American Antiquarian Society

Journal Article Translation & the Reception of Foreign Law in the Antebellum United States Get access M.H. Hoeflich M.H. Hoeflich 1M.H. Hoeflich is John H. & John M. Kane Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Kansas School of Law; B.A., M.A. Haverford College, M.A., Ph.D. Cambridge University, J.D. Yale. I want to thank Ms. Karenbeth Farmer, KU Law Class of 2002 for her research and editorial assistance. I would also like to acknowledge financial assistance in doing this paper received from the University of Kansas Center for International Business and the U.S. Department of Education, and the Kane Endowment at the Kansas University Endowment Association, and two Fellowships, the Phillips Fellowship in Jurisprudence of the American Philosophical Society and the Reese Fellowship in Bibliography and the History of the American Book of the American Antiquarian Society. A version of this paper was presented at a colloquium at the American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 50, Issue 4, Fall 2002, Pages 753–775, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/50.4.753 Published: 01 October 2002

Journal Article Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent. By Charles S. Grant. Columbia Studies in the Social Sciences, Number 601. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. xii + 227 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, appendixes, and index. $5.00.) Get access Clifford K. Shipton Clifford K. Shipton American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 48, Issue 2, September 1961, Pages 292–293, https://doi.org/10.2307/1902516 Published: 01 September 1961

Amphiagrion Chromagrion and bronze green above, abdomen slender.

Journal Article The Cultural Life of the American Colonies, 1607–1763. By Louis B. Wright. The New American Nation Series. Edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. xvi + 292 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $5.00.) Get access Clifford K. Shipton Clifford K. Shipton American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 44, Issue 1, June 1957, Pages 120–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/1898676 Published: 01 June 1957

Journal Article Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College. By Louis Leonard Tucker and The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795. By Edmund S. Morgan Get access Clifford K. Shipton Clifford K. Shipton American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 49, Issue 2, September 1962, Pages 316–317, https://doi.org/10.2307/1888634 Published: 01 September 1962

Journal Article Puritanism in Old and New England. By Alan Simpson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. x + 126 pp. Notes and index. $3.00.) Get access Clifford K. Shipton Clifford K. Shipton American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 42, Issue 4, March 1956, Pages 731–732, https://doi.org/10.2307/1889237 Published: 01 March 1956

As a representative model of a national “last-copy” repository, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) offers an interesting counterpoint to the other models generally discussed. As an independent institution, AAS is not formally associated with any university, government entity, or consortium. From its inception, the Society was founded with the desire to preserve printed sources for succeeding generations, and it has been sustained largely by private contributions from a nationwide network of members and supporters.Unlike those of other repositories, AAS collection policies are defined by date and by place of publication. Succinctly stated, its goal is to collect and preserve one copy of every item printed through the year 1876 in what is now the United States. Unlike other repository models, the AAS library serves as an active center for scholarship in early American history broadly and, more specifically, in the study of American book history. Its programs include residential research fellowships—not only for academics, but also for writers and creative artists—seminars, conferences, and the publication of a scholarly journal and of many important bibliographies.Despite these differences, the AAS resembles other national repository models in that the AAS seeks to collect, preserve, and make available materials from what is, in essence, a “national repository”.

Abstract This essay investigates Emily Dickinson’s domestic environment and her interaction with Native peoples, particularly the sellers of baskets and brooms who made seasonal travels to her neighborhood. It highlights both material and textual evidence that these wares were sold by Native American makers at the Dickinson family homes in Amherst, Massachusetts, during the late nineteenth century. The essay provides context for references about such so-called “Wanderers” in Dickinson’s letters. Her encounter in particular with a female basket seller at her own back door suggests Dickinson’s appreciation or even envy for a way of life that entailed travel and meaningful connection to place. The essay explores how the poet’s familiarity with Indigenous peoples and the crafted goods they peddled may have contributed to her thoughts on the independence that travel allowed and on nature and deep time.

