One of the duties of a curator at the American Antiquarian Society is to interact with dealers of antiquarian books, manuscripts, and paper ephemera. Over time we develop professional relationships with them as we get to know what type of materials they have, and they get to know our wants. In 2003 I was using eBay ...
Earlier blog posts have promoted a soon-to-debut online resource that will feature highlights from the William C. Cook Jacksonian Era Collection. Here’s another of those one-of-a-kind items. Today we feature an unrecorded elegy written after the death of Jackson by a poet previously unknown to the literary world (perhaps for good reason). Ode, Elegy, &c. on the ...
During the summer of 2015, AAS hosted a two-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for School Teachers, during which twenty-five K-12 teachers from all over the country convened for an intensive institute that featured lectures and discussions with scholars, field trips, and many hands-on workshops with original material from the Society’s collections. That ...
Odds are your Fourth of July celebrations will include something along the lines of mounds of food, parades, drinks, bonfires, and fireworks. Turns out, if you add in some minor property destruction and some long-winded toasts, you’ll be right on target with those colonists who celebrated the long-awaited news of Congress’s adoption of independence in ...
As a monographs cataloger at the American Antiquarian Society, I work primarily with books and pamphlets, often ones printed in the United States during the nineteenth century. However, the twenty-five miles of shelves at AAS hold much more than books and pamphlets, and recently I ventured into collections that were entirely new to me and ...
Last week we asked readers to figure out which five from a list of thirty nineteenth-century campaign newspaper titles were fake. Here are the answers. How did you do? Sober Second Thought (Hartford, CT), 1841 A Democratic newspaper supporting Martin Van Buren. Castigator (Middletown, CT), 1840 Another Democratic newspaper supporting Martin Van Buren. A Kick in the Pants - Fake ...
This election year the verbal thrusts and parries have been fast and thick throughout the primaries. Today Facebook and Twitter are as important as radio and TV in spreading the vitriolic name-calling and accusations of various candidates. In the nineteenth century politicians had to resort to print media, and one way to do this was ...
Earlier this year the American Antiquarian Society acquired an important archive of manuscripts and drawings related to American missionary activity in Western Africa. The collection tells the story of a couple, Emily Griswold (1838-1906) and her eventual husband, Benjamin Hartley (1838-1912). Emily was the daughter of the poet and publisher Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who edited anthologies, ...
Last week we posted ten nineteenth-century newspaper titles, which included three fake ones. Here are the real titles from that list with images of the mastheads as proof. 1. Sucker and Farmer’s Record (Pittsfield, IL). March 30, 1843. At that time people of that region were sometimes known as suckers. See the reply in this previous blog ...
When you look at the names of current newspapers you see much sameness in the titles. How often do you see Times, Post, Globe, Union, Herald, Sun, Independent, or Tribune as part of the title? Once in a while you might run across a paper still published today, such as the Quincy Herald-Whig (IL), which ...
This issue of the Subterranean (“Independent in everything, Neutral in nothing”), dated August 26, 1843, was acquired by AAS circa 2001 as part of a generous donation of Racy newspapers from Leo Hershkowitz. Published in New York City and reaching their peak in the 1840s, the contents of these papers are full of colorful stories ...
Asylum Journal (Brattleboro, VT) November 22, 1842 Published every Tuesday, By the inmates of the Vermont Asylum. The Asylum Journal was published at the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, a private institution founded in 1834 by Anna Hunt Marshall. It used a humane form of treatment on its patients, based on the theories of William Tuke ...
Let’s say you are the publisher of a newspaper in a small mining town in Colorado and you run out of the regular paper you use to print your publication. What do you do? In the case of The Silver World published in Lake City, Colorado, you find an alternative source of paper. Recently AAS acquired ...
“A book holds a house of gold.” – Chinese proverb AAS has quite a variety of American newspapers in different languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Cherokee, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Hawaiian. There is one language, however, that provided a unique challenge for printers. All of the newspapers above are letterpress. Each letter is ...
One feature that makes working at the American Antiquarian Society a joy is the number of resources available at our fingertips. Our reading room abounds in reference books and bibliographies. Our stacks are filled with county and local histories, city directories, genealogical publications, and other publications. We have access to numerous online databases. When an ...
