Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents

Today the American Antiquarian Society releases the new online exhibition Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents. This online resource presents fully-digitized versions of seven pre-1820 Indigenous-language imprints as well as digitized materials from four manuscript collections.  The printed books featured in the exhibition add to an existing archive of early American imprints used today ...

Fall 2021 Virtual Book Talk Schedule

We are pleased to announce the Fall 2021 schedule for the Virtual Book Talks series. Our lineup includes a variety of topics including astronomy and printing the universe, nineteenth-century printing in Mexico, African American literary practice, and the politics of Native American writing. We ended our summer with Elizabeth Kimball, Assistant Professor of English at Drexel ...

Artists in the AAS Archive: September 2020

This week we continue our Artists in the AAS Archive series.  This installment offers a spotlight on four more past fellows: book artist Maureen Cummins; performer-scholar Anne Harley; playwright and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher; and playwright and performer Laurie McCants. This series celebrates the 25th anniversary of Artist fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society.  More information about ...

An AAS Curiosity: The Puzzle of the Mayan Mural Drawings

Emily Isakson is a senior at Mount Holyoke College and was a Readers’ Services page this past summer. As an ancient studies major with a focus in art history and archaeology, Emily has always been interested in what has shaped the society we know today. Her time at AAS has only furthered her curiosity about ...

New Illustrated Inventory: Photographs of North American Indians, 1850-1900

Today, the American Antiquarian Society is launching a new illustrated inventory featuring photographs of Native Americans from our graphic arts collection. This collection of 225 photographs spans from 1859 to 1910 and makes available photographs of members of thirty-nine tribes. The collection was compiled as a resource decades ago, long before the creation of the ...

The Story of a Sword: Fitz-John Winthrop and King William’s War, Part II

Liebler, Theodore August. “Sir Edmund Andros, Kent.” Late 19th century. From the American Portrait Prints Collection at the American Antiquarian Society.

Last week, Dan Boudreau posted about a sword held in the AAS collections that belonged to Fitz-John Winthrop, an early governor of Connecticut and the grandson of the famous John Winthrop—the influential Puritan leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This week, Dan continues the story, focusing on Winthrop’s participation in King William’s War and his ...

The Story of a Sword: Fitz-John Winthrop and King William’s War, Part I

Detail of Ferrara mark on Winthrop sword. From the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

You never know what you’ll find while browsing the stacks at AAS. A few years back, when I had just started working at the Society, I stumbled across something unusual in the library basement: a pair of ornate swords, one from the early nineteenth century and the other from the seventeenth century. It was this ...

New Online Exhibition: From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations

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In addition to paging and returning collections materials, managing the desk schedule and the reference and reception staff, answering reference questions and compiling daily circulation statistics, my typical day as head of readers’ services usually involves meeting one or more researchers who are excited to arrive at Antiquarian Hall for the very first time. After ...

Meet AAS Fellow Linford Fisher

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Linford Fisher is associate professor of history at Brown University, where he studies and teaches the religious history of colonial America and the history of Indian and African slavery and servitude. His first book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, was published by Oxford University Press in ...

Moses Paul to Samson Occom: Rediscovering a Treasure

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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 ...

A Letter from Thomas Jefferson on the Plight of Native Americans

Camille Dupuis is a summer page at AAS and a rising senior at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. In this post she shares how her time at AAS and her interaction with programs and fellows has piqued her research interests. At AAS there are thousands of different materials at your disposal ...

Public Program: “The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies”

Second up in our fall line-up of public programs is a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Alan Taylor. Although the War of 1812 is an oft-forgotten part of American history, it looms much larger in the memory and story of Canada, along the border of which much of the fighting took place. Taylor’s lecture, based ...

Video: AAS President Shares Collections

The American Artifacts program on C-Span 3 will air a 30-minute television program on the American Antiquarian Society this weekend. The program is a virtual tour of Antiquarian Hall showcasing some of the Society’s treasures with our president, Ellen Dunlap. A short segment featuring the Eliot Indian Bible can be seen here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=muBe1woHuVA The full ...