The American Historical Print Collectors Society (AHPCS) is a non-profit group that encourages the collection, preservation, study and exhibition of prints depicting or reflecting North American history and culture, made either in America or elsewhere. One of the ways we achieve these goals is the support of publications on subjects that enhance knowledge on or interest in topics relating to historical prints produced in or about North America. Publication grants are funded by the Wendy Shadwell Fund with additional support from the Ewell L. Newman Fund.
Applications are accepted semi-annually with deadlines of January 1st and July 1st.
VIEW THE GRANT APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS
For more information, please contact:
Sarah Weatherwax, Chair of the Publications Committee
ahpcspublicationsgrants@gmail.
2025 Recipients
Political Appetites: The Power of Food in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming October 13, 2026) by Nancy Siegel
How a new nation cooked up politics—one recipe, satire, and celebration at a time.
Food has long carried political meaning, and revolutionary America was no exception. In Political Appetites, art and culinary historian Nancy Siegel uncovers a richly layered story in which meals, ingredients, and even kitchenware helped Americans define what democracy should look—and taste—like. From tea boycotts and homemade “Liberty Tea” to Washington Pie, Election Cake, and Mammoth Cheese, Siegel shows how ordinary foods became vehicles for protest, persuasion, and celebration during the years surrounding the Revolution and the Early Republic.
The book moves from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 through the 1830s, revealing how practices as simple as cooking, planting a garden, or setting a table could carry distinctly political weight. Imported luxuries symbolized ties to Britain, patriotic ceramics and satirical prints circulated new ideas about citizenship, and the cultivation of native plants signaled pride in American abundance. Women, enslaved cooks, Indigenous herbalists, artisans, and political satirists all helped shape this shared culinary vocabulary, making food an arena where people without formal political rights could still participate in nation-building. Examining visual culture, broadsides, recipes, horticultural writings, and domestic artifacts, Political Appetites offers a vivid portrait of a society learning to express its ideals through the everyday acts of eating and preparing food. Siegel includes historical recipes—short, evocative, and workable for modern kitchens—inviting readers to experience these early flavors firsthand.
Nancy Siegel is a professor of art history and culinary history at Towson University. She is the author of Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School.
Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher (Yale University Press, forthcoming July 7, 2026) by Ramey Mize
The first comprehensive exploration of Homer’s etchings in the context of his paintings and as fully realized artworks in their own right.
American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is renowned for his masterful depictions of American life that offer sensitive portrayals of the complexity of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction periods, dazzling watercolors from extensive travels across the Atlantic, Adirondacks, and Caribbean, as well as monumental marines from his studio home in Prouts Neck, Maine. His early work in the 1850s and 1860s as a commercial illustrator for magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Ballou’s Pictorial is well documented; less well known is the series of etchings Homer completed later in his career, between 1884 and 1889, which he counted among his finest artistic achievements, asserting that they were “as good work . . . as I ever did.”
This book is the first to foreground the role of Homer’s understudied etchings within his growing stature as an artist and his evolving strategies in the rapidly evolving nineteenth-century pictorial landscape. Most of these prints revisit subjects of popular oil paintings and watercolors by the artist, including The Life Line (1884), Eight Bells (1886), and Mending the Nets (1882), and highlight his captivation with the medium through extravagant linework, lush details, and a dazzling variety of intaglio techniques. Featuring essays by respected scholars and curators, and illustrated with dozens of objects and comparative images that document progressive work across states, this book will enthrall Homer enthusiasts as it reorients the importance of the artist’s etching practice within his prolific oeuvre and against the backdrop of late nineteenth-century American art. Published in association with the Portland Museum of Art.
Ramey Mize is the Susan G. Detweiler Associate Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Past recipients include:
The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024) by John Bidwell
Picturesque Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt: Artworks and Letters of John Douglas Woodward, 1878-1879 (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024) by Sue Rainey
“Prints of a New Kind”: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828 (Pennsylvania State University, 2023) by Allison Stagg
Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1785-1885 (University of Massachusetts Press, November 2021) by Georgia Barnhill
Fanny Palmer: The Life and Works of a Currier & Ives Artist (Syracuse University Press, 2018) by Charlotte Rubinstein
The first full-length biography of the life and work of one of Currier & Ives’s leading artists, Frances Bond Palmer (1812–1876). Palmer was a major lithographer whose prints reached a mass audience during her day.
Engraving Trade in Early Cincinnati (Ohio University Press, 2012) by Donald O’Brien
This book examines the vibrant engraving industry that helped fuel the growth of the “Queen City” in the 19th century. Cincinnati’s influence as the midwestern center for the print and engraving trade and its key position on the Ohio River played a crucial role in the development of print arts throughout the region. It provides a thorough account that shows how the print arts helped fashion Cincinnati in both image and economy.
Picturing Victorian America: Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, 1830-1880 (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) edited by Nancy Finlay
This is the first book-length account of the pioneering and prolific Kellogg family of lithographers, active in Connecticut for over four decades. Eight essays explore the complexity of the relationships between artists, lithographers, and print, map, and book publishers.
Interpretive Wood-Engraving: The Story of the Society of American Wood-Engravers (Oak Knoll Press, 2009) by William H. Brandt
The lost art of interpretive wood-engraving comes to life in this detailed work, which recounts the story of the Society of American Wood-Engravers and profiles many of its leading personalities.
Amos Doolittle: Engraver of the New Republic (Oak Knoll Press, 2008) by Donald O’Brien
This book was written to complement similar works on Doolittle’s contemporaries, including Paul Revere. There are chapters on various types of his work, including his tune-books, maps, illustrations, bank notes, and more. The book also includes two useful appendices, cataloguing books containing his engravings and references to him and his work.
Bibliography on American Prints of the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries (Oak Knoll Press, 2006) by Georgia Barnhill
This volume with over 1800 entries provides easy access to the literature concerning book and periodical illustration, city views, works on various graphic processes, historical prints, landscape prints, maritime and military prints, political satire, religious imagery, and social history.