New AAS Videos Provide Primer on Colonial Printing

Have you ever wondered when and how printing arrived in colonial British North America? Who were these early printers, and what did they print? How did printing change throughout the course of the colonial period? What were early newspapers like? How were images produced? You can find the answers to these questions and more in our ...

Isaiah Thomas Is Going Digital

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On a beautiful sunny day in June, AAS Director of Outreach Jim Moran and I headed out to Historic Deerfield in western Massachusetts to meet up with a film crew from Northern Light Productions. Surrounded by the dark wood and heavy equipment of the Wilson Printing Office, it wasn’t difficult to set the stage for ...

C-SPAN’s profile of Worcester is now available online!

The C-SPAN crew filming AAS President Ellen Dunlap.

Periodically, C-SPAN2 Book TV and C-SPAN3 American History TV profile regional American cities through a series they call C-SPAN Cities Tour. Working with their local cable partners, special C-SPAN production crews explore the literary life and history of these cities by interviewing local historians, librarians, authors, and civic leaders. Last Autumn C-SPAN visited Worcester and ...

The Gamebrarians: AAS Plays a 19th-Century Version of Cards Against Humanity

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A few months ago we posted an image on Instagram and Facebook that, while fun, we had no particular expectations for. It was a quite a surprise, then, when it garnered a massive amount of attention on both platforms. To this day it remains one of our most widely circulated posts on Facebook. The image was a ...

Lessons Learned through AAS’s YouTube Channel

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Sarah Harker, AAS media outreach intern this summer, graduated from Clark University last May, where she studied Film and Communications & Culture. She is currently an independent filmmaker while continuing her education at Clark, pursuing her master's degree in Professional Communications. Having grown up in northeastern Massachusetts and living the past four years in Worcester as a ...

Video Modules Enliven AAS Website

Whenever you create a movie you always shoot more footage than you can actually use. When we created our new orientation film describing the Society as part of our bicentennial celebrations last year, we decided to put the extra footage we had created to good use by creating five short video modules and embedding them ...

Huzzah! A Special Tribute to AAS at 200

A familiar voice begins, “…two years ago, it was a great honor to be elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society,” as President Bill Clinton sends his bicentennial congratulations via video. The Society has elected fourteen U.S. Presidents to membership, beginning with John Adams in 1813. Given the demands on a President’s – and a ...

Video: AAS President Shares Collections

The American Artifacts program on C-Span 3 will air a 30-minute television program on the American Antiquarian Society this weekend. The program is a virtual tour of Antiquarian Hall showcasing some of the Society’s treasures with our president, Ellen Dunlap. A short segment featuring the Eliot Indian Bible can be seen here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=muBe1woHuVA The full ...

Behind the Scenes at the American Antiquarian Society, or What I Learned from a Tour of the Library

Did you know that a patriot printer named Isaiah Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society in 1812? Did you know that the terms uppercase, lowercase, and stereotype originated from terms used in relation to early printing presses? Did you know that early printers needed to read backwards and upside down? Do you know why the ...

Apply for an AAS research fellowship and learn a trade!

Since the early 1970s, the American Antiquarian Society has been awarding fellowships to enable scholars to come to Worcester and spend anywhere from a month to a year in residence at the Society, immersing themselves in our collections. Many fellows over the years have raved about the richness of the research experience, which is borne ...