The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012


Book Description

This volume traces the development of the library and the role the Society's librarians have played as collectors, scholars of American writing and publishing, and stewards of the nation's history. Readers will meet Isiah Thomas and his successors at the Society's helm.




Defending Professionalism


Book Description

This book provides overdue guidance for demonstrating and preserving library, information, knowledge, and archival professionalism in American, British, and Canadian communities and organizations. There is no longer any way to deny or to escape the responsibility of marketing services and being an advocate for one's profession. Practitioners also need effective arguments and approaches for combating library and information deprofessionalization. This book offers the antidote for ineptitude in the fight to preserve professionalism in all major library and information environments. Composed of 14 chapters written by contemporary practitioners and practitioners-turned-theorists, Defending Professionalism: A Resource for Librarians, Information Specialists, Knowledge Managers, and Archivists clearly justifies the employment of the professional librarian, information specialist, knowledge manager, and archivist. The contributors offer both short-term and long-term political, cultural, and other approaches for the ongoing effort to retain and expand professionalism. The book provides managers, funding authorities, educators, and practitioners with practical, political, and theoretical reasons why it is in their self-interest to employ professionally educated personnel for positions within libraries, information or knowledge management centers, and archives.







Jewish Cookery Book, on Principles of Economy


Book Description

When it was first published in 1871, this book offered practical advice for American-born Jews who did not have the benefit of a good Jewish education. Authentic Jewish cuisine for todayis cook.




Mrs. Porter's new Southern Cookery Book


Book Description

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.




The Cook Not Mad


Book Description

Published in 1830 in North America, this volume in the American Antiquarian Cookbook Collection stresses American cooking over European cuisine. Within a year of its publication in the United States, The Cook Not Mad was also published in Canada and thus became Canada’s first printed cookbook. In contrast to some of the larger encyclopedic cookbook collections of the day, The Cook Not Mad provides 310 recipes and household information designed to be a quick and easy reference guide to domestic organization for the contemporary housewife. The author describes the content as “Good Republican dishes” and includes typical American ingredients such as turkey, pumpkin, codfish, and cranberries. There are classic recipes for Tasty Indian Pudding, Federal Pancakes, Good Rye and Indian Bread (cornmeal), Johnnycake, Indian Slapjack, Washington Cake, and Jackson Jumbles. In spite of the author’s American “intentions,” the book does include foreign influences such as traditional English recipes, and it also contains one of the earliest known recipes for shish-kebab in American cookbooks. Reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, founded in 1812.




Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six


Book Description

Self published by the founder of the New York Cooking School, this forty-page leaflet was designed to educate new immigrant families with low incomes about preparing good, healthy meals. As the industrial revolution gathered steam and reformers focused on living conditions of the poor and disadvantaged, economical themes began to appear in cookbooks, and Corson’s pamphlet was extremely popular. In addition to numerous recipes and food preparation techniques, the book contains a “Daily Bill of Fare for One Week”—seven days of menus that cost $2.53 in total leaving a balance of $.62 for extra bread, milk, and butter. The little volume also contains favorable reviews of the book from contemporary publications, and an “ad” for six other books by Corson. The title page contains the following quote from the author: “This little book may not be a welcome guest in the home of the man who fares abundantly every day; it is not written for him; but to the working man, who wants to make the best of his wages, I pray it may bring help and comfort.” This facsimile edition of Juliet Corson’s Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the Society is a research library documenting the life of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The Society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection includes approximately 1,100 volumes.




A Taste of Power


Book Description

Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. A Taste of Power examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect wife and mother. In this brilliant interdisciplinary work, Katharina Vester examines how cookbooks became a way for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women in the kitchen, and for lesbian authors to insert themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. A Taste of Power engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.




A Mercy


Book Description

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.




Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions


Book Description

This volume brings together an unprecedented gathering of women and men from the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolutions. Featuring hard-to-find writings from colonists and colonized, citizens and slaves, religious visionaries and scandal-dogged actresses, these wide-ranging selections present a panorama of the diverse, vibrant world facing women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An expansive introduction, along with rich contextual headnotes, makes this an indispensable text for students and scholars of literature, history, and women's and gender studies. With writings from figures like Aphra Behn, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, to name just a few, Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions recovers the revolutionary moment in which women stepped into a globalizing world and imagined themselves free.