Even Civil War Soldiers Played Ball

By Elaine Grublin

The Boston Red Sox meet the Detroit Tigers today in the first regular season game of the 2012 season. The arrival of baseball season is always a welcome treat in Boston. Getting myself into a baseball frame of mind, my thoughts wandered to a letter one of our volunteers, Joan, had shown to me several months ago. I know I love the distraction of baseball, a game that is simultaneously exciting and relaxing, but until I saw that letter I had not known that baseball was also a welcome distraction for soldiers during the American Civil War. 

In this 3 May 1862 letter Captain Richard Cary of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment describes for his wife a game played between men from the 2nd and men from the 3rd Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.  The text reads:

The men of the Wisconsin 3d challenged our men to a game of base ball & this afternoon it was played & at the end the tally stood 75 for our side & 7 for theirs so I hardly think they will care to play a return match; we have some of the best players of quite a celebrated ball club from Medway & some of the playing was admirable. 

The men of the 2nd might have had an advantage, as Cary indicates there were baseball clubs in Massachusetts and some of the men were experienced players. I am not certain how familiar the Wisconsin men would have been with the game — and if the Massachusetts regiment was playing by the rules of the Massachusetts Game (common in the mid-19th century) the Wisconsin team may have been more familiar with a different set of rules.

As a final thought, wouldn’t it be splendid if another Massachusetts/Wisconsin match-up brought similar results? A Red Sox 75, Brewers 7 score the final game of the World Series sounds pretty good to me. 

 

 

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A New Way to Look at an Old (and forgotten) Story

By Peter Drummey

We have just opened a new exhibition, The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theatre: 1794-1798, that complements a larger exhibition, Forgotten Chapters of Boston’s Literary History, at the Boston Public Library. The controversy over a public theater that raged in Boston in the 1790s, an old and largely forgotten story, now has been brought to life through the efforts of Professor Paul Lewis of the English Department of Boston College and his very able students. Thanks to the audio production services of Boston College, it also is the first time that the Society—and the Boston Public Library—have used QR codes in an exhibition. QR codes, the ubiquitous matrix barcodes that appear everywhere in advertisements, now are used increasingly in museum settings so that smartphone users are able to call up additional audio information about what is on display. 

The First Seasons of the Federal Street Theatre will be on display, Monday-Saturday, 10:00 AM-4:00 PM, through July 30, but more than twenty items from the MHS exhibition also are on “virtual” display at the Forgotten Chapters of Boston’s History website, www.bostonliteraryhistory.com. The online version of the First Seasons section of the Forgotten Chapters exhibition will reach a wider audience than those who are able to visit the MHS and be available for a longer period of time, but it also is an informative and engaging introduction to the original materials on show at the Society.

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This Week @ MHS

By Elaine Grublin

The April starts off busy, as we offer six free public programs this week. Mark you calendar and be sure to join us for one of the following:

Tuesday, 3 April at 5:15 PM, the Boston Early American History Seminar brings Len Travers, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, to the MHS to present his paper “The Court-Martial of Jonathan Barnes.” Colin Calloway, Dartmouth College, will give the comment. 

Wednesday, 4 April at 12:00 PM, join in the conversation at a brown-bag lunch program.  Joanne Melish, University of Kentucky, will present her finding on the topic “Making Black Communities: White Laborers, Black Neighborhoods, and the Evolution of Race and Class in the Post-Revolutionary North.” Then at 6:00 PM join in a second conversation, are our conversation series, Considering the Common Good: What We Give Up/What We Gain, offers its latest installment with Lewis Hyde, Kenyon College and Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, presenting “Common as Air: A Conversation with Lewis Hyde.” A pre-talk reception begins at 5:30 PM.

Friday, 6 April at 12.00 PM, Robert Turner, Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia Law School presents The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy in a lunchtime program. And at 2:00 PM, the MHS’ Stephen T. Riley Librarian Peter Drummey presents a gallery talk “Being Mrs. Adams” in conjunction with a viewing of our current exhibition A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life: The Photographs of Clover Adams, 1883-1885.

And Saturday, 7 April, our 90-minute tour “The History and Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society” departs the front lobby at 10:00 AM. 

For additional details about all of these events please visit our online calendar. 

Posted in This Week @MHS

Did John Quincy Adams Have a Sense of Humor?

By Peter K. Steinberg

Did John Quincy Adams (JQA) have a sense of humor? Would he, had it been practiced at the time, conducted April Fool’s hijinks?  Editors and staff of the Adams Papers admit to me that JQA might not have displayed much interest in performing jokes, but that he certainly could enjoy one if it were played in his presence. (If JQA were a conductor of practical jokes, however, I envision he would, if around today and in the current building of the MHS, arrive early on 1 April and place signs on all the bathroom doors saying “Out of order.”)

Since August 2009, MHS staff members have been tweeting JQA’s own line-a-day diary entries that summarize his life and work as a diplomat in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Each tweet contains JQA’s succinct words describing his day exactly 200 years ago.  (The link to JQA’s Twitter account is here: http://twitter.com/#!/JQAdams_MHS and a link to a page describing MHS’s approach to tweeting JQA’s words is here: http://www.masshist.org/adams/jqa.php.)

JQA’s tweets are interesting nuggets of information on their own, but I can’t help but yearn for something out of the ordinary: for something to reach out and slap me in the face.  There was one entry last year (tweet from 12 August 2011 that featured JQA’s summary of events on 12 August 1811) that was so matter of fact that I did LOL given a degree of plainness of JQA’s delivery and the momentous occasion recorded: “My wife gave me a daughter. Galloway came. Montreal here, and Hall. Patterson. Plummer, Ashton, Marks &c.”  It is so matter of fact as to be funny.

And then there is this, from 3 January 1812, which struck me as funny: “VII. Read, wrote and walked before Breakfast. Fruitman here again. Fraud of the Butter woman. Lange here.”  (MHS sent an extra tweet on January 3 to provide a bit of the backstory about the “Butter woman”:  http://twitter.com/#!/JQAdams_MHS/status/154193299073277953 )

Wanting some humor, we have come up with a few summaries that, irrespective of the contemporaneity of time, would have made good tweets as well…

Wednesday. Woodward and Montreal here. Eve at Betancourt’s: Rosenzweig, Brandel, and Strogonoff got the moves like Jagger. 

Saturday. Paid several visits. Fisher dined and spent the Eve here. I took a hot water and Russian vapour bath. Life in the big city.

Tuesday. Montreal here. Explains the affair of the Store-ships. I called on Meyer and Harris. Walk home. Jones here at Eve. Can’t keep up.

Friday. VIII. Löwenhielm here. Read 2. Sermons. de Bray & Emperor at Mrs. Colombi’s at eve: party rockers in the house tonight.

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