Americana; recent acquisitions--antiquarian and ephemera

History of world's tour : Chicago White Sox, New York Giants / by Ted Sullivan. Chicago : M.A. Donahue, 1914.

World tour, National and American League Base ball teams, October 1913-March 1914. The triumph of organized base ball / photographs by Frank Farrell, M. Dick Bunnell and Lee Magee. Chicago : S. Blake Willsden & Co., 1914.

Bromley, Isaac. The Chinese massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, September 2, 1885. Boston, Franklin Press, 1886.

Dulles, John Foster. The Panama Canal controversy between Great Britain and the United States. New York : s.n., 1913.

Bulletin. State Law Enforcement and Protection League. San Francisco : State Law Enforcement and Protection League, 1917.

Manila freedom : United States special edition. Manila, Island of Luzon: Freedom Pub. Co., June 25, 1899-July 2, 1899.

Rules of practice and procedure of the United States District Court in and for the Canal Zone. Adopted April, 1920. Mount Hope, C.Z., Panama Canal Press, 1920.

Carousel magazine, Volume 1, Number 1, December 15, 1949 (Tokyo)

Ephemera collection, Order of the Eastern Star, International Chapter No.1, Peking, China. [Peking] : [Peking Chapter, Order of the Eastern Star], [1934-1941]


Welcome to the Yamanaka Hotel, Lake Yamanaka, Honshu, Japan. Honshu : [The Hotel], [1947]

Americana; recent acquisitions, antiquarian and ephemera

William T. Keogh's Superbly Staged, Splendidly Cast, First Production of 'The Queen of Chinatown' by Joseph Jarrow. Academy of Music, February 26, Opium, Chinatown. [New York] : [s.l.], [1899]

"Every day new and wonder." By Lorenzo Delos Reyes.[Los Angeles? 1930?]

Vietnam- Who profits? Who pays? : Black people pay - twice !! ... Inferior medical care- the Black Panther Party wants people to be able to get good, free health care. Boston : Black Panther Party, Peoples Free Health Center, 1970.

We "Belong" to the Brotherhood Youth and Race Question / Olivia P. Stokes and Winburn T. Thomas. New York : Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1946.

The case against Dillingham. Palo Alto, Calif. : Grass Roots, [197-?]

International Seafarers' Federation. Minutes of the International Seafarers' Conference, Feb. 22nd to Mar. 3rd 1919 : together with minutes of an open Seafarers' Conference. London, [1919?]

Sarabia, Elizabeth D.T. Mexico from the inside : another letter from Mme. Sarabia. Boston : Massachusetts Branch of the Womam's Peace Party, 1916.

Shall the Chinese Exclusion Act be repealed ? / B.A. Garside and Burges Brown. New York : Citizen's Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, 1943.

Chinese drug stores in America. By Stewart Culin. [Philadelphia? 1887] "Reprinted from the Journal of Pharmacy, December, 1887."

Lee, Chin. A Chinese art which tells : of monkey sun with his magic club ... of a sauce that takes eight years to age, of bird's nest and shark fins, of calories and vitamines, of ways of cooking scores of Chinese dishes and of a number of other things. [New York] : [Chin Lee], 1928.

American Antiquarian Society databases

In yesterday's New York Times, Edward Rothstein contributed an interesting review of a new exhibit at the Grolier Club highlighting the bicentennial of the American Antiquarian Society. As noted in the article, many of the Society's collections have been digitized and Stanford has acquired access to these rich databases, listed below. They offer rich insight into American history, literature, and culture from the Colonial period through Reconstruction.

Early American Imprints, Series I, Evans (1639-1800)
Early American Imprints, Series II, Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)

America's historical newspapers: featuring Early American newspapers, 1690-1922

American Broadsides and Ephemera

American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection (1691-1877)

The AAS has also published The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History by Philip F. Gura, as well as a supplementary website; as the site notes, "the Society digitized and made available in high-resolution the images and descriptions from the text. Not merely a list of illustrations, this site provides links to inventories and catalog records while also establishing additional contexts for viewing these important items."

The image of the Charleston Mercury accompanying this post is taken from the AAS website, which provides a detailed account of its provenance:

"Considered to be the first Confederate imprint, this broadside announced to the public the declaration, on December 20, 1860, that South Carolina would secede from the United States. This sheet was removed from a wall in Charleston by the popular Boston-born author Caroline Howard Gilman (1794-1888), who had moved permanently to Charleston following her marriage to the Rev. Samuel Gilman. Gilman mailed the broadside to her daughter Eliza in Salem, Massachusetts. Eliza in turn presented the document to American Antiquarian Society (AAS) member Nathaniel Paine who, heeding the Society’s call to preserve all printed material relating to the unsettling national events, passed the broadside along to AAS."

Stanford users can also access the broadside via the American Broadsides and Ephemera database.

Americana--recent acquistions, antiquarian and ephemera

Golden Gate International Exposition [San Francisco, Calif.? : Japanese Committee for the Golden Gate International Exposition?, 1939]

Come vigil now : One man, one truck, a thousand lives. [Walnut Creek, CA] : Contra Costa Citizens Against the War in Viet Nam, [1966].

