American Antiquarian Society

Abigail Kelley Foster (1811-1887), noted antislavery partisan and women’s rights advocate, was an active correspondent and lecturer on behalf of reform movements in the middle of the nineteenth century. She was married to Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881).

The American Antiquarian Society contains a vast collection of American portrait prints. A reference collection of over 5,000 portraits of Americans has been gathered as the Society's American Portrait Prints (APP) Collection. Arranged alphabetically by name, this collection is maintained in the Graphic Arts Department and contains images removed from newspapers, periodicals, books, letterheads, and ephemera. The Society actively collects American portrait prints dating from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century.

The 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.

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.

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).

Paul 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.