Academic literature on the topic 'American Antiquarian Society'

This chapter discusses the mania for collecting old books and manuscripts relating to the New World. It argues that it was a feature of the emergent historical consciousness sweeping the country in the 1840s in America. The chapter also elaborates on the Massachusetts Historical Society's Club, a hub of antiquarian activity at the midcentury, noting that the rage for collecting old books from and about America was the fastest-growing sector of the bibliomania. The chapter recounts that one of the old Puritans who rested at the society was Hezekiah Usher, the first printer in the British colonies. The most famous book Usher printed was the Bay Psalm Book, the Psalter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had iconic status among collectors as the first book printed in British America. The chapter underlines that the old books like the Bay Psalm Book were more than mere textual chronicles of the past. They were actual participants in it and thus, like other historical witnesses, needed to be examined and cross-examined. The chapter concludes by investigating how a bibliography consequently became an essential skill in the thriving new field of American antiquarianism.

In the flurry of activity following the Centennial Exposition, the Kentucky Mummy’s onward journey to Washington went unremarked. Her addition to the national collection was eventually acknowledged in the Smithsonian’s annual report for 1876, without further comment. Cryptic references to this item’s new status can be found in institutional memoranda over the next few years: “Dr. Rau has the mummy on exhibition in first case to the left as you enter his hall,” reads one such note. But in the wilderness of artifacts at the Smithsonian there was little space for nostalgia, and the Mummy does not seem to have attracted the notice of the Washington audience. The implicit alignment of perspectives between local antiquarians and Smithsonian scholars at the end of the 1870s—that the documentation of archaeological evidence was fundamentally tied to experience on the ground, demonstrating the need for local knowledge and widespread cooperation—did not, however, affect the trajectory of archaeological practice in the United States. The implications of the deep files in Mason’s office remained largely unremarked. The passing of this opportunity for archaeological synthesis testifies perhaps more to inadequate institutional frameworks than to conceptual shortcomings. The Smithsonian’s efforts to collect information on American antiquity in the 1870s differed only in detail and scale from the correspondence of the American Antiquarian Society in the 1810s. In both cases—and in many others launched during the intervening years—an institution sought to acquire antiquarian capital through a network of collaborators, exchanging prestige and modest access for information and associated commodities. In the context of the late nineteenth century, however, the failures of such approaches were more evident than their episodic successes, and the sense that opportunities to understand the American past had been squandered was widespread. The words of Moses Fisk, published in 1820, could describe the antiquarian enterprise of his and subsequent generations. “It is to be regretted,” he wrote, “that these ancient ruins and relicks have been exposed to so much depredation. Valuable articles are lost by being found.”

Abstract When the Reverend William Bentley died at age sixty in 1819 he was a famous man, a scholarly celebrity. Recently honored with a doctor of divinity degree from his alma mater, Harvard, his eminence had long been recognized by election to leading American learned societies: the American Philosophical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. To John Adams, Bentley was “Doctor of Physics, Dr. of Philosophy, Dr. of Laws, and D.D.”1 Proficient in some twenty ancient and modern languages, a keen student of philology, scriptural criticism, and human and natural history, Bentley was, with Thomas Jefferson, one of the great polymaths of the early Republic. Indeed Jefferson, seeking the best scholars to guide the University of Virginia, invited Bentley to become its founding president. For breadth and depth of learning Bentley, whose personal library of 4000 volumes ranked with America’s greatest private collections, had few peers.

The long Worcester slumber of the Kentucky Mummy came to an end in 1875, with a letter to Joseph Henry from Samuel Haven, then in his fourth decade as Librarian of the American Antiquarian Society. “Nearly a year ago,” Haven wrote, “I received from you a request that the mummy (so called) from a cave in Kentucky, which had for many years been in possession of this Society, should be transferred to the Smithsonian Institution . . . I therefore . . . now feel at liberty to forward the body by express; hoping that you may find it convenient to make such return in exchange as seems proper.” Thus the Kentucky Mummy was packed up and sent south—by train, rather than by wagon, as in her northward journey—with little fanfare at either end. It is uncertain whether the return exchange was completed, but the episode provided an opportunity to highlight the Antiquarian Society’s collections, and perhaps thereby its priority in the study of the indigenous past. Earlier in 1875 the Society had called the attention of the membership to the display of antiquities in its halls. “Anything connected with the North American Indians is deemed worthy of the study of the antiquary,” noted the Council’s report, pointing out that even remains from lowly shell heaps “make known the character of their food with all the certainty of a bill of fare at the Parker House.” The same note, however, also acknowledged that the center of gravity for North American archaeology in New England had definitively shifted away from Worcester. The establishment of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard in 1866 was the initial cause of this realignment, which provided for scholarship a new venue, relatively unburdened by institutional culture. The museum’s first curator, Jeffries Wyman, died in 1874 and was replaced by a younger and more ambitious man, Frederic Ward Putnam. In the same year the Council of the Antiquarian Society was joined by Stephen Salisbury III, a dynamic patron with interests in the ancient Maya. With new leaders, the two institutions moved in different directions.

