This Week @ MHS

By Elaine Grublin

Please join us at this week’s event:

Tuesday, 11 January at 5:15 PM the Boston Environmental History Seminar series continues with “City as Change: Design and Science Collaborations for Sustainable Urban Life,” a talk presented by Ninian Stein of Wheaton College, Philip Loheed of Boston Architectural College, and Sarah Howard-McHugh of Tufts University. The comment will be given by Joan Fitzgerald of Northeastern University. You can find more information about the seminar series here.

 

And remember that our current exhibition “Josiah Quincy: A Lost Hero of the Revolution” is open Monday through Saturday 1:00 PM through 4:00 PM.  This exhibition is open through the 22nd of January.

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Massachusetts Finds Her Voice

By Elaine Grublin

The year 2011 marks the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. Over the course of the next five years the MHS will mark this milestone with a number of public events, exhibitions, publication projects, and web displays. The first of these efforts, Looking at the Civil War: Massachusetts Finds Her Voice launched on the MHS website today.

Over the course of the next 52 months, January 2011 through April 2015, we will post one Civil War related item per month to our website. The selected item will be something either written in or related to an event that occurred in that month 150 years ago. The majority of these materials will be manuscript items — letters, diaries, and other personal papers — discussing some aspect of the war. We will highlight materials to represent the many voices of the citizens of Massachusetts: soldiers, statesmen, women, politicians, and children.
Each month the display will feature a digitized version of the document, available as a screen-sized image and in high-resolution, a full transcription of the document, and a short contextual essay.

 

To kick off the online exhibition we feature a draft letter from the John A. Andrew Papers, (collection guide available) in which Andrew, the newly inaugurated governor of Massachusetts, writes to Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, that Massachusetts will respond with “an alacrity & force” to any call for troops issued by the federal government. Andrew was the first governor to promise troops to the federal government, and when war broke out in April 1861, Massachusetts was one of the first states to answer Lincoln’s call for troops to defend the nation’s capital.

Be sure to visit our website each month to view the new object. In February, we will feature a letter written by Edward Everett in which he discusses the peace conference that met in Virginia and gives his opinion of the secession crisis. And plan to visit the library to view the larger manuscript collections from which these items are drawn.

 

Fans of our established Object of the Month can rest assured that the Civil War feature will run in addition to, not in place of the Object of the Month. So continue to look to that feature as well.

 

 

 

 

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The Fifty Nifty

By Elaine Grublin

In January 2010 I posted a piece offering a glimpse of the researcher population that visited the MHS in 2009. This morning I sat down to compose a similar piece for 2010. But then I got distracted. As I worked through our researcher database, tallying up the different places researchers had visited from, I discovered that in June of 2010 we had a multi-day research visit from a resident of West Virginia!

If you did not read the January 2010 post, you may not understand why I find it so exciting that we had a researcher from West Virginia, so I will explain. With the closing of the first decade of the 21st century, West Virginia was the only state not represented in our researcher database. We had recorded visits from researchers from all 49 other states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. But up to that point the West Virginians had eluded us. Now with the opening of the second decade of the 21st century we can claim visitors from all fifty states – an interesting piece of trivia and a testament to the widespread appeal of our collections to researchers around the country.

In 2010 alone, the MHS was visited by researchers from 47 states. Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota were the only states not represented this year. As usual we also had a number of international visitors. Folks traveled to the MHS library from Australia, Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Russia, Scotland, and Taiwan just to name a few. Our international visitors comprise the smallest percentage of our individual researchers, but they often are in town for extended periods of time, making multiple visits to the library and are better represented in the total research visit category.

I ponder how I missed the West Virginian at the time of his visit. He was a researcher I spoke to – concerning his research, not his home! And I imagine that the staff member working the reception desk must have been one of our newer employees, not aware that I was on the look out for a researcher from West Virginia, thus not alerting me to the fact.

So now I must define identify a new geographical goal. I wonder how many of the Canadian provinces are represented in our database…

 

 

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This Week @ MHS

By Elaine Grublin and Carol Knauff

Happy New Year! We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, 5 January at 12 noon for a brown bag lunch. Alexander Kluger of Universitat Wurzburg will discuss his ideas and research concerning the topic What Is “Influence”? German Literature and American Transcendentalism. For more information, click here.

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