By Kathy Griffin, Collections Services Project Transcriber

Since the spring of 2022, we have been promoting a grant-funded, pilot project to enable crowd-sourced online transcription of MHS collections. This project offers a meaningful volunteer experience at the present time and in the future will facilitate research using those collections by people across the globe. I have been involved in this project both as a transcriber and as the principal reviewer/editor of the transcriptions as they are completed by volunteers. Crowdsourcing for transcription is particularly important in the 21st century, when fewer members of the new generation of researchers are able to read cursive writing, and those who can decipher the writing of earlier centuries are a rare commodity. For what use can historical manuscripts be, when no one can understand the written record? This article in The Atlantic, by Drew Gilpin Faust, stabs right into the heart of the matter. Our vast manuscript collections stored in archival repositories across the United States will be useless unless the items are digitized and transcribed for access.  

Online transcription projects which reach across the globe to willing volunteers can bring together those who enjoy both solving handwriting puzzles, and reading the stories of the past. Accurate transcription is probably the most time-consuming aspect of a completed digital project. We have the technology for rapid delivery of digitized documents to a computer screen, but we cannot engage the researcher if they cannot read the documents. On the MHS website, the transcriptions completed during the pilot project are visible to anyone who creates an account and logs in to the MHS Digital Volunteers web page. In the future, the plan is for the transcriptions to be searchable on the MHS website and also visible to people browsing the manuscript collection guides relating to the transcribed pages.  

The primary transcription project of this endeavor was deciphering the diaries of Lumen Boyden, a mid-19th-century Methodist minister employed by the Boston City Missionary Society as a missionary in East Boston for most of the documented time period 1854-1863. He was also employed as the preacher for the Union Chapel in East Boston, and as a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, and for several other charitable endeavors. Boyden spent his daily rounds visiting East Boston families of all religions and ethnicities. There is a wealth of information on the every-day life of the poor people of the area, from food consumed, to religious habits, to the scourge of alcoholism among the populace, sickness, medicine, the weather, schooling, amusements, fires, floods, wages, cost of living, religious beliefs and practices, and so forth. The poverty, squalor, disease, and dreadful living conditions that Boyden encountered in East Boston, on a daily basis, rival anything described in Dickensian London. And this is what historical manuscripts really give to us: a snapshot, incomplete at best, but an important glimpse into the lives of those who came before us. Since the journals have already been described in more detail in a previous Beehive post I will not give any further detail of Boyden’s writing.

Went to “Bowkers Block” & called on eleven families & what misery. Rum & ruin go hand in hand. A Mr Judge Roman Catholic very sick with consumption very poor — Called on lame man in another room — In another a woman with a number of children also a sister & family just from Ireland wretchedly poor Husband of the lessee in house of correction Having spent a short time in that den of pollution that hive of iniquity left to breath the pure air of heaven & hastened to Waltham & after tea meeting at B Colby

From my point of view the pilot project has been a great success with only minor technical glitches along the way. I cannot speak to the technical stuff – people who know me will agree that I have a troubled relationship with technology – but I love the editing work and consider transcription to be my truest vocation, next to sorting and arranging 18th and 19th century American manuscript collections. There is nothing like solving a good handwriting mystery to make me feel the sort of satisfaction one hopes to derive from a job well done. We have had a dedicated and hard-working group of volunteers (most of whom we never meet in person!) who have given freely of their own spare time to help us bring these journals of Lumen Boyden to life on the screen. We are so grateful and fortunate to have volunteers who enjoy diving into the work, and who find the same pleasure that I do, in making manuscripts accessible online.

[Note:  Funding from an anonymous organization supported the pilot crowdsourcing project in 2022 featuring the Luman Boyden missionary journals.  Funding from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati supported beta testing of transcription tool in the fall of 2021 featuring two volumes of the John Rowe diaries.]

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

Happy October and spooky season! I have always had an interest in the weird and wonderful and of course the MHS is full of those. However, one significant missing piece in the collection, to my thinking at least, is material regarding aliens and extra-terrestrial sightings. Most of the content that the MHS has related to the word “alien” is about the Alien and Sedition acts, passed in 1798 and signed into law by Pres. John Adams. In light of this, I decided to look at what similarities and differences the word “alien” had in 1798 compared to how it is used today.

