, September 28 – 7:30 p.m. Discovering the Great Divorce
by Ilyon Woo
In 1814, Eunice Chapman’s estranged husband stole away her three children and took them to live among the Shakers. At a time when wives and mothers had few rights to speak of, Eunice Chapman waged a colossal campaign for her children’s return, lobbying the New York legislature year after year, courting politicians, penning thrilling narratives about Shaker captivity, and finally rallying a mob to bring her children home. In the process she drew the attention of such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren and won unprecedented rights as a wife and mother.
Drawing on her newly published book The Great Divorce, Ilyon Woo will discuss this sensational story and the key historical evidence she found at AAS. You can read more about the book and find links to other Shaker resources on the book’s website at http://ilyonwoo.com/about-the-book/ or play the video below to see a 3:28 minute book trailer for The Great Divorce.
Ilyon Woo holds a B.A. in the Humanities from Yale College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. She conducted research for The Great Divorce at AAS in 2004-2005 as a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow. Information about the AAS Fellowship program is available online at http://www.americanantiquarian.org/fellowships.htm.
Tomorrow evening’s program is co-sponsored by Fruitlands Museum. More information is available at http://www.fruitlands.org.
Friday, September 24th, is National Punctuation Day. Here at the American Antiquarian Society, we take our commas and semi-colons quite seriously. We hold in our collection numerous grammar manuals, essays, school books, and pamphlets on the correct use of the English language, dating from the 1780s right on up to 1875. However, being the curator of Graphic Arts, I am especially interested in the use of punctuation on broadsides in our collection. A typesetter’s box has space for all of the punctuation marks, but some printers seemed to be more inclined to use the marks to make, sorry for the pun, their point.
Advertisers, especially theater promoters and circus printers, are the most frequent users of excitable punctuation on their material. The designer of an 1860 broadside advertising a tight rope walker in Worcester increases the use of exclamation points as he moves down the sheet, using multiple points after each line. An 1845 broadside in the collection telling of a recent murder uses various sized type and punctuation to draw the eye. The large type at the top of the sheet is accompanied by an equally large exclamation point. Keep in mind that the $2,000 reward offered is the equivalent of $58,000 in today’s dollars – certainly something that merited exclamation!
In addition to the always eye-catching exclamation point, there are numerous ballad broadsides set in poetic lines ending with commas, semi-colons, dashes, and ellipses, including the 1772 song Love in a tub, or, –– The merchant outwitted by the vintner (commas and dashes right there in the title!). Early printings such as this example do not necessarily follow modern punctuation standards set forth by publications such as the Chicago Manual of Style, but they get the point across with solid attention to design, making it easy for the eye to read each line and indicating pauses.
So go on out and celebrate National Punctuation Day in whatever manner you choose. Last year, contestants made food in the shape of their favorite mark – a meatloaf shaped like a question mark was a popular entry. This year school students, copy editors, and writers are entering haiku poetry about punctuation on the National Punctuation Day website. As for me, I’ll be keeping an eye out for posters and signs, the modern equivalent of the early broadside. You never know when you might see multiple exclamation points crying out from the wall at the vet’s office (“Lost dog!!!!!!!”) or question marks on the side of a city building (“Did you vote today?”) or on a billboard for pest control looming over the highway on your commute (“Got ants?”).
This broadside is an early example of the use of photography on public posters. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, invented the photographic mug shot; during the 1860s and early 1870s, he often used small albumen photos on wanted posters for train robbers and outlaws. The case of Charlie Brewster Ross gripped the Philadelphia/New York metro area for months in the summer of 1874. Charlie and his older brother, sons of a wealthy industrialist, were kidnapped by two men in a carriage while playing in front of their house. The men promised the boys, ages 6 and 4, candy and firecrackers. The older boy was let go at the candy store, but the men ran off with Charlie and ransom letters soon began arriving at the Ross home.
