Time for a New Illustrated Inventory – Watch Papers

After many years of inventorying, identifying and digitizing, the Society’s collection of nearly 500 watch papers are now available as an illustrated inventory! Watch papers are small, decorative pieces of paper or cloth that are meant to protect the mechanisms of watches, and were also used to indicate when a watch was last repaired and ...

Reading into Valentines

This semester, AAS is partnering with a class from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, as students there learn about the production and popularity of valentines in America. In an upper level colloquium, Professor Laura Kalba and her students are exploring the connections between nineteenth-century print ephemera and the ephemerality of images in the digital era. "Be ...

Omeka Tutorials

Ever since Omeka Mania first took hold here at AAS, we have delighted in learning about this exhibition publishing platform and helping each other make the most of it. A group of us meet about twice a month to share our progress and help each other out.  From these collaborations, AAS has published six online exhibitions in ...

Transcribing the War of 1812: AAS Collections in the Classroom

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Associate Professor of History at Assumption College Carl Robert Keyes and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American history and digital humanities in the classroom. About a year ago, AAS launched the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. Featuring 338 broadsides, 800 images, and many contextualizing essays, ...

Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print: AAS Collections meet DH Pedagogy

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Assistant Professor of English at  University of Maryland Baltimore County Lindsay DiCuirci and our digital humanities curator, Molly O’Hagan Hardy, recently collaborated to combine early American labor history and digital humanities in the classroom.  It is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the latest Omeka exhibition from AAS: Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print. We ...

New AAS Online Exhibition Launched: James Fenimore Cooper, Shadow and Substance

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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 ...

New Online Exhibition Launched: Women and the World of Dime Novels

Julie Le Roy is one of the more sensational dime novels, full of death and tragedy. Julie is seduced by a young man who promises marriage. When she realizes that he has no intention to marry her, she threatens to stab herself rather than continue as his mistress. She attempts to flee from him, but trips and falls onto her knife. She is one of many women in dime novels to come to a tragic fate as a result of premarital sex.

I’ve written previously about my experiences cataloging the AAS dime novel collection.  I was still fairly early in the process when I discussed the relative quality of three publishing houses: Beadle and Adams, George Munro, and Elliott, Thomes & Talbot. As I have continued working with the collection since, I have had a chance not ...

Omeka Mania at AAS

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We at AAS have figured out one way to beat the winter blues: Omeka! Thanks to the generosity of Jay Last (member since 1987), we held a two-day training session for our staff to learn this content management system for online exhibitions of special collections. Omeka is not archival software, but it was developed at ...