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Archive for November, 2008

William Barnes

The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet.
Born into a farming family of seven [...]

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By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing.   We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected [...]

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Prince Hall (1738-1807), known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, worked as a minister, abolitionist, civil rights activist, and proponent of education for black children.  Details on Hall’s birth and early life are vague; the first record of Hall reveals he was a servant to William Hall of Boston.  Legally a [...]

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