One lesser-known collection at the American Antiquarian Society is a group of broadsides printed on textiles. Broadsides are ephemeral, single-sheet items that are usually printed only on one side. Some topics typical of broadsides include advertisements, official proclamations, theater announcements, and opinions. AAS has approximately 148 textile broadsides that showcase the breadth and type of these ...
Rosanna Sizer. Female Whig of ’76. New London, Conn.: Jonathan Sizer, 2nd., 1840. According to the imprint on this 1840 broadside, Rosanna Sizer wrote this poem in 1777, shortly after Danbury, Connecticut, was burned by the British in April of that year. A family connection between Rosanna and the publisher, Jonathan Sizer, appears likely (he may ...
The Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project has been fully transcribed! Each of the more than three hundred ballads in the collection now has a text-searchable transcription, as well as the option to download an XML file of the document that includes tags related to the subject matter contained within the text (both can be found at ...
David Hildebrand, Ph.D., specializes in researching, recording, and performing early American music. He presents concerts and educational programs throughout the country for museums, universities, and historical organizations, and has consulted for and provided soundtrack materials for numerous documentaries, such as the PBS series Liberty!—the American Revolution, Rediscovering George Washington, and Anthem. He also teaches at ...
Daguerreotype Apparatus. Boston: H.P. Lewis, 1840. The technical elements of daguerreotypy were presented by Louis Daguerre to the world in Paris in August of 1839. By September, a technical manual, in French, was for sale on the streets of Paris and London. At the end of September 1839, an Englishman named D. W. Seager was in New York demonstrating the process, and he ...
AAS member Jane K. Dewey has volunteered in the manuscripts department for almost 30 years and processed forty large collections. Jane most recently organized, housed, and wrote about some of the manuscripts from the Pike-Wright Family papers, a recent donation from Susan Pike Corcoran. Even though the donation includes a substantial collection of ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and photographs and a ...
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 ...
Libraries like the American Antiquarian Society exist not just to preserve material, but also to help people find it. Detailed descriptions of items in our catalog records and thoughtfully designed systems of organization ensure that items in our collection can be located. But AAS also relies to a great extent on institutional memory—the knowledge of ...
Province of Massachusetts-Bay. By the Governor. A Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue… Boston: Margaret Draper, July 23, 1774. This important broadside was printed in Boston by Margaret Draper, a loyalist printer who enjoyed the support of Province of Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Gage. Gage had been appointed by King George in the spring ...
As the United States is gearing up to celebrate its independence for the 239th time, here in the Outreach Department at AAS we’re also gearing up for another kind of event, taking place for the first time: hosting an NEH Institute for K-12 Teachers. Among the many sessions in this institute, titled The News Media and ...
This past April, AAS received a plain brown envelope via U.S. Mail, with no return address. The envelope was carefully opened by our Acquisitions staff and two folded broadsides were found inside. There was no note included, no inscriptions or marks on the broadsides, and, as luck would have it, there was not even a ...
What do Red Jacket, Pompey Fleet, James Macpherson, Mary Washington, and Geoffrey Chaucer have in common? They all are depicted in, influences for, or creators of the 300 (give or take a few, depending on how you count them) broadside ballads Isaiah Thomas collected from Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly in 1814. Mostly printed in Coverly’s ...
This post will present approximately one hundred years of Irish ballads contained within the Society’s collections. The first is a fascinating 1769 broadside containing a New Year’s address by Ireland native Lawrence Sweeney (-1770), a popular figure in New York City journalism in the 1760s. Sweeney is one of the first identifiable Irish-American voices. He ...
Halaina Demba, our guest author here, is a third year student in the Buffalo State College Program in art conservation. She spent this past summer, the final one of her graduate studies, interning in the Society’s book and paper conservation lab. This summer the American Antiquarian Society received a unique gift of an 1854 broadside with ...
It has been a big year for some of the country’s most important documents. January saw the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and just last week was the 150th anniversary of the reading of the Gettysburg Address. This Thursday in the United States we celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving, and so are looking back, ...
