During the Civil War era Boston led the national crusade against slavery and the struggle over emancipation and citizenship. Owing largely to activists in Boston, Massachusetts became one of the first states to end slavery. It soon granted black men full suffrage, ended the ban on interracial marriage, and in 1855 became the first state [...]
This weekend, expect the smell of madeleines to fill the balmy spring air of Harvard Yard, as Proustians from around the world gather in Cambridge for the conference Proust and the Arts. Coinciding with the centennial of the publication of Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time, the co-organizers [...]
From the perspective of today’s theatregoer, the current method of admission seems like a forgone conclusion: pay ahead of time for a ticket entitling you to a specific seat for a specific performance. But it wasn’t always this way, as evidenced by a wide range of ephemera in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Surveying even one [...]
John Brown’s raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16th, 1859, and his subsequent martyrdom elicited an immediate outpouring of abolitionist sentiment across the Northern states. In Columbus, Ohio, twenty-two-year-old William Dean Howells responded with “Old Brown,” his first separately printed work; the poem was soon reprinted in the Ashtabula Sentinel, [...]
A story in this week’s Harvard Gazette covers a new exhibition at the Woodberry Poetry Room called PHONE-A-POEM: A Selection of Archival & Newly-Commissioned Answering Machine Poems. Started in 1976 by Cambridge poet Peter Payack, for 25 years Phone-a-Poem offered callers recorded poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall. Visitors [...]
[Thanks to Matthew Battles, Senior Researcher at metaLAB, for contributing this post on the new Edward Lear Visualizer.] I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but let me just get this out: a library is no mere set of bookshelves, no simple windowpane through which to view the wonders of books and the discoveries [...]
Harriet Beecher Stowe was paid $300 for 40 installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly by the Free Soil newspaper National Era, which began running them in June 1851. Encouraged by their success, Stowe decided to publish them as a novel, and the first edition, published by the Boston firm of John [...]
We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “A History of Medieval Christian Preaching,” prepared by Harvard Divinity School Professor Beverly Mayne Kienzle and her students. This site and an exhibition now on display in the Amy Lowell Room accompany a conference of the same name sponsored by Harvard University’s Standing Committee on Medieval [...]
When Edward Lear received a letter from the British ornithologist William Swainson in November 1831, he must have opened it with great trepidation. The nineteen-year-old artist had recently sent Swainson a portfolio of hand-colored lithographs of parrots and was eagerly waiting to hear his reaction. What a thrill — and a relief — he must have felt [...]
2012 is the 200th anniversary of the event that could be said to mark the start of the modern era of book collecting: the sale of the library of John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe. The sale of this extensive and masterfully assembled collection attracted the interest of every major book collector in Britain, its [...]
