While most library collections are printed or written on paper, hundreds of historic objects at the American Antiquarian Society -- including broadsides, children's books, and ribbon badges -- were printed onto cloth. Often produced as keepsakes, souvenirs, commemorative objects, or teaching tools, cloth printings in the AAS collection include texts and images printed onto silk, ...
Last year, the American Antiquarian Society received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support the reorganization, rehousing, and digitization of 655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people. The new digital resource Letters from Freedom provides additional context to the materials and to the stories of the people ...
Thanks to a generous grant from the Pine Tree Foundation of New York, newly digitized Hawaiian-language materials are now available through Printing in the Hawaiian Language, a digital resource on the American Antiquarian Society website. The resource contains a digital library of 115 digitized Hawaiian materials, as well as background information on the Hawaiian collection ...
Did you miss the Radiant with Color & Art exhibition featuring a portion of the AAS’s large archive of McLoughlin Brothers material that was shown at the Grolier Club last winter? Yes? Then you’re in luck! The exhibition has now been fashioned into a colorful online exhibit showcasing the history and work of the McLoughlin Brothers, the New York publishing ...
Editor’s note: Originally from Texas, Zoe Margolis is an Art History major at Smith College, slated to graduate this upcoming spring (class of 2018). Zoe wrote the first draft of this post on behalf of the students in the Spring 2017 course at Smith College “ARH291: Be My Valentine.” It was later revised by Prof. ...
AAS recently collaborated with the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery to create our latest exhibition, Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination. A man who has been immortalized as a hero and condemned as a charlatan, mourned as a victim and reviled as a traitor, Nat Turner lives in myriad formats and genres ...
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 ...
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 ...
Just over a year ago, we launched Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads: Verses in Vogue with the Vulgar. With over 800 images and 300 mini-essays, this site offers a unique and comprehensive view of the broadsides that Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) collected in early nineteenth-century Boston. Each broadside includes a brief explanation of its content by Kate Van Winkle ...
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 ...
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 ...
In December 2014, AAS member Joanne S. Gill gave the Society a copy of Louis Prang’s Oriental Ceramic Art, published in 1897. The work, in four volumes, describes the collection of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics collected by William T. Walters of Baltimore, now housed along with some of the original Prang watercolors in the ...
In a post last January about the difficulty of cataloging dime novels, I discussed how much valuable information is lost when a novel no longer has its wrapper (paper cover). One of the most important kinds of information lost is series information. Knowing that a novel was in a specific series is one of the ...
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 ...
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 ...
