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 ...
When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...
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 ...
What do Red Jacket, Pompey Fleet, James Macpherson, Mary Washington, and Geoffrey Chaucer have in common? They all are depicted in, influences for, or creators of the 300 (give or take a few, depending on how you count them) broadside ballads Isaiah Thomas collected from Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly in 1814. Mostly printed in Coverly’s ...
For the first time ever, the extensive 1880s-era correspondence between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan and Sullivan’s mentor at Perkins School for the Blind, Michael Anagnos, are available online. An unusual collaboration between the American Antiquarian Society and Perkins (www.perkinsarchives.org) harnesses the power of social media to create a revealing new online exhibit that ...
Back in the 1950s, the AAS used to exhibit its items in places with traffic – (skeptical? Check out this 1952 photograph taken by Ted Woolner showing the front window of the Industrial City Bank and Banking Co. in Worcester with our Graphic Arts items) – but then the Internet was born and we learned ...
As the Prints in the Parlor (PIP) Project begins its last leg of digitization and access to images generated, those of us involved with it find ourselves itching to pull together some of the results into conversation with one another. The reason for this is to show how these book illustrations, sometimes independent of the ...
In August and December of 2010, the AAS received additional gifts to supplement the already delectable David Claypoole Johnston Family Collection. (You can see a portrait of the artist and read a short bio as part of the online exhibition of Portraits at the American Antiquarian Society.) Of the material which came (in the form of ...
A Place of Reading. That phrase defines Antiquarian Hall. Reading is an everyday occupation for those of us in Antiquarian Hall whether staff or, yes, readers. But it is also part of the title for the newest online exhibition posted on the AAS website. How did this one come to pass? It started over twenty ...
