My latest volunteer project, to quote Winston Churchill, was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." I was handed twenty-eight legal depositions, tucked in a manila folder, with a notation that simply said: “The depositions were part of a suit by multiple claimants for the $500 reward.” First, the riddle: Who offered the $500 reward? ...
Last year on Past is Present we featured a series of interviews with American Antiquarian Society fellows in order to showcase their thoughts about writing history and work with the Society's collections. This year we’ve decided that, instead of transcribing those interviews, we will make them available as podcasts. This will let our readers (and ...
AAS member Jane K. Dewey has volunteered in the manuscripts department for almost 30 years and processed forty large collections. Jane most recently organized, housed, and wrote about some of the manuscripts from the Pike-Wright Family papers, a recent donation from Susan Pike Corcoran. Even though the donation includes a substantial collection of ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, and photographs and a ...
Linford Fisher is associate professor of history at Brown University, where he studies and teaches the religious history of colonial America and the history of Indian and African slavery and servitude. His first book, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, was published by Oxford University Press in ...
Sean Moore is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and recently completed an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Society. His work has received support from a variety of institutions, including the John Carter Brown Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Fulbright program, and he has just ...
I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person. (p. 17-8) So Solomon Northup begins his harrowing account of slavery from the inside. In Twelve Years a Slave, Northup, a free black man from upstate ...
We are very excited that an article about the inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin by Susanna Ashton that appeared in the most recent issue of Common-place was picked up by the Associated Press and is getting some national circulation, including in the New York Times over the past weekend. If you haven't yet ...
The American Antiquarian Society has a large number of periodicals and newspapers of which only a single issue was printed before they folded. There are a variety of reasons for why this might be. Sometimes issue no. 1 is really a prospectus trying to generate interest and subscribers, but failing in this mission. Often it ...
On Friday, April 5th from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., the American Antiquarian Society will be hosting our 6th Annual Adopt-A-Book event. This event is an important fundraiser for the curatorial team at the Society, and monies raised will go towards future acquisitions of books, prints, newspapers, manuscripts, and children’s literature. Below are examples of two ...
A very rare self-published collection of poems by Holmes, a farmer in Greene County, OH east of Dayton. Most of the poems are short and predominantly religious in theme. Preceding these is Holmes’s 20-page “Dialogue on Slavery,” which offers an unusual poetic recapitulation of the religious, economic, and political arguments for and against slavery. Firmly ...
Today we present a story in two parts, part of which you probably already know and part of which you probably didn't know before. PART I is a summary of the story of John Brown, Harper's Ferry, and American Anti-Slavery from AAS volunteer Colin Fitzgerald: For three days in October 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown conducted ...
Henry Box Brown (b. 1816) escaped lifelong slavery in Virginia by shipping himself in a box (with the help of white and African-American abolitionists) to Philadelphia in 1849. One of the few primary sources detailing his breathtaking escape to freedom is the children’s book Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children. Written in 1849 by Quaker abolitionist ...