About AAS > History and Activities > A Brief History of AAS

Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas was born in Boston in 1749 into a family so poor that at the age of six he was taken from his mother by the Overseers of the Poor and apprenticed to the printer Zechariah Fowle. His first typesetting assignment was a broadside ballad entitled The Lawyer's Pedigree, set on an English-made wooden common press which Thomas would later describe as "old No. 1."

Thomas was an ardent patriot during the American Revolution. His newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy,became the voice of the Whig party. On the eve of the Revolution, Thomas smuggled his printing press out of Boston and set it up in Worcester where, on May 3, 1775, he published the first printed accounts of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

After the Revolutionary War ended, Thomas remained in Worcester where he prospered as the country's leading printer, publisher, editor, and bookseller. The scope of his printing and publishing is impressive: important works in medicine, music, history, children's books, schoolbooks, and bibles, among others, were issued from his press. His biographer, Clifford Shipton, wrote that "A great part of the American people learned their letters from his primers, got their news from his papers, sang from his hymnals, ordered their lives by his almanacs, and read his novels and Bibles."

Thomas retired in 1802 and devoted the rest of his productive and long life to collecting, scholarship, and philanthropy. In 1812 he established the American Antiquarian Society to house his remarkable library of 8,000 volumes, with a mission to collect, preserve and make available the printed record of the United States for future generations. He served as president of AAS until his death in 1831.

More information about Isaiah Thomas may be found in Old "No. 1" The Story of Isaiah Thomas & His Printing Press (Worcester, MA: 1989).

Old No. 1

Read more about AAS founder Isaiah Thomas Mass Moments, a daily almanac of Massachusetts history created by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.