Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 19th, 2009 No Comments »
Modern has recently acquired the Report of the Proceedings in the Cause of Mary Alice Orford, versus Thomas Butler Cole, Esq. for a breach of promise of marriage…, published in 1818 following the trial on March 30th of that year.
This sensational case was, according to The Times, “the subject of general conversation throughout the country [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 3rd, 2009 1 Comment »
In 1861, President Lincoln signed a bill making the United States Sanitary Commission into a government agency. Organized by thousands of women volunteers across the country, the commission succeeded in raising almost twenty five million dollars during the course of the Civil War, and worked to cut the disease rate of the Union Army [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 26th, 2009 1 Comment »
While best known as a Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) held government posts in the British government of Malta from April 1804 to September 1805. The location was chosen in part to aid the poet’s poor health.
From April 1804 to September 1805, Coleridge served in Malta as Secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 12th, 2008 No Comments »
In 1785, Jean Jacques Audubon was born in Haiti, the illigitimate son of a French naval officer and his mistress. Audubon immigrated to the United States at age 18 (anglicizing his name to John James Audubon), and almost immediately began to study its ornithology, hoping to illustrate the birds he observed in a more realistic [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 25th, 2008 No Comments »
In 1846, while living at Brook Farm (the Transcendentalist utopian experiment in communal living) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, artist Marianne Dwight (later Orvis) compiled this album of watercolor flower portraits. Dwight (1816-1901) made a living creating lampshades and paintings, and her detailed punchwork designs can be seen on the cover of the album (click the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 20th, 2008 No Comments »
We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” based on the 2007 exhibition curated by Christoph Irmscher.
This exhibition seeks to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2008 1 Comment »
If your gadgets are on the fritz, or you just feel like technology is taking over your life, let Fuller’s Computing Telegraph take you back to a simpler time of slide rules and mental arithmetic (and don’t worry, the irony of blogging about this isn’t lost on me):
This “computer” is one of the earliest uses [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most textually interesting in her corpus. She revised it over a period of nearly twenty years, and five versions survive: four in autograph, and one transcript of a lost autograph original. That “lost” original has now been recovered, and has [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2008 2 Comments »
At a loss for a new rainy day activity? Need to work on your dating skills? Try this parlor game from the 1820s…
The set, which arrived in its original box, includes forty hand-colored cards depicting men and women. The twenty cards picturing men each contain a member of a different profession and a [...]