Online Exhibitions

American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A View at the Bicentennial

In the Spring of 2012, AAS published The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History by Philip F. Gura. To supplement this publication, the Society digitized and made available in high-resolution the images and descriptions from the text.

Architectural Resources at the American Antiquarian Society

Architectural resources in the collection include design books, drawings, lithographs, engravings, periodicals, and photographs.

Artists in the Archive: Twenty-Five Years of Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowships

In 1995, AAS welcomed its first class of Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellows. Visual artists, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, poets, playwrights, performance artists, musicians and composers, as well as film and media makers came to the society seeking to create original works based on American history to present to non-academic audiences and readers. These fellows added immensely to the intellectual mix under the dome of Antiquarian Hall and contributed to lively conversations with AAS staff, academic fellows, other scholars, and the general public over the past quarter century. Many have also created powerful, imaginative, and beautiful works, which we are celebrating in a program we are calling Artists in the Archive: Twenty-Five Years of Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowships.

Beauties of America: The Staffordshire Pottery of John and William Ridgway

This online resource both catalogs and contextualizes the twenty-two pieces of the Ridgway dinner service “Beauties of America” – a subset of the Society' collection of Staffordshire potter using maps, photographs, source prints and rich descriptions of the objects.

Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in 19c American Prints

Most of the prints in this exhibit were designed simply to please the eye, but they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how 19th century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Explored are artistic depictions of the standard of beauty, ideal beauty, women as objects, variations on the standard, true womanhood, women at home, American slavery, women in public life, women as performers, use of women as advertising strategies and more.

Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere

Drawing on the American Antiquarian Society’s unparalleled collection of prints and books, the exhibition, Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere, will transform viewers’ understanding of the iconic colonial patriot. This in-depth examination of Revere’s many skills as a craftsman will help illustrate the entrepreneurial spirit of an early American artisan who stood at the intersection of social, economic, and political life during the formation of the new nation.

Big Business: Food Production, Processing & Distribution in the North, 1850-1900

This online exhibition features lithographs, chromolithographs, trade catalogues, trade cards, and product labels from the American Antiquarian Society's collection that help shed light on major changes in the way Americans in the North produced and sold their food in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Caribbeana Project at AAS

The Caribbeana Project at the American Antiquarian Society features some of the major works about the Caribbean or published in the Caribbean that can be found in AAS's collections. These include letters, manuscripts, almanacs, laws, newspapers and bound volumes of all kinds. While not a comprehensive accounting of AAS's Caribbeana holdings, this exhibition examines and emphasizes the close relationship between early British North America or the United States and the Caribbean World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This website samples over one hundred of AAS’s most interesting Caribbean items, delving into the close relationship between these two regions, and opening up the collection for scholarship by identifying avenues for potential research.

Collecting the Jacksonian Era: How Books Become Library Collections at AAS

In 2015, the William C. Cook Jacksonian Era Collection arrived at AAS adding almost five hundred books, prints, manuscripts, newspapers, and more to the Society's already significant holdings from or about the Jacksonian Era. This online exhibition follows the books from that collection through the process of being integrated into the Society's other library collections in order to reveal the everyday work of collection-building being done by AAS members, staff, friends, and researchers.

The David Claypoole Johnston Collection

This exhibition highlights the Society's outstanding collection of lithographs, watercolors, and drawings of artist David Claypoole Johnston.

From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations

Some of the earliest and rarest materials printed in British North America were not printed in English. Instead, these books, pamphlets, and broadsides were printed in the various dialects of Algonquian, the language of the Native Americans who populated the American Northeast. This exhibition explores the contributions of those who labored in translating and printing works in the Algonquian family of native languages.

In Pursuit of a Vision: Two Centuries of Collecting at AAS

In the early days of the American Antiquarian Society, founder Isaiah Thomas asked members to send materials for preservation in the Society's library at Worcester, Massachusetts. Over the course of two hundred years, generations of the Society's members, friends, and staff have ably answered Thomas's call. This exhibition celebrates the generosity and farsightedness of some of the many collectors, book dealers, and librarians who have, each in his or her own way, contributed to the greatness of AAS.

An Invitation to Dance: A History of Social Dance in America

An Invitation to Dance: A History of Social Dance in America showcases the unique print culture items on the subject of dance within the Society's holdings. From its fashion and origins, to its etiquette and opposition, this online exhibit features a sampling of artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries. Click on the image to the left from Stephen Salisbury's "Bal Masque" ticket to attend.

Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project

With over 800 images and 300 mini-essays, this site offers a unique and comprehensive view of the broadsides that Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) collected in early nineteenth-century Boston. Each broadside includes a brief explanation of its content by Kate Van Winkle Keller.

James Fenimore Cooper: Shadow & Substance

The American Antiquarian Society is a natural home for an online exhibition about James Fenimore Cooper's works. For many years the Society has supported The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, an editorial project the bears the seal of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. To support the work of the editors of the Writings, also knows as the Cooper Edition, the Society has actively collected editions of Cooper's works printed in any language up to the year 1877.

