The exhibition is free and open to the public.  More information can be found on Houghton’s website.

For details, contact exhibition curator Heather Cole, 617-495-2449.

Image:  Tennyson from the Houghton Library Portrait File.  May not be reproduced without permission.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

Image, above, John Updike as a Harvard senior, 1954   Image, below, Updike (left) with his staff at the Harvard Lampoon, 1954.    Both images © Harvard Yearbook Publications. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Origin first appeared in 1859 and went through six heavily revised editions in Darwin’s lifetime. Literary in style, it appealed to readers of all types in its simple explanations and conversational tone. Although Darwin had no knowledge of how variations in species occurred, the work is mainly a demonstration that they do occur. The work stresses a natural, as opposed to a divine, presence in this process, and it provoked intense debate in both the public and private circles of a very religious society. It remains a highly-regarded and popular work of scientific research, and Darwin’s theories are debated just as heavily today as when they were first published.

The exhibition, on display in Houghtons’ Amy Lowell Room, includes a page from Darwin’s original manuscript, correspondence with friend and Harvard professor of zoology and geology Louis Agassiz, the first and several early editions of the book itself, and a few contemporary reactions to Darwin’s theories.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.  More information can be found on Houghton’s website.

For information on Darwin-related events at Harvard, visit the Darwin Day 200 at Harvard website.

Image: Darwin photographed around 1874 by Leonard Darwin.  Portrait File.   May not be reproduced without permission.

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 manner than was common at the time.  His famous work, Birds of America, was published after years of study, from 1840-44.

116 of Audubon’s early drawings, held at Houghton Library and at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, have been published together for the first time in a new publication, Audubon: Early Drawings, available this month from the Harvard University Press.  The drawings are enhanced by an essay on the sources of Audubon’s art by his biographer, Richard Rhodes; transcription of Audubon’s own annotations to the drawings, including information on when and where the specimens were collected; ornithological commentary by Scott V. Edwards, along with reflections on Audubon as scientist; and an account of the history of the Harris collection by Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie A. Morris.   More information on the book can be found on the Modern Books & Manuscripts website, the Harvard College Library website, and a slideshow of images from the book may be found here, on the Harvard University Press website.

In the video below, by David Braun of National Geographic, Scott Edwards talks about the book and shows a few of the images:

Image above:  MS Am 21 (88).  Juglane oliveformia. Carolina Parrot in[?] Willow from imitation of colors [?] Psittacus Carolinensis. N.p., 1811 June 9. 1 drawing: watercolor, pastel, graphite, and ink on paper; 43 x 28 cm.

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 literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had. By foregrounding the “private” Longfellow (the drawings made by and for his children, his journals, and letters written by and to him) alongside the international, multilingual and widely-traveled Longfellow, the exhibition demonstrates how Longfellow re-invented poetry as a public forum for everyone’s private feelings and how he consistently challenged the nationalistic distinction between what is typically and purely “American” and all that is not.

More information on the original exhibition, along with a slideshow of images, may be found here.