Digital Collections

The Society’s collection of printed ribbons featured in this digital collection 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.

The American Antiquarian Society has a 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, is depicted here during the tenure of the school’s first president Booker T. Washington. Under Washington's leadership, students learned trades while also constructing the school's buildings brick by brick.

The 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.

This illustrated inventory highlights a small collection of nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans. 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 Native people in AAS collections

Harriette 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.

This illustrated inventory records the glass plate negatives of personal photographs of family and friends taken T.C. Wohlbrück during his time in Worcester. Included are portraits of Wohlbrück's first wife, Mabel Brown Wohlbrück Penneton (1879–1960), and their three young children, Virginia Wohlbrück Willard (1903–1994), Gretchen Wohlbrück Bath (1904–1995), and Theodore C. Wohlbrück Jr. (1906–1985).

Painted portraits, miniatures and sculpted portrait busts in the United States were displayed in homes and in government and other public buildings such as hospitals and libraries. This online inventory and visual resource designed for researchers and scholars interested in the Society's fine art collections.

The following 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.

Search the online catalog to locate additional materials about the McLoughlin Bros.

In 1900, when he was twenty-two years old, Theodore Clemens Wohlbrück (1879–1936) moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, from New Jersey and started a career as a photographer. He specialized in city views that were often turned into postcards and also took class photographs of children for schools. He opened a modest photo studio on Main Street and married a local girl in 1902.

One of the unusual portions of the Hawaiiana at AAS is an assortment of more than thirty rare engravings produced by students at the Lahainaluna Seminary on the island of Maui. An intaglio press was introduced at this institution about 1834 and was used to provide students with instructions in the skills of copperplate engraving and printing. The students produced maps, views, portraits, and depictions of native floral.

Access

The collection has been inventoried and digitized.