Louis Prang and Chromolithography

This online exhibition showcases the collection and career of Boston lithograph firm Louis Prang & Company, within the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Featuring prints, salesman's samples and progressive proof books, this exhibition tells the story of Prang during the height of his career in chromolithography during the second half of the nineteenth century. Prang pioneered developments in the chromolithographic process, creating painting-like prints for the general public. He is also considered the "Father of the American Christmas card" having introduced it to the American public in 1874 after the wife of an agent suggested the idea to him while he was promoting his business abroad. Instrumental in the promotion of art education for public school students, Prang helped develop curriculum for schools, teaching art instructors, and creating safe, quality art supplies for students.

Making Valentines: A Tradition in America

Making Valentines: A Tradition in America is designed to show the evolution of the Valentine's Day card. This exhibition is drawn, in part, from an original display created by AAS staff member Audrey Zook in 1985. It includes a select group of Valentine's Day cards belonging to the Society.

Men in the Young Republic

This online exhibition explores images of men in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The selection of prints from the Society's collections represents male roles and activities and reflects social expectations.

Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print

At the start of America’s industrial revolution, a large number of young women found employment and a unique form of independence in American textile mills. Featuring selections both by and about the mill girls, from approximately 1834 to 1870, the exhibition highlights the culture and working conditions of the mills and the actions the women took to better their lives through self-advocacy.

The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1865

The history of America has always been intimately entwined with the history of communications media—and that has always been changing. This exhibition broadly explores the interconnectedness of American news media, in all its formats, with changes in technology, business, politics, society, and community from 1730 to 1865.

A Place of Reading: Three Centuries of Reading in America

This exhibitions uses images and objects from the AAS collections to illuminate the spaces where reading happened in early America.

Portraits! Worcester Portraits in the AAS Collection

This exhibition features the images of thirty-one Worcester residents depicted in the Society's portrait paintings, miniatures, and sculpture collections.

Radiant With Color & Art

As one of the first publishers to focus exclusively on products for children, McLoughlin Brothers was able to shape and define the American picture book market. This exhibition documents the working practice of the firm by associating its products with many of the tools used during the production process, such as printing blocks, designer mock-ups, and watercolor illustration art.

Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Early Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents

This online exhibition effectively creates a digital archive of several Algonquian-language printed books and pamphlets, or wussukwhonk as they are called in the Nipmuc language, chosen for the value they add to current language reclamation work taking place in Nipmuc country. The manuscript collections featured here include town records, land deeds, and account books from English settlements established on Nipmuc homelands in the southern part of the area now referred to as Worcester County.

Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination

Using print and manuscript collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this exhibition explores portrayals of Turner in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bookends of this exhibition are the two “confessions”: one from 1831 and the other from 1967 when William Styron created the most controversial version of Turner to date.

Shakespeare in the Parlor

This online exhibit, generated using images from the Prints in the Parlor cataloging and digitization project, considers the ways William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) characters were pictured inside the covers of literary annuals and gift books in the nineteenth-century.

Summer Vacationing in New England

This exhibition brings together a selection of images from the Society's collections that illustrate the most popular and most beautiful New England destinations for summertime visitors.

Victorian Valentines: Intimacy in the Industrial Age

As this exhibition shows, the practice of exchanging valentines on February 14th was a distinctly modern tradition, first popularized in the United States in the 1840s.

Following practices previously developed in England, lovers, friends, and family members bought or made fanciful valentines decorated elaborately with paper lace, colorful printed materials, ribbons, hair, and scraps. Manufacturers of valentines, such as Esther Howland and George C. Whitney, played a crucial role in establishing Valentine’s Day as an American holiday. These same manufacturers often sold valentine writers, collections of short poems and affectionate messages meant to be copied verbatim, to aid the less poetically-inclined in wooing their beloved. Along with valentines themselves, these writers shaped the way Americans both expressed and experienced affection for one another.

Visions of Christmas

Visions of Christmas exhibits an array of Christmas images from the Society's collections. Among the featured artists are F.O.C. Darley, Thomas Nast, Louis Prang, and the McLoughlin Brothers.

With a French Accent: American Lithography to 1860

This exhibition explores the connections between American and French lithography in the early days of this printing technology. Themes include the circulation and reproduction of French imagery in the United States, the stylistic contributions of French lithographic artists who immigrated to America, and the reproduction of American genre paintings by French publishers for distribution in Europe and the United States.

A Woman's Work is Never Done

A look at women's work, from before the American Revolution through the Industrial Revolution, using selected images from the Society's collection.

Women and the World of Dime Novels

This exhibition explores the AAS collection of dime novels. Full of romance and adventure, dime novels were a variety of melodramatic fiction that was popular in the United States from about 1860 until the early 1900s. Published as cheap paperbacks (most cost only ten cents), they were generally regarded as low-quality fiction.