With all eyes in the media directed towards the new addition to the royal family, we’ve taken a look back to seek out evidence in the historical record of this subject’s proportional popularity. Unsurprisingly, American buzz on the most recent princes and princesses is anything but new. Indeed, everything about Queen Victoria’s life was reported in ...
This past year the American Antiquarian Society has been hard at work proving the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to cartoons. AAS holds a comprehensive collection of political cartoons produced in the United States between 1764 and 1876. The separately published American cartoon collection holds ...
The March 2013 issue of AJN: The American Journal of Nursing featured on its cover a well-known AAS collection item – A Map of the Open country of a Woman’s Heart by “A Lady” published by Kellogg c. 1833–1842. Throughout the month of April, we received queries about this image from nurses around the country. We ...
As a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, I was excited to find a wealth of material related to my dissertation on photography and intellectual property law. The United States Constitution pledged “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing, for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors the ...
Tonight is the night! Come to AAS at 6 p.m. for the Society’s 6th annual Adopt-a-Book event! There will be food, drinks, original collection materials to view, and curatorial knowledge-sharing. If you haven't pre-adopted it will be $10 to get in, but if you have, it's free! You can still browse the 2013 Adopt-A-Book Catalog to ...
The AAS curatorial team is just delighted by the response to our 6th annual Adopt-a-Book event, with over half of the selected “orphans” already adopted by generous supporters. Thank you! Below, please find one of the few titles for children still available from the online catalog as well as a railroad map from the cartography ...
On Friday, April 5th from 6:00 to 8:00pm, the American Antiquarian Society will be hosting our 6th Annual Adopt-A-Book event. This event is an important fundraiser for the curatorial team at the Society, and monies raised will go towards future acquisitions of books, prints, newspapers, manuscripts, and children’s literature. You can browse the entire ...
Attribution is something libraries and museums struggle with every day. Who is the sitter in this portrait? Who is the author of this pamphlet? Often the objects give us clues, but not always. Sometimes they even lead us astray. This is the story of a pair of daguerreotypes at the American Antiquarian Society and how ...
As many scholars of American history are aware, for many decades before 1840 the largest winter holiday in the nation was New Year’s Day, not Christmas. Christmas was perceived by many Protestant Americans as too closely linked to Catholicism. New Year’s Day, on the other hand, was a secular family holiday often marked by travel ...
Nineteenth-century American publisher McLoughlin Brothers pioneered the use of chromolithography in the production of color picture books starting in the 1860s. Until that point, most children’s books were illustrated with wood engravings that were locked into the printing press form along with set type. Coloring these images generally entailed using hand-colored stencils or employing a ...
Camp of the Duryea’s Zouaves Federal Hill Baltimore, Md. Looking North. Baltimore: E. Sachse& Co., 1861. This hand colored lithograph is one of six prints of Civil War encampments by E. Sachse& Co. given to the Society by member David Doret. The publisher, Edward Sachse (1804-1873), had just opened at a new location on South ...
Some children would do just about anything to catch a glimpse of the gift-giving St. Nick on Christmas Eve – others have parents who would set up a camera and create a stereographic photograph to capture the whole visit. This image, titled “Santa Claus loaded for business” illustrates just such a scene. A bearded and ...
Photograph Album. [1863-1866]. This album of over 150 cartes-de-visite images of American prints illustrates the methods used to distribute images in the nineteenth century. Many of the photographs were made by John B. Soule. Soule worked with lithographers, such as J. H. Bufford, to reproduce popular lithographed images of children, attractive women, kittens, and comical ...
As a description of a professional trajectory in the research library world, it certainly makes for an impressive resume: Library Assistant, American Antiquarian Society Curator of Maps and Prints, American Antiquarian Society Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society Director, Center for Historic American Visual Culture, American Antiquarian Society At the same time, it’s not unheard of. ...
Edward W. Clay, Practical Amalgamation. The Wedding. New York, John Childs, ca. 1839. This print by Edward W. Clay is one in a series of images that comments on interracial relationships in America during the 1830s. Most of the prints in the set are held by the Society. This impression is actually a second copy ...
