For those in later years, the bell’s value lay not in its powerful sound, but in its visual representation.

To judge from the Concord collection, the public forum of antebellum America was no model of democratic deliberation.

Commemoration, commerce, and complex social connections combined to dictate the paths and diversions of this obscure object and others.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving” both in terms of preservation and Christian redemption—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

Since I hadn’t found Memoir in the likely places based on the finding guide, I began going systematically, folder by folder, through the fifty boxes, more than a few of which still at that time contained bundles of Jenks’s many sermons inside, wrapped in wastepaper exactly as they had been when deposited at the library.

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

Several cartoons from the presidential campaign of 1848 show Salt River as a foreboding obstacle for all who seek the nation’s highest office.

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death.

Here was a Bible that had not only come over on the Mayflower in 1620, but had belonged to some of the most prominent early settlers, according to annotations on its pages . . . Could it be true?

More than a historical resource, “The Lost Museum” invites us, then, to ponder the narratives with which we stage authenticity, the material objects and practices with which every generation reimagines the kinship of truth and fiction.

Erotic standards are also historically contingent: what would have raised eyebrows in the eighteenth century often seems laughably tame, even quaint to the modern viewer.

Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press

Ink covers much of the wood work, various parts have been gouged by nails or other sharp tools, the bar handle has been smoothed by the hands of many journeymen printers, and overall the press has the worn but proud look of an old veteran.

Historians are finally coming to realize that diet, the production of and commerce in foodstuffs, and cookery are not only important but are actually defining characteristics of a nation’s culture.

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on […]

My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling.

I entered the archive in Florence in June 2015 looking for one item, and I walked out with something completely unexpected, yet to which I was deeply and personally connected.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation. The Indigenous objects that once resided in early American collections present powerful opportunities for institutions to reflect on their own entanglements with centuries-long patterns of dispossession and settler colonialism.

Beginning with Thomas’ initial gift of 2,650 titles, the research library currently boasts nearly 750,000 volumes, over 2 million newspaper issues, as well as large collections of periodicals, graphic arts, children’s literature, and manuscripts.

Caroline Winterer describes America as “a vast Enlightenment laboratory” but one cannot easily imagine Winterer’s exuberant, capacious and eclectic American […]

As a profession, we are experiencing a generational shift, and much of the data created several decades ago has already been lost.

Sponsored by The Chipstone Foundation.

Thinking about books as objects that were processed, stored, and packaged by industrialists (I use the term advisedly, instead of “printer”) like Isaiah Thomas helps re-orient the way we think about literature in early America.

Historical editors can never fully anticipate the needs of future historians, but hopefully with a growing respect for the full documentary record, including material that might, to some, be considered unimportant, editors will begin to add accounts, images, and other addenda and make them searchable, as the editors of the George Washington papers have done.

Pigeons—like some other breeds of birds—were easy to hunt, indeed, so easy that the hunt couldn’t be sustainable.

Sarah Nehama’s catalogue In Death Lamented was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that she curated […]

Creating a literary genealogy linking Occom and Wheatley could change conceptions of early American Indian and African American writing and missionary work

I’m not in the habit of reading my work once it appears in print.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

At first glance the map may not seem like the work of one of the best-informed Frenchmen in colonial Louisiana…

Hendrick Aupaumut has had many collaborators, but it wouldn’t be entirely correct to say that he has worked with many of them.

His descriptions of Poll were not as a bird in its own habitat, but as his companion.

Sitting in a sunlit reading room at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I pored over letters I knew from genealogical records and internal evidence were the material remains of a stepfamily.

Matters related to the history, production, and evolution of a text as a text did not have to be prompted by the professor but figured seamlessly into class discussion and student papers.

Can less produce more?

I sensed the spark of time travel, but even the most vaporous spirits seemed unable to slip between the apertures of the past and this particular May evening.

Jefferson documented his collection decisions in this manuscript—which books to retain, which ones to give away, and to whom.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The archive does not have an online or printed catalogue, which is probably why its visitors’ sign-in book has so few entries. More the pity, since it is one of those rare places with a collection broad enough to cater to a wealth of interests, and yet manageable enough to really work through.

Beginning in July 2002, the Readex Corporation, in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, began releasing the first installments of “Evans Digital,” […]

Pamphlets, plays, poetry, and periodicals overflowed with news and opinion about bloody tragedies, both real and imagined.

Historical inquiry may often be blocked by the prior agenda of the historian.

“Do [these pamphlets] represent what the Atheneum’s generous donors perceived as important materials of the day, things that any major cultural repository should hold?”

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

“Given its unique origins and historical identity, the Smithsonian would seem to deserve protection not just from private exploitation but also from the rigid ideological prescriptions of some of its would-be defenders.”

“The time had come to liberate the parchment after fifty years, a step fraught with uncertainties and concerns.”

During the early twentieth century, Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943), the most influential early American historian of his time, spent several […]

    Databases Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources, 1589-1839: An Index http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/Index.htm The Hymn Tune Index. All hymns […]

“[T]he historian doing this sort of research must learn how to build relationships and earn the trust of people–usually historical society volunteers–who might be skeptical of outsiders and inclined to protect their cherished local history from professional revisionists intent on rewriting it.”

“As the Internet continues to enable and encourage possibilities for professional-nonprofessional collaboration, the historian and genealogist may find that the gulf between them has been bridged–almost in spite of themselves.”

“How do students who have never produced original research papers begin to write about aspects of an important historical figure whose accomplishments have been mostly forgotten over time?”

One concept sure to provoke debate among scholars is the notion that a tribal understanding of the past may incorporate ways of knowing that are different from western epistemologies, yet more sophisticated than mere wishful thinking.

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