A selection of images of Revolutionary-era portraits and artifacts from the Massachusetts Historical Society. This website includes 67 portraits and 48 artifacts. Included are portraits of Continental Army generals George Washington, Benjamin Lincoln, David Cobb, and Henry Jackson; patriots John Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Jonathan Jackson, and Caleb Strong; and loyalists Charles Paxton and Thomas Hutchinson. Artifacts provide a tangible, physical connection to the individuals who witnessed the Revolutionary era. Included are Joseph Warren's sword, pistols owned by Paul Revere and Artemas Ward, and Abigail Adams's pocket.
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This website presents digital images of 840 visual materials from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society that illustrate the role of Massachusetts in the national debate over slavery. Included are photographs, paintings, sculptures, engravings, artifacts, banners, and broadsides that were central to the debate and the formation of the antislavery movement.
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Browse online presentations of early photographs from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). These images include portraits taken by some of Boston's most notable photographers as well as depictions of locations in and around Boston.
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There are over 400 architectural drawings in the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Approximately 245 of these drawings (including notebook pages) are plans for Jefferson's home, Monticello. The collection also contains Jefferson's drawings for municipal and civic institutions: the University of Virginia; capitol buildings for Washington and Richmond; and the president's house.
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This web exhibition explores how cartoonists have depicted issues relating to voter rights through United States History. Political cartoons have long served to provoke public debate, illustrating opinions of the day and poking fun at those in power. From early in the 19th century, arguments over voting rights—who votes and who counts the votes—have been depicted in cartoons, especially with the rise of illustrated newspapers and magazines with a national circulation before the Civil War.
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This website presents manuscript maps of local towns and counties dating from 1637-1809, iconic printed maps of Massachusetts and Boston, and meticulously drawn manuscript maps by Samuel Chester Clough (1873-1949) presenting a wealth of information about property owners in Boston during the 17th and late 18th centuries.
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Americans, like their English counterparts, wore rings, brooches, pendants, and other jewels in memory of family and friends. Over the centuries a striking range of design, styles and craftsmanship was employed, from the simple gold bands of the 17th century to the intricate and opulent earring and brooch sets of the late Victorian era. The way memorial jewelry was worn also shifted over the years and these changes tell the story of a culture’s changing sensibility around death and grief.
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A selection of photographs providing a unique visual record of life and work on sugar plantations in Cuba during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs were taken and collected by Boston merchant Edwin F. Atkins and other members of his family are from the Atkins Family Photographs. Edwin Atkins was a dominant force in the U.S.-Cuban sugar market and his firm, E. Atkins & Co., established sugarcane plantations along the southern coast of Cuba near the cities of Cienfuegos and Trinidad.
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Featuring selections from the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts at the Massachusetts Historical Society, this digital collection (entitled, Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive) includes Jefferson's manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence, Farm Book, Garden Book, book catalogs, and architectural drawings.
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The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment was the first military unit consisting of black soliders to be raised in the North during the Civil War. Browse online presentations of photographs and broadsides relating to a notable Civil War army regiment.
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A selection of photographs taken by Francis Blake, an innovative man who lived in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century. In the 1880s Blake designed a focal-plane shutter that allowed him to take photographs with exposure times of 1/1000 to 1/2000 of a second and he took stunning stop-action images of trains, pigeons, horses, bicyclists, and athletes.
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This companion website is divided into three parts according to John Adams’s scheme: "Politicks and War," "Mathematicks and Philosophy," and "Painting, Poetry ... and Porcelaine." It consists of artifacts, manuscripts, medals, paintings, engravings, furniture, clothing, and early publications. These historical objects form a solid foundation on which the collections of the MHS have been built and inform us today about how our ancestors lived.
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This website features 117 items from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, including historical manuscripts and early printed works that offer a window into the lives of African Americans in Massachusetts from the late 17th century through the abolition of slavery under the Massachusetts Constitution in the 1780s.
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The following web presentations of selections from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) relate to the debate about the ratification of the U. S. Constitution in Massachusetts (including the District of Maine). These materials have been assembled for a workshop, Ratification! The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.
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This website allows users to browse and search all 246 photographs and 29 additional illustrative items from Margaret Hall’s typescript narrative, Letters and Photographs from the Battle Country, 1918-1919. As a member of the American Red Cross in France during World War I, Massachusetts-born Margaret Hall worked at a canteen at a railroad junction in the town of Châlons. On her return home she compiled a typescript narrative from the letters and diary passages that she wrote while overseas. Her words offer a first-hand account of life on the Western Front in the last months of the war. She also copiously illustrated the text with her own photographs, which depict soldiers, canteens, and the extensive destruction and ruin following the war.
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The Massachusetts Historical Society holds many important manuscripts, photographs and artifacts that relate to the abolitionist movement in Boston. This website includes a range of materials from the first antislavery tract published in America, The Selling of Joseph by Samuel Sewall, (printed in New England in 1700) to a broadsheet with William Nell's tribute in December 1865 to last issue of The Liberator (the country's leading abolitionist newspaper).
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Web exhibition by the Ruffin Society (website currently hosted at MHS) relating to a traveling exhibition about the African American experience in the Massachusetts courts. PLEASE NOTE: this exhibition features items and images that aren't part of the collections of the MHS.
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The following web presentations of selections from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) relate to Boston history, places, and events. The following primary sources offer details and perspectives that should complement and supplement the existing knowledge base Boston experts have already established regarding the events and history of the city.
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This web feature highlights Thomas Nast’s remarkable life and career through a biographical series created specifically for MHS by eight contemporary Boston-area cartoonists. Starting with his arrival as a young German immigrant in NYC, this pictorial biography follows Nast through his successful career as the illustrator of immensely popular images within Harper’s Weekly magazine. Nast was famous for his support of the Union cause in the Civil War and his relentless campaign against New York’s Tammany Hall political machine. The eight biographical cartoons were drawn by members of the Boston Comics Roundtable, a community of comics creators.
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Read and examine materials offering a range of perspectives about the Boston Massacre. Included are letters, diary entries, pamphlets, broadsides, newspaper accounts, printed depositions, orations, trial notes, and even bullets recovered from the site. Use a comparison tool to closely view any two of seven featured images side by side.
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