American Antiquarian Society

This online exhibit, generated using images from the Prints in the Parlor cataloging and digitization project, considers the ways William Shakespeare's (1564-1616) characters were pictured inside the covers of literary annuals and gift books in the nineteenth-century.

Using print and manuscript collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, this exhibition explores portrayals of Turner in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The bookends of this exhibition are the two “confessions”: one from 1831 and the other from 1967 when William Styron created the most controversial version of Turner to date.

This 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.

As one of the first publishers to focus exclusively on products for children, McLoughlin Brothers was able to shape and define the American picture book market. This exhibition documents the working practice of the firm by associating its products with many of the tools used during the production process, such as printing blocks, designer mock-ups, and watercolor illustration art.

This exhibition features the images of thirty-one Worcester residents depicted in the Society's portrait paintings, miniatures, and sculpture collections.

The history of America has always been intimately entwined with the history of communications media—and that has always been changing. This exhibition 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.

At the start of America’s industrial revolution, a large number of young women found employment and a unique form of independence in American textile mills. Featuring selections both by and about the mill girls, from approximately 1834 to 1870, the exhibition highlights the culture and working conditions of the mills and the actions the women took to better their lives through self-advocacy.

This online exhibition explores images of men in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The selection of prints from the Society's collections represents male roles and activities and reflects social expectations.

Making Valentines: A Tradition in America is designed to show the evolution of the Valentine's Day card. This exhibition is drawn, in part, from an original display created by AAS staff member Audrey Zook in 1985. It includes a select group of Valentine's Day cards belonging to the Society.

This online exhibition showcases the collection and career of Boston lithograph firm Louis Prang & Company, within the collections of the American Antiquarian Society. Featuring prints, salesman's samples and progressive proof books, this exhibition tells the story of Prang during the height of his career in chromolithography during the second half of the nineteenth century. Prang pioneered developments in the chromolithographic process, creating painting-like prints for the general public.