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Manuscript Society Digest: August-September 2022
Manuscript Digest: August – September 2022 – This complimentary e-digest, now published bi-monthly, covers significant acquisitions and sales, manuscripts lost and found, rare books and ephemera, document conservation, and more news […] […] In the News Past Perils of Presidential Papers Stars and Stripes | Washington Post, August 27, 2022 [...]
Recent Posts
Kenneth Rendell: The Importance of Handwriting
As we have seen over time, trends in handwriting styles change. Yet, nothing has prepared us for the fast drop off in the teaching of handwriting. Not just cursive, but the ability of people to print. Somewhere along the way, communicate without writing with a pen or pencil has become [...]
MM On-Demand: Spanish New Orleans & the Caribbean
New Orleans is French by name. The popular belief is that Spanish Louisiana was a relatively dormant period. In fact, the impact of Spain upon both New Orleans and the greater region is far greater than frequently thought. Frequently pictured as a “backwater” Spanish province, it in fact reflected the [...]
MM On-Demand: The Tile Club 1877-1887 (11/07/22)
The Tile Club was one of many societies that formed across the United States during the late nineteenth century. It included well-known artists; Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Edwin Austin Abbey, J. Alden Weir, and John H. Twachtman. The club was founded in 1877 riding the wave of [...]
Cursive Writing and Reading History
Reading History in Real Documents Drew Gilpin Faust, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, shares a lesson she learned when students in her undergraduate history class could not read documents written by soldiers and others during the Civil War. Why could they not read them? They were written [...]
MM On-Demand: Harding and Phillips Correspondence (10/03/22)
The Warren G. Harding–Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence: A tangled tale of ownership rights, romance, and archival ethics Warren Harding Carrie Fulton Phillips On July 22, 2014, the Library of Congress opened the Warren G. Harding-Carrie Fulton Phillips Correspondence. The papers, which had been closed for fifty [...]
2023 Maass Research Grant: Application Open
2023 Maass Grant Application Window Is Open Who can Apply Only scholars attending institutions with memberships in the Manuscript Society as of January 1, 2023, will receive consideration for the grant. Check the list of member institutions here https://manuscript.org/projects/scholarship-activities/. If your institution does not now have a membership, consider asking [...]
MM On-Demand: Reading Silver Marks (09/05/22)
How to identity those marks. Sterling or silverplate? Domestic or foreign? Great Grandmother’s Silver. Now it is your silver, and you don’t know anything about it. What is its value? How is it valued? What do those marks mean on the base? Appraiser Leon Caster, ISA CAPP, will share a [...]