In 1798, the word alien in the context of the Alien and Sedition Acts meant someone “foreign” to the new United States but the word was not without negative connotations. While the word had other meanings at the time as well, they are all derived from the same sense of othering and otherness. Alien was not a bland, neutral word then and it certainly is not now.

While the prevailing viewpoint today is that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional, at the time that was a hotly contested debate. Objectors argued that because they were unconstitutional, the states were not under obligation to follow the laws, a state’s rights argument that definitely would not cause problems in the future. But despite its detractors, there was a lot of support for the laws. One such supporter was Kentucky Senator, Humphrey Marshall, who wrote a poem (below) praising the laws and waxing, well, poetic about the dangers of these non-WASP immigrants and mob rule as opposed to royal rule. Ironic, given that the United States had just gotten rid of a monarchy!  His support of this, and other unpopular Federalist policies, was the end of his senatorial career.

“Aliens: A Patriotic Poem” by Humphry Marshall.

(33) Has France a diplomatic corps,
Dispers’d, and arranged among us?
And has not Britain, on our shore,
Another; that is as dangerous?

(34)

In this, most lies, the difference,
One nicely observes the common form;
‘Tis mob, with Democratic France,
With Royal Britain, ‘tis well born

We can trace many words that we use today back to that same use of the word. Words like “alienated” or terminology like “illegal aliens” (over “undocumented immigrants”) all come from that Middle English origin of alean or alyen, meaning foreign. It is not until the 20th century that the word alien was used to mean “extra-terrestrial” and even longer before it conjures up the image of creepy humanoids you see when you search “alien” today.

In my experience, modern reactions to the word alien often include images of flying saucers and characters from a sci-fi film, not the Democratic-Republicans of 1798. People claim to have had encounters with extra-terrestrial aliens and lived to tell the tale, creating an interesting tension between the 18th century use of the word and the modern one. For my part, I see this shift as making the word even more dehumanizing than it already was. After all, the group I most often use it for are foreigners of the highest degree- not only not American, but not even from Earth! It’s the ultimate foreigners. If I had to guess, the Alien Acts of 1798 probably would have ranked at extra-terrestrial aliens as even lower and less worthy of rights than the Earthlings the Federalists were so nervous about.

I also wanted to share some interesting Boston connections to extra-terrestrial aliens. One website collects people’s stories of alleged alien and UFO sightings and includes a few in the same area as the MHS, including a very close encounter. Interestingly, the North End is packed with sightings, significantly more than any other area of the city. Perhaps you have a guess as to why extra-terrestrial life seems to be such a fan of that area. Regardless, it is clear that aliens of all kinds continue to capture our attention.

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

William Lloyd Garrison was brutally attacked in Boston on 21 October 1835 while speaking at a meeting of the Female Anti-Slavery Society. You can read more about the attack and how eyewitness stories differed in a previous Beehive blog post.

Garrison, a Boston journalist, abolitionist, and social reformer, was most famous for his widely read antislavery newspaper, The Liberator. The Boston paper began in 1831 and ceased publication when enslavement in the United States was constitutionally abolished in 1865. The MHS has several items relating to The Liberator, including the stand on which Garrison set the type for printing, a banner to celebrate the beginning of The Liberator, and several issues of The Liberator, including the first issue, and the first and second editions of the last issue.

In the last edition of The Liberator on the last two pages is a Farewell Address to the paper, written by William Cooper Nell, an educated post-office employee, author, and abolitionist in the Boston African American community. He created antislavery societies and was a friend, supporter, and article writer for Garrison and his Liberator. Nell worked to desegregate antislavery societies and schools in Boston. He achieved the latter in 1855.

Nell’s “Farewell Address” in The Liberator, was addressed to his “Dear Friend Garrison.” It is both a love letter and, at times, a chastisement towards white abolitionists, as seen in these passages: “The first year, the Liberator was supported by the colored people, and had not fifty white subscribers,” and “In reading the Liberator for these thirty-five years, what volumes might be gleaned illustrating the noble, heroic and martyr spirit of the anti-slavery women, who, in the earliest days, rallied, in the midst of fiery persecution, to encourage by their presence, assist by their counsel, and by the magic influence of voice, pen and purse sustain the anti-slavery cause, and through whose devoted labors that cause received an impetus which you have often acknowledged could have been gained through no other instrumentality!”

