What Happened
John Jay Smith curates a visual catalog of American identity, focusing on the literal ink deposited by the people who populated the nation’s formative years. The volume centers on facsimiles of personal autographs and detailed illustrations to connect the 1860 reader to the handwritten remnants of past figures. It functions as a portable print museum, arranging the script of statesmen and literary individuals alongside sketches of the landscapes and buildings they occupied. By emphasizing the exact reproduction of these pages, Smith presents the stroke of a pen as the primary physical bridge to these figures, effectively documenting the ink-stained trail left by the people whose names appear in the series.
Key figures
- John Jay Smith
The nineteenth-century collector and author of the series.
- United States
The geographical and political focus of the historical curiosities.
- American Revolution
The primary historical period documented through autographs and facsimiles.
What it's really about
- National Memory
- Preserving the physical remnants of the Revolutionary generation.
- Visual Documentation
- Using facsimiles to authenticate and humanize historical figures.
Why it's memorable
- The precise visual reproduction of autographs from high-ranking Revolutionary officers.
- A massive series of twenty-two volumes dedicated to American historical ephemera.
Where it lands
John Jay Smith attempted to preserve these artifacts in 1860 by capturing them as hand-drawn illustrations and lithographic page images, creating a permanent visual record where standard typesetting failed.
For your book club
- Whether handwriting provides a more intimate connection to history than printed text.
- The transition from physical archives to digital accessibility through preservation projects.