navOpen-Access Digital Collections
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Ambrotypes Collection InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society's photograph collection includes approximately one hundred and fifty ambrotypes. Ambrotypes became popular in the mid-1850s, and were much less expensive to produce than daguerreotypesAmbrotypes became popular in the mid-1850s, and were much less expensive to produce than daguerreotypes. The low-contrast images are sometimes difficult to distinguish from cased tintypes, unless the black background material is damaged. |
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Audubon's Birds of America: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThis resource provides access to the color plates inside lithographer Julius Bien’s rare edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1860 in New York. The Bien volume was produced entirely in America, unlike the famous 1838 engraved edition, which was printed in Scotland and England by W.H. Lizars and Robert Havell. Begun seven years after the death of John James Audubon, the Bien set was intended to provide a more affordable edition of the Birds of America, appropriate for educational institutions. |
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Charles Peirce Collection Illustrated Box ListSatirical prints published in London during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were presented in various ways for a growing consumer audience. This illustrated inventory consists of 65 British and American satirical prints published between 1796 and 1807. Well-known British caricaturists James Gillray (1757-1815), Isaac Cruickshank (1756-1811) and Charles Williams (active 1797-1830), are well represented with colored social satires. |
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Daguerreotypes Collection InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society's photograph collection includes nearly 230 daguerreotypes. Daguerreotypes, the first commercial form of photography, appeared in America around the year 1839. These were produced by first sensitizing a polished silvered copper plate with iodine vapor, and then exposing the plate to light. |
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David Claypoole Johnston Family Illustrated Box ListDavid Claypoole Johnston (1799-1865) is a noted cartoonist and humorist, who also worked in watercolor, charcoal and oil. The David Claypoole Johnston Family Box List consists of 28 boxes of material dating from 1799 through the early twentieth century, and spans two generations.The collection consists of approximately 50 watercolors, two states of three of his most famous cartoons (including colored proofs, engravings and watercolors), pencil, pen, ink and wash drawings, and working pieces. |
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Drawings Collection InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society’s drawings collection consists of over 550 drawings in graphite, pen, ink and wash, chalk, watercolor and charcoal ranging in size from items used as bookmarks to large landscapes intended for display in the home; there are also over a dozen sketchbooks. The collection ranges from the late 1700s to the early twentieth century, with the bulk dating from the mid-nineteenth century. For the most part, the works in this collection are by amateurs, not professional artists, and they are representative of similar collections stashed away in local historical societies and other libraries. |
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European Political Print Collection InventoryThis fully illustrated inventory of over 200 graphic arts items dating from 1720 to 1843 represents a traditionally out of scope area of the Society’s major collections, but it remains a rich resource for those studying the cultural capital of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While the advent of American caricatures and cartoons is found with Paul Revere, William Charles and the comic popularity of David Claypoole Johnston, this collection traces the source of such artists to the Transatlantic world. Titled the European Political Print Collection, the pieces are of British, French, German and Dutch origin, and feature content in various languages. Some of the prints are hand-colored and others have text or poems beneath referencing the visual material; the processes represented are mezzotint, aquatint, engraving and etching. |
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Farber Gravestone CollectionThe Farber Gravestone Collection is an unusual resource containing over 13,500 images documenting the sculpture on more than 9,000 gravestones, most of which were made prior to 1800, in the Northeastern part of the United States. The late Daniel Farber of Worcester, Massachusetts, and his wife, Jessie Lie Farber, were responsible for the largest portion of the collection. This online version of the Farber Gravestone Collection is sponsored by AAS. The website and online image database have been created by David Rumsey and Cartography Associates. |
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Hawaiian Engravings Collection InventoryOne of the unusual portions of the Hawaiian Collection is an assortment of more than thirty engravings produced by students at the Lahainaluna School on the island of Maui. A mission press was introduced at this institution about 1828 and was used to provide male students with instructions in the skills of engraving and printing. No complete inventory of Lahainaluna engravings has been made, but the number reported in various locations exceeds 100. A checklist made by George T. Lecker in 1927 records thirty-three maps and fifty-seven sketches of houses and landscapes, only one of which is of a non-Hawaiian subject. A view of the town common of Holden, Massachusetts, circa 1840, as sketched from memory by Edward Bailey, a teacher at the school and a native of Holden, is included in the collection. |
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Images of WorcesterThis collection of 180 glass plate negatives document the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, as it looked from about 1905 to 1910. Included here are views of more than thirty city churches, buildings associated with Memorial Hospital, bucolic views of nearby Lake Quinsigamond, and bustling street sceens of downtown Worcester. A handful of images document the April, 1910 visit of President William Howard Taft to the city. Many of these negatives were likely used to print photographic postcards, which Wohlbrück was producing at this time. |
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Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads ProjectWith 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. |
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The Letters of Abigail Adams: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society (AAS) holds a collection of over 200 letters written by Abigail Adams. The letters in this collection are addressed almost exclusively to Abigail’s sister Mary and Mary’s daughter, Lucy Cranch Greenleaf (1767-1846). The text of many letters has been unavailable online until now. This illustrated inventory also marks the first time digital images of these letters have appeared online. |
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McLoughlin Bros. Catalogues, Price Lists, and Order Forms InventoryThe catalogs, prices lists, and order forms from the McLoughlin Bros. Collection are available as pdf files. Digital copies have been made since each item is extremely fragile. |
