Digital resources

This directory contains 2,600 entries documenting the activity of individuals and firms involved in the manufacture and distribution of children's books in the United States chiefly between 1821 and 1876. 

New Nation Votes is a searchable collection of election returns from the earliest years of American democracy. The data were compiled by Philip Lampi. The American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives have mounted it online for you with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Black Self-Publishing is an ongoing collaborative research project based on a working list of books that are known to have been or may have been self-published by people of African descent who resided in North America and either were born before 1851 or first published before 1877. 

This resource 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.

A union catalogue describing engravings issued as separate publications or as illustrations in books and periodicals from the early eighteenth century through the year 1820. 

Clarence is an item-level catalog which provides detailed information on the newspaper and periodicals holdings of the American Antiquarian Society. 

An inventory of 29 boxes and 8 oversized folders of material dating from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries with the bulk of the collection falling between 1870 and 1890.

GIGI, the American Antiquarian Society's digital asset database, is a storage and retrieval system for the Society's digitally-created collections and surrogates.

Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831) was the foremost printer of the generation that came of age during the American Revolution. This resource explores Thomas’s life and American history and culture through selected documents that Thomas had a personal relationship with. Video, primary sources, lesson plans, an online game, and additional resources for use in the classroom are available.

Scholarly transcriptions of early texts, with basic editing and apparatus.  

Scholarly transcriptions of African American literature, with basic editing and apparatus.  

The Morgan Bibliography of Ohio Imprints, 1796-1850 describes books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in Ohio, from the earliest in 1796 through 1850. The bibliography is compiled and maintained by Richard P. Morgan.

This index includes 286,645 names of Ohio people, businesses and institutions whose names appear in the books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in Ohio from 1796 through 1850, and are listed in the Morgan Bibliography of Ohio Imprints, 1796-1850.

At AAS, we are infinitely proud of the scholarly, nose-to-the-book (or newspaper, or graphic art, or manuscript) work that goes on in Antiquarian Hall, but we invite you to take a minute and enjoy the lighter side of our people and collections by reading our blog.

Data detailing the work of 6,145 printers, publishers, editors, binders, papermakers, and others involved in the American printing trade through 1820. Although the data is unindexed and therefore difficult to search, it can be found in spreadsheet and JSON formats.

This database contains over 1 million entries of students, teachers, and trustees whose names appear in the catalogues from 1800-1900 of the American Antiquarian Society's School and College Collection. 

This resource 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.

Taught by Literature is a collaborative project honoring Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s lifelong commitment to education.  Taught by Literature celebrates Dunbar-Nelson’s legacy by recentering Black women writers, beginning with Dunbar-Nelson herself and extending to other Black women from the Harlem Renaissance and earlier. 

DTA virtually merges disparate archival collections, digital materials, and independent projects with a single search engine. 

A bit less formal than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Commonplace speaks—and listens—to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900.