This collection of essays edited by Mark Alan Mattes seeks to initiate a revival of the study of early American handwriting. As Mattes says in his introduction, most scholarly works that engage with manuscript history have an “insistent yet secondary attention to handwriting, suggesting the historiographic need for the first programmatic book-length study of handwriting in America in a generation” (30). The roots of this collection of fifteen essays plus foreword and afterword were in a 2019 conference, “The Futures of Handwriting,” held at Mattes’s home institution, the University of Louisville (Kentucky), and sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. Part of the University of Massachusetts’s series Studies in Print Culture and History of the Book, the collection makes a case for handwriting as an important media form that can relay inscribed ideas, both alphabetic and nonalphabetic.The last major study of American handwriting was published by Tamara Plakins Thornton in 1998. Mattes says that the current volume is “a necessary corrective to the predominantly Anglo-American, nation-focused coverage” (of Thornton’s Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, published by Yale University Press). Thornton’s own work was part of a longer trend in studies of British American handwriting and penmanship by genealogists, bibliographers, autograph collectors, and librarians such as Ray Nash, Anthony Petti, and Peter Beal. Thornton added to the discussion with economic, psychological, and gendered aspects of handwriting. This current volume of essays engages with Indigenous inscription as well as Black handwriting, manuscripts and mental health, letters and disability studies, and the place of writing in the working class in a way that Thornton’s nearly three-decade-old work does not.Mattes distinguishes this volume from other works on manuscript culture, making a tenuous case that “‘manuscript’ as a concept, or the ‘epistemological category’ of post-Gutenberg written culture, hovers over nearly every cultural context touched by this collection. . . . [But] handwriting is that which stands between [print and manuscript], enacting the relations between print and manuscript whose study has become central to manuscript studies today. Put another way, handwriting precedes manuscript. Sometimes” (7; italics in original). With this comment, Mattes perhaps gestures back to the longer history of letterforms, but he does not delve into that territory. Ultimately, his emphasis on the interplay between print and manuscript through the medium of inscription is one coherent way to bring together the disparate essays in this volume.These essays touch on various threads, including the history of the material text, of penmanship, of education, of individuality, and of Indigenous and Black literacies. Essays on Indigenous and nonalphabetic literacies by Danielle Skeehan and Christen Mucher are perhaps some of the volume’s stronger and most creative contributions to the history of handwriting and inscription. Skeehan explores the multiple meanings of a feather, from its role as a quill pen to its role as a symbol in Indigenous cultures. She also looks at the porcupine quill in Mi’kmaq boxes and meditates on the role of the hieroglyph in various Eastern Woodlands tribal communities. Mucher also looks at Indigenous symbols and signatures on colonial deeds (or doodems) and the complicated interplay of their representation in manuscript and print.Essays by Carla Peterson and Sarah Robbins stand out as significant contributions to Black handwriting in mid-nineteenth-century America. Peterson discusses the friendship album of Martina Dickerson in the context of the Black elite in early nineteenth-century America and the role of imitation and politeness in that world. Robbins writes about the manuscript version of Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), the “as-is” style of the manuscript, and what is missing in Henry Louis Gates’s edition of the work, such as slips pasted over words, carets, and other evidence of the working author. Both essays acknowledge overtly or by default the very scarcity of nineteenth-century manuscripts in the hands of Black writers, which presents a challenge for those who wish to pursue a study of Black handwriting. It is unfortunate that Nazera Wright, who was part of the 2019 conference and who is working extensively on Black penmanship, did not contribute to this volume.Other articles cover little-studied topics in handwriting history. Patricia Roylance looks at “print hand” in both schools and working-class circles. James Berkey writes about the manuscript predecessors to printed Civil War prison camp newspapers. John Garcia discusses overwriting in the diary of institutionalized patient Charles Beach. And Christopher Hager’s afterword on the handwriting of Civil War soldiers with disabilities shows how returning to handwritten sources is critical for understanding the lived reality of writing with disabilities. Many of these essays look at the way handwriting can be studied as a representation of the self.The one question that remains is whether the study of American handwriting or manuscripts will turn into a larger field or remain subservient to the history of the material culture of the printed text. If it does become a larger field, scholars must move beyond the tired fascination with the work of Derrida on archives and script. Early modernists in England have done important work on the sermon, the diary, and correspondence, some of which is mentioned by contributors to this volume. Sarah Robbins says in her essay, “[S]etting aside the fantasy that to encounter an author’s literary labors in script is to be granted unmediated access to her consciousness, we can attend with greater care to how she handled her materials—her paper, ink, thimble, sand, and quill” (257). Perhaps handwriting affords us not any insight into the individuality or frame of mind of the author but, rather, an understanding of the material reality of one small part of life. The ultimate question for the future of handwriting studies, then, might be whether the material realities of the lives of individuals matter as much as print, which had a wider distribution and, according to some, a wider influence on and better reflection of cultural trends.

In 19th century America, few people had knowledge of ancient Egypt. George Gliddon’s Panorama of the Nile was the first traveling exhibition that featured lectures and exhibitions of its civilization, its history, its art, and its culture. Although the exhibition was short-lived, it reached a great many people during its tour, inculcating them with its lessons. This article traces the origins and subsequent travels of the Panorama and describes how and where it was exhibited and the events surrounding those exhibitions.