The chapter explores how early American collections were consistently preoccupied with threats of loss and decay. It focuses on the American Philosophical Society’s cabinet, which was developed through the society’s networks of members and correspondents and included specimens, antiquarian artifacts, models, maps, and books. This chapter examines writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Charles Willson Peale to show how the uncertainties of attempting to build museum collections informed ongoing conversations about preservation and potential loss. By narratively experimenting with the possibilities of lost or missing information in Letters from an American Farmer and other writings, Crèvecoeur reveals ongoing concern with the longevity and survival of fragile manuscripts and printed texts. Peale similarly takes up questions of preservation, using his skill at taxidermy to promote his relationship with the Society and to link public museums to national stability.

This chapter examines the life and writings of Eusebio Guiteras (1823–93), who lived for twenty-five years in Philadelphia. Guiteras captured American life and culture in his travel diaries of the 1840s–1880s, and he translated Rudo Ensayo, a work by the eighteenth-century priest Juan Nentvig (1713–68) that details the evangelization mission of the Jesuits in what is now the American Southwest, but was then northern New Spain. Contextualizing the production and circulation of the multiple editions of Nentvig’s text in the nineteenth century, specifically one by the well-known antiquarian Thomas Buckingham Smith (1810–71), this Latina/o translation advocates for a constructive place for the Catholic Church in the US and Cuba. This advocacy must be understood in light of the translation’s underlying racial politics. Following his source text and the political designs of the editors of the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society (1894), in which the translation appeared, Guiteras simplistically and erroneously depicts the pacification of Native Americans in New Spain as a compassionate enterprise. In his travel diary, Un invierno en Nueva York (n.d.), Guiteras transposes this spiritual enterprise to the Cuban context, in which the place of Afro Cubans was being debated in the 1880s and 1890s on the island and in the US. In doing so, he envisions Catholic priests and Catholicism as agents for the pacification and assimilation of Afro Cubans in Cuba’s future republic while also arguing for a parallel and positive role for the Catholic Church in fashioning a culturally integrated United States.

Historical works dealing with archaeology have been written to entertain the public, commemorate important archaeologists and research projects, instruct students in the basic concepts of the discipline, justify particular programmes or ideas, disparage the work of rivals, and, most recently, try to resolve theoretical problems. These studies have taken the form of autobiographies, biographies, accounts of the development of the discipline as a whole, investigations of specific institutions or projects, and examinations of particular theories and approaches. They have used the analytical techniques of intellectual and social history and sought to treat their subject objectively, critically, hermeneutically, and polemically. Over time, historical studies have become more numerous, diversified, and sophisticated. Histories of archaeology are being written for all parts of the world, and in a growing number of countries, a large amount of material is being produced at local as well as national levels. There is no end in sight to the growing interest in this form of research. The history of archaeology has been written mainly by professional archaeologists, who have no training in history or the history of science, and by popularizers. Only a small number of these studies have been produced by professional historians. Archaeology has attracted little attention from historians of science, despite its considerable interest to philosophers of science. This lack of interest is hard to understand since the difficulties inherent in inferring human behaviour from archaeological evidence make archaeology an ideal discipline for addressing many of the issues of objectivity that are currently of interest to historians of science. The earliest use of the history of archaeology appears to have been for didactic purposes. In the mid-nineteenth century, the physicist Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to purge American archaeology of useless speculation and to encourage an interest in factual research. To do this, he commissioned Samuel F. Haven, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, to write a critical historical review of studies of American prehistory titled Archaeology of the United States (1856). To improve the quality of American archaeology, Henry also published reports on developments in the discipline in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, which was widely distributed in North America.

Aided by American antiquarians, the Royal Society of Northern Antiquities of Denmark produced Antiquitates Americanae (1837) which argued Vinland of the Norse sagas was in southern New England. Editor Carl Christian Rafn published a borderline fraudulent interpretation of Dighton Rock that turned it into a Viking inscription. A colonial windmill in Newport, Rhode Island was misinterpreted as the ruin of a Christian Norse church. An Indigenous burial near Dighton Rock at Fall River was miscast as Norse or Phoenician and immortalized by Henry Longfellow in “The Skeleton in Armor.” This chapter argues Antitquiates Americanae and the RSNA’s Mémoires represented an elaborate exercise in transatlantic Gothicism. White Tribism also factored in Rafn’s analysis, as he made Norsemen the improvers of ancestral Native Americans.