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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
This image above of a woman reading in a busy interior, surrounded by household chaos appears in two gift books in the Society’s large collection, one from 1849 and one from 1853. The main figure sits completely engrossed in her book while the baby cries and a cat and a dog steal food. ...
The following conundrum for Past is Present readers comes from AAS reader Mary Fissell. I’m writing a book about Aristotle's Masterpiece, and have just spent a couple of very productive and happy weeks working with the AAS’s collection of 50+ editions. This book, neither by Aristotle, nor a masterpiece, is one of the longest-running popular medical ...
A Place of Reading. That phrase defines Antiquarian Hall. Reading is an everyday occupation for those of us in Antiquarian Hall whether staff or, yes, readers. But it is also part of the title for the newest online exhibition posted on the AAS website. How did this one come to pass? It started over twenty ...
NPR had a piece this morning on an exhibit that just opened at the Smithsonian called Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. If you are in the D.C. area, the exhibit is running until January. It sounds like they are making some interesting connections between the American ...
In a New York Times Book Review article last month, Jennifer Schuessler quoted Bob Brown, an early proponent of electronic reading devices. In his prescient manifesto, "The Readies," Brown declared: “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age.... Writing has been bottled up in books since the start." Brown called for no less than ...
This past April, the state of Massachusetts marked the 235th anniversary of the famous ride of Paul Revere and the start of the American Revolution at the Battles of Lexington & Concord. As you might expect, AAS takes Patriot’s Day (April 19th) seriously. Like most Massachusetts residents, we have the day off ...
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Many institutions are planning exhibitions, activities, and publications around the events which tore the United States apart between 1861 and 1865. Some organizations have already contacted AAS regarding the possibility of borrowing or reproducing material from our collections. ...
When I first told people I'd decided to nurse my twins I was asked jokingly, "So you're going to hire a wet nurse?" followed by "too bad they're not around anymore." Of course they are, I thought - just ask Salma Hayek. For awhile I didn't think about nursing history, until I recently saw ...
Recently, the American Antiquarian Society digitized a new finding aid to help scholars access the Society’s Group Photograph collection (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/groupphotos.htm). Usually, we like these finding aides to be as complete as possible, with detailed entries and scans -- you know, the whole works, like we have done for our collections of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. ...
This was the question I got recently as I was sorting through some photographic material at my desk and was putting carefully aside a small, round photograph of two children. As you might already know, the American Antiquarian Society has important holdings of early photography, including daguerreotypes from the 1830s and cabinet photographs of performers ...
