Additional AAS collections help amplify the voices of historic children. While some of the resources listed below were created by adults, they all assist in understanding the world of nineteenth-century American children.
Selected Digital Exhibitions
Picture Books by the McLoughlin Bros.
The American picture book market was shaped and defined by the McLoughlin Brothers, New York publishers who operated from 1858 to 1920. This company was one of the first publishers to focus exclusively on products for children.
In 2017, AAS assembled Radiant with Color & Art, an in-person exhibition documenting the products and working practice of the McLoughlin Bros. The online version of the exhibition of Radiant with Color & Art and the heavily illustrated exhibition catalog provide information on American picture books from 1858 to 1920.
Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print
Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print illustrates the experience of young women working in American textile mills from approximately 1834 to 1870. Sources include music, items from newspaper and periodical publications. Some texts by the mill girls themselves are included. The exhibition highlights the culture and working conditions of the mills.
Selected Video Content
The New England Primer
In 1995, the American Antiquarian Society acquired one of the two earliest known copies of the New England Primer. During this virtual program, AAS curator of children’s literature Laura Wasowicz and historian Kyle Roberts unpack the complex cultural history of the New England Primer. Babette Gehnrich, AAS chief conservator, discusses the significant efforts taken to conserve the fragile early eighteenth-century volume and provides a demonstration of some conservation techniques.
Presented on August 31, 2022
Isaiah Thomas Apprenticeship
In this talk AAS member Karen Sánchez-Eppler links Isaiah Thomas’s printing apprenticeship, his juvenile publishing, and his memorializing and collecting practices to assert the importance of children’s labor and ideas of childhood.
Presented June 8, 2020
Good Wishes for Children
Laura Wasowicz, the Society's curator of children's literature, recovered the identities of the illustrator and the translator of Good Wishes for the Children, a compilation of Hans Christian Andersen stories published in 1873 as a fundraiser for Boston Children’s Hospital. The illustrator Sarah Gooll Putnam (1851–1912), worked with translator Adeline A. Bigelow (1842–1915), to produce the edition. In this webinar, Wasowicz examines artistic collaboration and the opportunities and limitations encountered by gifted women of social means in late nineteenth-century American children’s book publishing.
Presented February 4, 2021
Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century
In this lecture, AAS member Nazera Sadiq Wright discusses how she located evidence of Black lives by exploring the often-uncatalogued signatures and inscriptions written in nineteenth-century Black girls’ autograph albums. These reveal the wide-ranging impact that early friendships, alliances, and associations had on the girls’ intellectual and political development. Nazera Sadiq Wright’s book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism.
Presented May 21, 2019
Selected Posts from Past Is Present, the AAS Blog
Children as consumers of books
- How Six-Year-Old Stephen Salisbury III Rescued One of the Rarest and Most Important Christmas Documents in American History
- Indestructible! How Children’s Books Have Survived the Centuries
- A Young Reader's Appreciation for Johnny Tremain
- How to Impress-the Modern Teen or the Power of Poe
These are more general:
Selected Articles from Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life
Commonplace is published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and AAS. It is a place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Commonplace speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, and anyone interested in American history before 1900.
Selected articles:
- Black Girlhood in Early American Print Culture
- Incarcerating Children in the Age of Emancipation
- The Souls of African American Children New Amsterdam/
- The Peculiar Game of the Yankee Peddler
AAS Collections of Interest
Games
The games collection includes games both for children and young adults and includes board and card games, puzzles, blocks, and paper dolls. Over 200 games are individually fully cataloged online in the General Catalog. Images of each are available by selecting "Scanned image available here" on the right corner of each record. This blog post Game On: AAS’s Game Collection describes the cataloging and digitization of the games collection.
Rewards of Merit
Rewards of merit, small tokens of congratulation given to students for good behavior and scholastic accomplishments, have been utilized by teachers for generations. Rewards of merit can be religious (for use in Sunday schools) or secular, touching lighter topics such as polite behavior, patriotic awareness, and children's games and other activities.
Rewards of merit reveal the priorities of educators and disciplinarians of the time. AAS's collection of nearly 2,000 hand-painted, engraved, printed, and chromolithographed examples provide a glimpse into education and cultural issues over a span of almost one hundred years. The collection is fully cataloged online in the General Catalog.
Maps made by Children
AAS holds nine maps drawn by children between 1810 and 1870. Many were completed as school assignments in geography. The maps were drawn with pen and ink or watercolor by both boys and girls, all between the ages of 10 and 16. Some are very local, depicting the county where the student lived and went to school, while others depict the entire globe. Students copied these maps from atlases, geography textbooks, or wall maps in the classroom. In the spring of 1862, 8-year-old Grenville H. Norcross recorded in his diary his homework assignments from his local primary school in Boston – from March to May he drew maps of all of the New England States, the City of Boston, and the Boston Common, which were shown at Map Day in May. Although he received average marks for most of his other work, for the maps he received 7 “extras” or merits.
Coloring Books
Coloring and painting books were popular in American starting around 1860 and included outlined images ready for watercolor or pencil additions. AAS holds a collection of 65 examples, some pristine, and others used by children in the past. These volumes, including one example published by the McLoughlin Brothers, were inexpensive and were touted by publishers as “an unfailing source of amusement for children. They instruct and refine, while giving pleasure, and aid in developing any talent they may have.” Scenes inside include landscapes, trains, pets, farm animals and pictures of children at play.
Children’s Drawings
The Society’s collection of drawings includes many made by children using ink, watercolor, or pencil. Art education, particularly drawing, was emphasized in primary schools during most of the nineteenth century as drawing was considered vital for later life – surveyors, milliners, rug makers, textile weavers, printers, and painters all had to master the skill to be successful in the American economy. Like the maps listed above, many drawings were made at school, particularly designs with mottos or moral themes. Drawing books, which were published texts with step by step instructions, were popular in the nineteenth-century and were used by both children and adults as they learned perspective, color theory and technique. The Society’s instructional drawing books are fully cataloged online in the General Catalog.