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Painted Portraits, Miniatures and Sculpted Portrait BustsThis inventory illustrates over 160 of the Society's painted portraits, miniatures and sculpted portrait busts. Use the thumbnail gallery with reduced-sized images to browse the collection. |
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Paul Revere Collection InventoryPaul Revere. The name evokes much for historians, silver collectors, art historians and printmakers. Among his other trades were dentistry, ventures into an iron and brass foundry, innovator of rolled copper and, of course, ardent patriot. While Revere (1735-1818) is most famously known for his legendary midnight ride as well as his three-dimensional wares, his prints and works on paper remain some of the most iconic images of the late eighteenth-century. The Society's collection contains separately published prints, currency, receipts and bookplates, illustrations and plates, and political pieces. The inventory provides are titles, sheet and plate sizes, approximate dates, subject-tags, links to bibliographic records and detailed descriptions as well as images for both viewing and downloading. To keyword search or browse across the collection, we have also provided a searchable PDF of the entire inventory as well as a thumbnail gallery with reduced-sized images. |
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Personal Photographs of Theodore C. WohlbrückThis collection contains 164 glass plate negatives taken by the photographer Theodore C. Wohlbrück (1879–1936). It includes images of the Wohlbrück family, the construction of their home in Worcester, Mass., and their travels. |
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Photographs 17th and 18th Century Structures in MassachusettsHarriette Merrifield Forbes (1856-1951) was a Worcester author and historian. From 1887 to 1945, she photographed seventeenth and eighteenth century structures throughout central and eastern Massachusetts. Her images, preserved as 853 negatives (mostly glass plate negatives), have been digitized and cataloged as part of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. |
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Photographs of North American Indians, 1850-1900: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThis illustrated inventory highlights a small collection of nineteenth-century photographs Indigenous peoples of North America. The collection was compiled as a resource decades ago, long before the creation of the Society’s online catalog, and represents just a fraction of the resources documenting Indigenous people in AAS collections. |
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Photographs of the New England Fair by B.T. Hill: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society contains a collection of glass plate negatives taken by Benjamin Thomas Hill (1863-1927), at the Worcester County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds in the early decades of the twentieth century. The photographs depict the fairgrounds behind Norton Company in the city’s Greendale neighborhood. The fairgrounds were lost about 1947 when Norton Company bought the land and expanded its business. |
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Photographs of Tuskegee Institute: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society holds a small collection of fifty-six photographs depicting life in and around Tuskegee Institute, in Tuskegee, Alabama, ca. 1890-1915, taken by an unknown photographer. The campus, now known as Tuskegee University, of the school is depicted here during the tenure of the school’s first president Booker T. Washington. Here, African-American students, both male and female, are seen in the various schools on campus learning practical skills including nursing, dairy, sewing, teaching, farming (cotton and sugar cane), mattress making, blacksmithing, printing and laundering. The collection also includes group portraits of students and teachers. There are also images of the other buildings on and near the school's campus, including former slave quarters and a plantation house. |
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Printed Ribbon Badges: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society collects printed materials of all kinds, including ephemera such as printed ribbon badges. The Society’s collection of printed ribbons featured in this illustrated inventory includes over 170 badges ranging in date from 1824 to 1900 and includes ribbons worn to welcome Lafayette during his 1825-26 visit to the United States, mourning badges sold during the funeral of John Quincy Adams, and celebratory ribbons worn during the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument. In the nineteenth century, ribbon badges were engraved, lithographed, or run through relief letterpress presses. Some printers, after seeing the profitability of printing on silk and other fabrics, soon specialized in the trade and hired skilled artists like Peter Maverick to create the visual images that characterize many of the earliest examples. |
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Reclaiming Heritage: Digitizing Early Nipmuc Histories from Colonial DocumentsThis 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. |
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Silhouettes: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society collection of portraits contains 209 silhouettes. Silhouettes are profile portraits made of paper that became popular in the mid-eighteenth century in Europe. Generally the profile of the sitter is cut out of white paper and the resulting shape is then mounted on glossy black paper or black fabric. These portraits became very popular in the United States during the early nineteenth century. Itinerant silhouette cutters traveled up and down the eastern seaboard advertising in American newspapers and making likenesses of a wide variety of citizens from all walks of life. Within the collection are traditional silhouette cuttings on black paper, hollow-cut silhouettes with black paper or fabric underneath, and painted silhouettes. Some have been partially cut, allowing for ink and watercolor detailing to be added. |
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Tintype Collection InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society's photograph collection includes over two hundred tintypes. Tintypes, also known as ferrotypes or melainotypes, were produced from the mid-1850s until as late as the mid-1930s. They were less expensive and more durable than either daguerreotypes or ambrotypes, and quickly became the most popular form of early photography. The image consists of a collodion positive fixed to a thin plate of varnished iron. The name "tintype" is derived from the tin shears used to cut the image from a larger sheet. |
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Watch Papers: An AAS Illustrated InventoryThe American Antiquarian Society holds a collection of more than 400 American watch papers ranging in dates from the 1790s to 1910. These ephemeral items were inserted into a watch case to protect the delicate mechanisms from dust and debris. These papers often included advertisements for the watch maker or jeweler and were frequently used over the life of a watch to record repairs, with manuscript notes and dates of oiling, spring replacement and cleaning made on the back of the small round disc of paper. Many also include decorative images showing elaborate time pieces, allegorical women, Father Time, or even the shopfront or factory where the watch was made. |
