Here at AAS, we’ve always enjoyed Valentine’s Day. From various blog posts to our online exhibit on Victorian Valentines, we have fun promoting the holiday. This year, we thought we’d go in a different direction and look at what could happen when love doesn’t go as planned. Breach of promise lawsuits occurred when a person, usually ...
My latest volunteer project, to quote Winston Churchill, was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." I was handed twenty-eight legal depositions, tucked in a manila folder, with a notation that simply said: “The depositions were part of a suit by multiple claimants for the $500 reward.” First, the riddle: Who offered the $500 reward? ...
Although we’re not often thought of as a legal repository, we do have a few famous firsts to claim in the realm of legal research. In our manuscript collection lives the notebook of Thomas Lechford, 1638-1641, the first lawyer in Boston. AAS was also the first government documents repository. In 1814, in an effort to ...
