Linford Fisher is associate professor of history at Brown University, where he studies and teaches the religious history of colonial America and the history of Indian and African slavery and servitude. His first book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, was published by Oxford University Press in ...
Tag: African Americans
Metadata Matters: “African American” in the News and in the North American Imprints Program
This post was co-written by AAS Digital Humanities Curator/ACLS Fellow Molly O'Hagan Hardy and AAS Head of Cataloging Alan Degutis. The New York Times recently reported the “discover[y]” of the earliest known use of the term “African American” from almost fifty years earlier than previously thought. The Oxford English Dictionary attributed it to The Liberator in ...
Gen. Benjamin Butler and Shoo Fly Chewing Gum
This past winter, while hunting in the stacks for a trade card for a reader, I spotted this intriguing advertisement for chewing gum. As editor of the Society’s Instagram account, I had been participating in an event called #bugginout, which featured posts by libraries around the world focused on illustrations of anthropomorphic insects. These posts ...
The Acquisitions Table: Belle of Baltimore
Belle of Baltimore. T.W. Strong, [between 1843 and 1866] A minstrel songster known in only two other copies (and those are either a variant or defective copy). This copy of Belle of Baltimore is remarkable for its intact publisher’s green wrappers and illustrations. The seven woodcuts, all but one depicting African Americans, are located on the ...
Photography: Printers at Work
Recently, AAS purchased two photographs depicting American newspaper printers, one on eBay and the other at a local auction in central Massachusetts. These images capture working men posed in photographic studios, holding props and tools of the trade. When viewed with two additional photographs already in the collection, these portraits capture the likenesses of people ...
“Black Printers” on White Cards: Information Architecture in the Database of the Early American Book Trades
Since our founder Isaiah Thomas’s research for his ambitious The History of Printing in America (1810), AAS has held the largest collection of data on the early American book trades in North America and the Caribbean. The bulk of this information exists on 25 drawers of cards in our reading room and is known as ...
Twelve Years a Slave, The Book: Truth Stranger than Fiction
The Acquisitions Table: Lessons in Dancing
Dilettante [i.e. Edward W. Clay] Lessons in Dancing, Exemplified by Sketches from Real Life in the City of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Published by R.H. Hobson, 1828. Only the second known copy of this title with eight delicately hand-colored plates of dancing couples mounted on stubs and sewn into printed tan paper wrappers with the imprint information. The ...
The Pay Off for a Curator’s Perseverance
Last week, curator of children's literature Laura Wasowicz posted about finding a unique find in a dusty house. This week, curator of graphic arts Lauren Hewes talks about another tack curators more often have to take: "hard work and diligence." Recently, the Society’s curatorial staff was asked to blog about significant acquisitions and the process by ...
The Acquisitions Table: Juno on a Journey
Abbott, Jacob. Juno on a Journey.The Juno Stories.New York: Dodd & Mead, ca. 1870. Jacob Abbott’s Juno was among the first female African American protagonists of a children’s book series. In this book, Juno is enlisted to take a little white boy named Georgie on a train journey by the boy’s father. During this early fictional ...
Featured Fellow: Aston Gonzalez
Aston Gonzalez, Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship: "Kneeling and Fighting: African American Artists' Depiction of Black Humanity" My project at the American Antiquarian Society investigates how African American visual artists produced work that acted as counternarratives to the racist messages contained in popular literature, images printed in ...
Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and the Early Black Church
In April 1787, Rev. Richard Allen and Rev. Absalom Jones co-founded the Free African Society (FAS) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As two of the earliest African Americans to become ordained Christian priests, Allen and Jones sought to create a kind of community outreach organization with the FAS. It helped black Philadelphians satisfy some of their basic ...
The Civil War comes to “Mary S. Peake, the Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe,” Part 1
What we have for you today is the story of a remarkable African American woman and her community. The story was told by Rev. Lewis C. Lockwood, self-described as the “First Missionary to the Freedmen at Fortress Monroe, 1862,” in a book titled: Mary S. Peake, the Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe. (The full text ...
Samuel Cornish, John Russwurm, and the Early Black Press
In March 1827, Rev. Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm co-founded Freedom’s Journal in New York City. It served as the first African-American newspaper in the United States and commemorated the 50th anniversary-year of the first American anti-slavery statutes in the 1777 Vermont Constitution. One of their primary objectives in starting Freedom’s Journal was to combat ...
A Story You Probably Didn’t Know about John Brown’s Body, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau
Today we present a story in two parts, part of which you probably already know and part of which you probably didn't know before. PART I is a summary of the story of John Brown, Harper's Ferry, and American Anti-Slavery from AAS volunteer Colin Fitzgerald: For three days in October 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown conducted ...