The Chinese junk "Keying", being a full account of that vessel, with extracts from the journal of Capt. Kellett. In order to furnish visitors with the information necessary to understand the nature ... of the exhibition at Castle Garden, the following remarks have been deemed necessary. New York, I. Sackett, 1847.

Fuddlehead by Fuddlehead : an autobiography. Forbes, W. Cameron (William Cameron), 1870-1959. Peking : [s.n.], 1935.

The politics of the Philippines : Aguinaldo a traitor to the Filipinos and a conspirator against the United States ; the record of his transformation from a beggar to a tyrant. Halstead, Murat, 1829-1908. Akron, Ohio: Allied Print Trades Council, [1899?]

Report by W. Calder on his investigation of road problems in Europe and America during 1924. Calder, W. Melbourne: Govt. Printer, [1924?]

San Francisco : seeing San Francisco's Chinatown after dark. [San Francisco]: Pacific Sightseeing Co., c1914

Tourists' guide and handbook of Honolulu and the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Mid-Pacific folder Distributing Co., [1917]

20th anniversary celebration and conference : Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah.
Federal Land Bank of Berkeley. [Berkeley, 1937]

"Help the Anti-Fly Campaign by eliminating the breeding places of flies" [broadside]. Chapman, Alonzo. Redlands, CA : Board of Health, 1914.

Lamont, A Lecture on the Civil War in America

I am always keen to acquire titles that offer foreign (chiefly European) views of the American Civil War. We recently acquired an interesting volume--James Lamont's "A lecture on the civil war in America / delivered at the Rothesay Mechanics' Institute" (Glasgow : Printed by W.A. Eadie, 1864.)

As evidenced by Lamont's armorial bookplate (J. Lamont of Knockdow), this was his personal copy, made even more interesting by the inclusion of a newspaper clipping mounted after page 30., advertising a "slave for sale" and also a reward for a runaway slave.

A search of a proper name in the text ("Martha Frazer") of the newspaper clipping (in America's Historical Newspapers, published by Readex) reveals that clipping was likely from the May 2, 1856 issue of the New Orleans Daily Picayune (p. 6; the same ads also appeared in issues of the same paper on May 8 and May 9, 1856)

In his lecture, Lamont noted his travels in the United States during 1856:

"When in the United States in 1856, I held a long conversation on the subject of slavery with a gentleman of Kentucky, a proprietor of many human chattels. He argued the question, unlike most slaveowners, in a temperate, gentlemanlike, and sensible manner, admitted that slavery was, in the abstract, a bad system and a great evil to the country, but could not see how it was to be done away with, without ruin and injury to many. I told him what I had seen in South America, and suggested that such a plan of gradual emancipation was the only way that I saw of meeting the difficulty. I regret to state that his reply was of such a nature that I cannot venture to repeat it, but it showed, as much as anything that ever came under my observation, the inveterate habit that even the refined and educated slaveowners invariably acquire, of regarding their slaves not as human beings, but as cattle, -- as beasts that perish."

One may surmise that Lamont saved the clipping from his 1856 travels and appended it to his copy.

Cornell University Library has digitized a copy of Lamont's lecture as part of their magnificent Samuel J. May Antislavery Collection.

Civil Rights interviews

The Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Vanderbilt University has recently created a fascinating digital archive of primary sources compiled by Robert Penn Warren for his 1965 book "Who Speaks for the Negro?"

Closer to home, Stanford's Department of Special Collections, University Archives, and the Archive of Recorded Sound hold a similarly fascinating collection of interviews (known as the "KZSU Project South interviews") with Civil Rights workers, recorded in 1965 by Stanford students affiliated with campus radio station KZSU.

New York Journal-American Photographic Morgue--HRC, UT-Austin

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has recently launched a fabulous website designed to expose the holdings of the New York Journal-American photographic morgue, acquired by the center in 1966. The site includes both an image gallery (containing over 900 images) and a database which enables researchers to search the file headings of photo folders within the archive. As the HRC's site notes:

"The photographic morgue consists of approximately two million prints and one million negatives created for publication in the New York Journal-American newspaper. The bulk of the material covers the years from 1937 to the paper's demise in 1966. Earlier decades are represented in the collection, but with decreasing frequency toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Roughly half of the prints are images taken by Journal-American staff. The backs of these prints usually bear the stamped date of publication and a pasted-down clipping from the newspaper. The majority of the other prints come from wire services such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and other syndication entities, and a small portion of the prints are publicity photos from sources such as airlines, public relations firms, movie studios, etc. Many of the prints in the morgue show crop marks and/or heavy retouching with either pencil or ink as evidence of their use in publication"

"Until now, access to the photo morgue collection has been limited, resulting from its uncataloged status. In keeping with the Ransom Center's mission to advance the study of the arts and humanities by preserving and making accessible creations of our cultural heritage through the highest standards of cataloging, conservation, and collection management, the Center has now constructed this website as a portal to the prints in the New York Journal-American photo morgue. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the collection and its imagery and to provide a searchable database of more than 64,000 folder titles by which the prints were organized by the newspaper staff."