December 01 2018 Henry David Thoreau: A Life Henry David Thoreau: A Life. By Laura DassowWalls. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 616. $35.00.) Mark Gallagher Mark Gallagher Mark Gallagher is a PhD candidate in the English Department at UCLA and the Barbara L. Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. He is the former editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Mark Gallagher Mark Gallagher is a PhD candidate in the English Department at UCLA and the Barbara L. Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. He is the former editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin. Online Issn: 1937-2213 Print Issn: 0028-4866 © 2018 by The New England Quarterly2018The New England Quarterly The New England Quarterly (2018) 91 (4): 705–707. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00713 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Mark Gallagher; Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The New England Quarterly 2018; 91 (4): 705–707. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00713 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe New England Quarterly Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2018 by The New England Quarterly2018The New England Quarterly Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This dissertation explores how capital-poor American traders harnessed navigational information and commercial knowledge to expand the geography of American foreign commerce from the late colonial period to the close of the Napoleonic Wars. American traders like those in the mid-level port of Salem, Massachusetts, who form the focus of this project, recognized that overcoming their knowledge deficit about navigation and foreign markets would be faster than overcoming their capital shortages or the economies of scale in larger ports like Boston, and they structured the geography of their maritime commerce to maximize the acquisition of market and route-based information. By the 1780s, Salem traders drew on their longstanding Atlantic commercial strategies to trade in new Indian Ocean markets as they had traded for centuries in the Caribbean, on circuitous voyages that they modified en route as they gathered new information about surrounding markets. They deliberately constructed broad and diverse commercial geographies not tied exclusively to British, French, or even European markets. This work redraws the map of early American foreign commerce, particularly American neutral trade, by foregrounding American circuitous trade across regions and across political boundaries and by highlighting American dependence on hubs of commercial information like Mauritius in the Indian Ocean that fell outside of major and well-studied shipping centers like London or Calcutta. Protecting access to information as a means to enhance the ability of American traders to compete and capitalize on new commercial opportunities, rather than simple Anglophilic or Francophilic sentiment, lay at the core of American commercial interests throughout the colonial and early national periods, particularly as places like Mauritius became the contested spaces in the American debate over neutrality and the union’s place in international geopolitics. This commercial context and this new explanation of how American neutral trade operated provides essential background for understanding the meaning and the stakes of early national debates over American political economy that lay at the heart of the union-building project.

Abstract This chapter explores the appropriation, adaptation, and translation of the picturebook Grandmamma Easy’s Michaelmas Day, or The Fate of Poor Molly Goosey . Originally issued by London publisher Dean & Company c. 1843 , it was reprinted three years later in Philadelphia by George S. Appleton. In about 1850, the text was Americanized and issued by Boston publisher Wier & White under the title Thanksgiving Day . Around 1870, New York publisher D. Appleton & Company translated the picturebook into Spanish and issued it as La Historia de La Gansa Amorosa (The Story of the Loving Goose) for sale in an emerging Hispanic book market, enlisting picturebook manufacturer McLoughlin Brothers. Tracing the transnational, translingual history of Molly, this study illuminates the use of recognized public holidays to reach new markets.

As a representative model of a national “last-copy” repository, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) offers an interesting counterpoint to the other models generally discussed. As an independent institution, AAS is not formally associated with any university, government entity, or consortium. From its inception, the Society was founded with the desire to preserve printed sources for succeeding generations, and it has been sustained largely by private contributions from a nationwide network of members and supporters. Unlike those of other repositories, AAS collection policies are defined by date and by place of publication. Succinctly stated, its goal is to collect and preserve one copy of every item printed through the year 1876 in what is now the United States. Unlike other repository models, the AAS library serves as an active center for scholarship in early American history broadly and, more specifically, in the study of American book history. Its programs include residential research fellowships—not only for academics, but also for writers and creative artists—seminars, conferences, and the publication of a scholarly journal and of many important bibliographies. Despite these differences, the AAS resembles other national repository models in that the AAS seeks to collect, preserve, and make available materials from what is, in essence, a “national repository”.

Reflect, if you will, on two libraries forming at the same time in nineteenth-century Worcester, Massachusetts, separated by only a seven-minute walk. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a rese...

