By Jeremy Dibbell

The micro-blogging site Twitter wasn’t around in John Quincy Adams’ day, but a recent visitor to the MHS suggested he might have found it a very natural addition to his routine. JQA was a prolific diarist, filling fifty-one volumes over sixty-nine years (amounting to nearly 15,000 pages) – and not only did he keep a diary, he often kept multiple diaries simultaneously (there are three different entries for the day he was inaugurated as president, for example: a long entry, a draft entry, and a line-a-day entry).

The line-a-day notes are mostly in a single volume, which contains entries for 1 January 1795 to 12 May 1801 and 5 August 1809 to 30 April 1836, and they’re very succinct comments on what happened that day. The first, for New Year’s Day 1795, reads “Thursday. The Hague. Attended the Stadtholder’s Court. Paid official New Years day visits.” Some almanac volumes and in one section of one of the main diary volumes also contain entries of this type. During a tour this month a student commented upon seeing these line-a-day notes, “It’s like he’s using Twitter.” And, we realized, that’s a pretty apt comparison. Twitter offers its users (known as tweeters, twitterers, or, less fondly, twits) a platform to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. JQA’s line-a-day entries do just this (even if they were not, at the time, available for immediate public consumption). Here’s a sample:

– 12 October 1800: “My cough getting better. Walk round the Walls. Reading Amadis de Gaulis. Tedious.”

– 15 May 1819: “Commodore Rogers here. Ladies visited the Columbus. Homans at the Office. Rainy eve.”

– 22 November 1831: “Thunder and Snow. Letter on Imprisonment for debt. Reading on Masonry.”

These entries and all the rest of JQA’s diaries (part of the Adams Family Papers) have been made available digitally on the MHS website as “The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection.” This project was partly funded by a 2003 “Save America’s Treasures” grant, which allowed us to conserve the diaries and create the digital versions. You can read more about the project here, or see this section for information on using the diaries (they have not been fully transcribed, so there is currently no full-text search function, but you can browse by volume or search by date). A detailed JQA timeline has also been provided. And since he had remarkably good handwriting all through his life, JQA’s diaries are easy (as well as fascinating) to read.

By Jeremy Dibbell

Teachers are invited to participate in a collaborative professional development project presented by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), and the Worcester Public Schools (WPS). Defining Freedom examines how Americans conceived and promoted both individual and communal liberties and responsibilities from 1763 through 1863. The project seeks to create a series of professional development experiences in which participating teachers will examine the imperial crisis, the American Revolution, the Early Republic, the antebellum period, and the Civil War.

The workshop will be held in late July at the MHS in Boston and AAS in Worcester. Teachers will interact with leading historians and scholars and explore the vast collections of primary source documents and images available through the collections of the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society in preparation for developing and piloting instructional units. These units will employ technology to help students develop and teachers assess 21st century skills. The project will encourage teachers to explore each of these institutions’ artifacts through onsite workshops, presentations, and individual research conducted by teachers at their own pace. Additionally, teachers will be encouraged to use various online resources, including those developed by AAS and MHS. Defining Freedom will employ various digital and printed resources to help students analyze and evaluate information, think critically, develop coherent and intellectually rich theses, employ evidence to support arguments, and fashion compelling written, oral, and multimedia presentations.

Registration information and more background on the workshop is available here.

By Jeremy Dibbell

Note: the reading room will close at 3:30 p.m. today (Wednesday, 20 May) for setup purposes.

It’s going to be a busy day at the Historical Society!

Please join us at 12 noon for a brown-bag lunch with Alan Rogers, professor of history at Boston College and a 2009-10 New England Regional Fellowship Consortium fellow. Rogers will speak on “Smallpox and Skeptics: The Battle Over Compulsory Vaccination in Massachusetts.” This event will be held in the Dowse Library and is free and open to the public.

The MHS will hold its annual meeting beginning at 5:30 p.m., in Ellis Hall (the reading room). After Society business has been completed, attendees will enjoy the unveiling of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s newest publication, “Collecting History,” which details its vast collections. Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian will conclude the meeting by talking about collection highlights.

By Jeremy Dibbell

David Herbert Donald, the Charles Warren professor of history emeritus at Harvard and a member of the MHS since 1960, died on Sunday at the age of 88. Mr. Donald’s many books included Lincoln’s Herndon (1948); Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (1960); Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (1974); Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (1987); Lincoln (1995); and ‘We Are Lincoln Men’ (2003). With his wife Aida DiPace Donald, he edited a two-volume edition of The Diary of Charles Francis Adams, 1820-1829 (1964). He won Pulitzer Prizes for the first volume of his Sumner biography and for Homeward.

Dr. Donald was at work on a study of John Quincy Adams’ post-presidential career, which he spoke about during his last public lecture at the Historical Society, on 11 October 2006. He reported that he was delighted by the digital collection of JQA’s diaries, because they meant that he could work comfortably from home. In my notes from that talk, I wrote that a member of the audience asked a question after Donald’s lecture about how he’d decided to write the book, and he said his agent told him that the publisher wanted it done. “But I’m too old,” Donald said, to which the agent replied “You’re no older than Adams was and he kept at it.” Donald told the crowd that he kept saying no until the agent said “Listen, you have to write this book, you’re just as cranky and cantankerous as Adams ever was!” “And then,” Donald quipped, “I couldn’t say no.” In my notes from that night I also wrote how much I enjoyed listening to him speak – he had a wonderfully rich, Southern voice.

The first mention of David Herbert Donald in the MHS Proceedings was at the annual meeting in 1957, when Librarian Stephen T. Riley reported that he had visited the library for research purposes that year (Riley described Donald as having “been long engaged on his life of Charles Sumner”). The MHS elected Donald a corresponding member at the December 1960 meeting, and a resident member in January, 1975. Since 1963 he has been a member of the Adams Papers Editorial Advisory Board.

Donald, a native of Mississippi, was a graduate of Millsaps College (B.A., 1941) and the University of Illinois (Ph.D., 1946). He taught history at Columbia University, Smith College, Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, as well as Harvard University. A full obituary appears in today’s Boston Globe.