AAS recently collaborated with the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery to create our latest exhibition, Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination. A man who has been immortalized as a hero and condemned as a charlatan, mourned as a victim and reviled as a traitor, Nat Turner lives in myriad formats and genres ...
A couple of weeks ago, Claire Jones, an intern from Princeton University, posted about her project centered on Judaica at AAS. This is the next installment in her findings. From its cover, the book looked totally ordinary. I had picked the title—The Life and Adventures of John Levy—from my list of memoirs for a few reasons. First, if the ...
For some collections within the Graphic Arts Department, we do not catalog each item in the collection individually. Sometimes, it makes more sense to create one all-encompassing record that describes the collection as one entity to avoid redundancy in the catalog. These collections are still easily found in the online catalog, and they will usually ...
Recent researchers and other visitors to the American Antiquarian Society have had an opportunity to view a special exhibit: “From Frederick Douglass to Ferguson: Graphic Design Projects on Race in Modern America Inspired by the Collections of the American Antiquarian Society.” This is the story of the origins of that exhibit as the result of ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. (p. 17-8) So Solomon Northup begins his harrowing account of slavery from the inside. In Twelve Years a Slave, Northup, a free black man from upstate ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