Although Annie Dillard's masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) has conventionally been analyzed as a piece of Nature writing embedded in the Thoreauvian tradition, little has been said about the aesthetic concepts that underlie the text and Dillard's entire take on Nature. This research applies the concepts of Baumgarten's “science of sensible knowledge” to the narrator's perceptions in order to demonstrate that Dillard's ultimate message is the acceptance of Nature, even in its seemingly inhuman places. The study begins with the analysis of the structure of the book, which outlines two types of experience of Nature. Thevia positivais related to the aesthetic concept of beauty and to an active participation of the subject in the aesthetic experience of seeing as a verbalization, whereas the via negativais linked to the concept of the sublime and the experience of seeing as a letting go. Furthermore, the analysis employsand develops Linda Smith's valid conclusions (1991) to show how these two paths join in a third mystical and aesthetic path, the via creativa. By leaving the interpretation of natural signs open-ended, Dillard's modern vision enables the author's total acceptance of Nature's freedom, which fosters its beautiful intricacy as well as its horrible fecundity. Thus, Nature's creativity becomes the basis for an aesthetics of Nature's wholeness, which leadshuman beings to embrace the true essence of Nature, freed from anyprejudices.Resumen A pesar de que Pilgrim at Tinker River (1974), obra maestra de Annie Dillard, ha sido analizada convencionalmente como una pieza de literatura y medio ambiente incrustada en la corriente Thoreauviana y ha sido estudiada extensivamente, poco atención se le ha prestado a los conceptos estéticos que subyacen la obra y que pueden servir para comprender mejor la opinión de Dillard sobre la naturaleza. Por lo tanto, esta investigación aplica los conceptos de “ciencia del conocimiento sensible” de Baumgarten a la percepción del narrador con el fin de demostrar que el mensaje final de Dillard es la aceptación de la naturaleza, incluso en sus lugares aparentemente inhumanos. El estudio comienza con el análisis de la estructura del libro, que describe dos tipos de experiencia de la naturaleza relacionados con caminos místicos que llevan a Dios, dentro de la teología Neoplatónica. La vía positiva está asociada al concepto estético de la belleza y a la participación activa del sujeto en la experiencia estética de ver, la cual es definida como una verbalización. Por otra parte, la vía negativa está vinculada con el concepto de lo sublime y la experiencia de ver como un dejar ir. Además, el análisis emplea y desarrolla las válidas conclusiones de Linda Smith (1991) para mostrar cómo estos dos caminos se unen en un tercer camino místico y estético, la vía creativa. Al dejar la interpretación de signos naturales abierta, la visión moderna de Dillard permite al autor la total aceptación de la libertad de la naturaleza, lo que fomenta su hermosa intrincación, así como su horrible fecundidad. Así, la creatividad de la naturaleza se convierte en la base para la estética de la naturaleza en su totalidad, lo que lleva a los seres humanos a aceptar y respetar la verdadera esencia de la naturaleza, libre de cualquier prejuicio.

Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.

00 ($3.00, SAA members

Journal Article The Beginnings of Printing in Arizona with an Account of the Early Newspapers and a Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides printed in Arizona, 1860–1875. By Douglas C. McMurtrie. (Chicago: Black Cat Press. 1937. Pp. 44, facsims. 2. $2.50.), Indiana Imprints, 1804–1849: A Supplement to Mary Alden Walter's “Beginnings of Printing in the State of Indiana”, published in 1934. By Douglas C. McMurtrie. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society. 1937. Pp. [4], 307–93. 75 cents.), Montana Imprints, 1864–1880: Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides printed within the Area now constituting the State of Montana. By Douglas C. McMurtrie. (Chicago: Black Cat Press. 1937. Pp. 82. $5.00.) and Vermont Imprints before 1800: An Introductory Essay on the History of Printing in Vermont, with a List of Imprints, 1779–1799. By Elizabeth F. Cooley. (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society. 1937. Pp. xxxii, 133. $2.00.) Get access The Beginnings of Printing in Arizona with an Account of the Early Newspapers and a Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides printed in Arizona, 1860–1875. By McMurtrie Douglas C.. (Chicago: Black Cat Press. 1937. Pp. 44, facsims. 2. $2.50.)Indiana Imprints, 1804–1849: A Supplement to Mary Alden Walter's “Beginnings of Printing in the State of Indiana”, published in 1934. By McMurtrie Douglas C.. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society. 1937. Pp. [4], 307–93. 75 cents.)Montana Imprints, 1864–1880: Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets, and Broadsides printed within the Area now constituting the State of Montana. By McMurtrie Douglas C.. (Chicago: Black Cat Press. 1937. Pp. 82. $5.00.)Vermont Imprints before 1800: An Introductory Essay on the History of Printing in Vermont, with a List of Imprints, 1779–1799. By Cooley Elizabeth F.. (Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society. 1937. Pp. xxxii, 133. $2.00.) R. W. G. Vail R. W. G. Vail The American Antiquarian Society Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 44, Issue 2, January 1939, Pages 407–408, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/44.2.407 Published: 01 January 1939

Throughout the eighteenth century, the oblong octavo format had a specific variety of uses. Held horizontally, oblong books were almost exclusively used for printed and manuscript music, and printed music books frequently contain manuscript additions by amateur musicians, as well as non-music additions. Held vertically, oblong books were used by sermon auditors, students, notetakers, and businessmen and women for their receipts. In this article, I examine the changing print and manuscript uses of the oblong book over the eighteenth century. I look at the stationers who sold oblong blank books in the context of their wider blank book offerings; the publishers and booksellers who used the oblong format for printed books and who accounted for manuscript use by those who purchased the volumes; and the everyday practice of the musicians, business owners, and students who used them. Ultimately, this article suggests that studying book format requires not only the skills of traditional bibliography, but also research into the practical use of books.