Has bound with it: Alfred Ely, A Sermon, Occasioned by the Late Death of Mrs. Charlotte Sprague (Hartford, 1821) and Absalom Peters, Memoir of Mrs. Charlotte E. Sprague (New Haven, 1821). Although the original leather and gilt binding has been worn down by much handling over the years, this bespoke volume provides a physical tribute to ...
Now a ghost town, Granite, Montana, was once a thriving mining town after the discovery of silver in the 1870s. The Bi-Metallic Mining Company operated there from 1887 until 1893, when the Sherman Silver Purchase Act made the price of silver so low that the mines were abandoned. This album contains numerous photographs including cyanotypes, Kodak ...
Tom Thumb takes center stage as both a sword-wielding hero and object of royal curiosity in this early nineteenth-century picture book. Although this rhymed tale is set in the early Medieval court of King Arthur, the ladies and gentlemen of the court are dressed in Regency Era attire that would have been familiar to the ...
At least these two issues of the Roll Call newspaper from the Civil War were edited by “Three Ladies. Two of the War, and One of the Treasury Departments.” There is only one other known issue of this title, which may have begun in February 1864. It was apparently published during one of the many ...
Almanacs, pregnancy, and dodging fines are all contained in this one-page testimony to the Court of General Sessions of Massachusetts from 1710. Unmarried Ruth Copeland became pregnant with a child by a man named Samuel Hayden, who promised to marry her after finding out she was to have his child. Samuel subsequently rescinded his offer after ...
This 1620 Mexican imprint – once in the library of AAS member and prominent Mexican bibliographer Joaquin García Icazbalceta (1825-1894) – arrived at AAS just in time to cause a stir among the students in the 2024 History of the Book in America summer seminar on multilingual cultures of print. Printed well before there was even ...
The thoroughbred racehorse Longfellow was known as the “king of the turf” and won nearly every contest he ran in the 1870s. The horse was born in 1867 in Kentucky and began racing as a four-year-old. His jockey was the young John Samples (d. 1912) who was born to enslaved parents in Midway, Kentucky, around ...
Although Ann Taylor's poem begins with the line, "Who fed me from her gentle breast …," very few American illustrated editions show a mother actually breastfeeding her child, due to modesty concerns, making this image published in an edition issued by New York publisher Solomon King (1791-1832) a great find. Several scholars have recently used the ...
Typically, curators purchase collection material from dealers, auctions, and bookfairs. Less common is the unsolicited offer from someone who found something in their house. Early this past summer [2024], a woman from West Virginia called AAS – on the recommendation of a dealer she had consulted – about a newspaper she found among other old ...
This account book, kept on an unidentified Georgia plantation in the mid-1860s, features accounts for over fifty Black sharecroppers. Sharecropping families were frequently trapped in a cycle of debt due to laws restricting sale of sharecropped goods on former plantations and unethical practices by southern planters. On this specific Georgia plantation, Black laborers are recorded ...
Pasted into volume 11 of Encyclopaedia; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1798), this broadside appears to be the only surviving evidence of one of the most unusual private circulating libraries. It demonstrates the cultural importance of one encyclopedia and the lengths people might go to be able to ...
The early 19th century saw a resurgence in the use of leeches for medical use, especially during the cholera epidemic of the 1830s in Europe and America. Though leeches did prove to have anti-inflammatory effects, they did not cure or mitigate cholera and by mid-century were rarely used in medicine. This trade card touts a Miss ...
Inspired by a performance of scenes from Alice in Wonderland performed in Japan by a cast of English-speaking children in 1890, New York socialite Emily Prime Delafield (1840-1909) wrote her own dramatized version of Alice. It was originally performed at the Waldorf Hotel in March 1897 as a benefit for the Society of Decorative Arts, ...
Benjamin Lundy was a prominent abolitionist in the 1820’s and 1830’s. Brought up as a Quaker in what is now West Virginia, he saw the iniquity of slavery. In 1821 he started the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. From there the periodical moved several times, being published in Greenville, TN; Baltimore, MD; Washington, ...
Worcester County sheriff Lewis Evangelidis and his team were looking to rehouse their cache of county jail records during a recent construction project and, thanks to a diligent staff member, reached out to AAS to ask if the Society was interested in acquiring the records. The records had been otherwise set for destruction, so it was ...
