AAS houses a representative collection of American games, from board games inspired by the adventures of Nellie Bly to educational puzzles and fancy paper dolls, but one fascinating subgroup of this collection harnesses the popularity of one entertainment option of the 1800s: reading. Before the world ogled over athletes and movie stars, the greatest celebrities were authors. People traveled ...
Last September, Jessica Pressman, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, was a featured guest at the Virtual Book Talk series sponsored by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC). Jessica spoke about her recent publication, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age, published in ...
On August 28, 2020, author Amy Hildreth Chen was a featured guest at the Virtual Book Talk series sponsored by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC). Amy spoke about her recent publication, Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market, published in June 2020 by the University of Massachusetts Press. ...
Since the late 1960s, the American Antiquarian Society has been a sponsor of the Cooper Edition, a scholarly edition of Cooper’s works that conforms to the editorial principles approved by the Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE) (formerly the Center for Editions of American Authors) of the Modern Language Association. To facilitate the production of the ...
Luke Henter is a senior in the History Department at Princeton University. He studies 19th and 20th century international history, with certificates in the History and Practice of Diplomacy and Creative Writing. He has also worked at the Princeton Historical Review and is a member of the Community Service Interclub Council at Princeton. ...
In his October 1983 report to the Council, former AAS President Marcus A. McCorison outlined the founding of the Program in the History of the Book (PHBAC), an ambitious initiative that set out to unite four areas of the Society's work: collections, scholarship, fellowships, and publications. In the same 1983 report, John Hench, then assistant director ...
Black Self-Publishing is a new collaborative research project from the American Antiquarian Society. The core of this site consists of a list I developed of books self-published by black authors within the scope of the American Antiquarian Society’s collecting period (origins to 1876). Studying self-publishing, occasions when an author pays for the printing of his ...
In 1995, the Society welcomed its first class of a new kind of fellow. They were the Creative and Performing Artist and Writers Fellows, and they included fiction writers, poets, playwrights, visual artists, sculptors, performance artists, and musicians, as well as non-fiction writers, documentary filmmakers, journalists anyone seeking to create original works based upon American ...
In 1956, Edward Connery Lathem (1926-2009), who would later distinguish himself as a Robert Frost scholar, took leave from his position as director of the Division of Special Collections at Dartmouth College to pursue an advanced degree under renowned Jonathan Swift scholar Herbert Davis at Oxford University. There, Lathem completed his bibliography of “English Verse ...
It seems as though many studies of James Fenimore Cooper begin on the defense. Mark Twain's severe treatment of Cooper in the 120-year-old essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" leaves many a poor Cooper critic to battle with Twain before easing into the comforts of Cooper. Never mind that Melville called him "our national novelist" or ...
Whenever it's a damp, drizzly November (or January) in your soul, where do you go to keep from knocking people's hats off? In Melville's Moby-Dick Ishmael goes to sea, while the novel's sub-sub librarian (Melville's fictional assistant, assistant librarian who scours the earth for the "Extracts") apparently retreats to literary references to the Leviathan. The sub-sub ...
The fall is always an exciting time here at AAS, with a full schedule of public programs, conferences, and workshops. We'll be keeping you updated with all of these events throughout the season, starting here with our next round of professional development workshops for K-12 educators.
First up, on Saturday, October 19, will be the "Emancipation ...
Recently my high-school-aged daughter was working on a final paper for her English class. She was writing about Edgar Allan Poe, comparing the vault setting of “The Cask of Amontillado" with the quiet library used in the poem “The Raven.” She asked me to proofread her paper and to check her bibliography (I was a ...
In 1842, Charles Dickens made his first of two visits to America. He took a sweeping tour of the country, meeting with dignitaries such as Longfellow, Poe, and President John Tyler. He visited Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. While in New York City, he was welcomed with a ...