At the end, Nell shows deep feeling, “I have cherished an interest in the Anti-Slavery cause from the time of your lectures in the old Athenaeum Hall on Pearl Street, before the Liberator was unfurled to the breeze, every copy of which I rejoice to have in my possession, and which no ordinary pressure of circumstances will ever compel me to part with.” His address finishes with a poem by Anne Warren Weston, and his own heart-felt thanks: “With a heart overflowing with gratitude for your life-long services in the cause of those with whom I am identified by complexion and condition, Ever fraternally yours, William C. Nell.”

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

Yesterday (30 August) was the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Transcendentalist Caroline Sturgis Tappan. When I searched old posts at the Beehive and discovered I’d never written about this interesting and talented woman, I decided I should correct that oversight.

Caroline Sturgis was born on 30 August 1819, the daughter of Elizabeth and William Sturgis of Boston. She had four sisters and one brother. As the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Caroline had quite the privileged upbringing and was educated by some of the most eminent 19th-century thinkers and teachers, including Amos Bronson Alcott, Dorothea Dix, and Margaret Fuller.

Today, Caroline is known primarily as a Transcendentalist poet and children’s author. Her poems appeared in The Dial with the byline “Z,” and her children’s stories were published (anonymously) as Rainbows for Children and The Magician’s Show Box. She was also an intimate friend and confidante of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, as described by Francis B. Dedmond in 1988, Kathleen Lawrence in 2005, and Megan Marshall in 2013.

Given her accomplishments and important literary connections, I think Caroline gets short shrift in histories of the Transcendentalist movement. I found no record of a full-length biography, though she’s mentioned in passing in biographies of Emerson, Fuller, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

Caroline may have been overshadowed by her older sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, who was also a poet. Even the notice that appeared in the pages of Literature magazine (page 178-82) after Caroline’s death, which characterized her work as “daring” and brilliant,” spent more time praising her sister’s “finer [poetic] touch” and citing Ellen’s poetry. You can see a similar dynamic in an 1885 article in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (pp. 249-50).

Meanwhile, a joint biographical sketch of the sisters in Notable American Women (vol. 2, pp. 214-5) describes Caroline as “the more outgoing and unconventional of the two.” One of her poems, published in The Dial in October 1840, begins with these lines:

Greatly to Be

Is enough for me,

Is enough for thee.

As an archivist, I’m most familiar with Caroline through her manuscript correspondence, which appears in a few different collections at the MHS, including the Davis-Sturgis-Tappan family papers and the Sturgis-Hooper family papers. Author Megan Marshall calls Caroline “high-spirited” (p. 100), and after reading through some of her letters, I have to agree. You can almost picture her grinning to herself as she writes. Here’s a sampling:

To her sister Ellen, 18 Sep. 1838: “Your tortoise of a letter has at length been welcomed at Naushon, & I thought at first it was from father, until I perceived it had no date & then I knew that it must of course be from you. I suppose you think time is nothing & it is not worth while to note down the day when you write.”

To Lidian Jackson Emerson, 4 June 1839: “I am sure it is very kind for you & Mr Emerson to invite me to stay with you, for I am as uninteresting as possible, & have nothing to say. […] I shall not send my love to the baby for I never like anything that can only express itself by doleful cries. I only love it when it arrives at smiles.”

To Ellen, about a mouse, 29 Sep. 1839: “I called him Romeo, because he roamed about & squealed O! all the time.”

To her husband William A. Tappan, 17 Jan. 1849: “It seems to be a great trouble to build a house & after it is done we shall feel as if we must like it whether we do or not.”

To her father William Sturgis, 9 Mar. 1854: “You know children will be children & mine do not make any pretensions to be angels, except that the other day Ellen refused a tart which was offered her, saying her mother did not let her eat tarts, which I consider slightly angelic.”

As an added treat, Caroline frequently illustrated her letters.

Caroline Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of abolitionist Lewis Tappan, in 1847. The couple had two daughters, Ellen and Mary. Caroline survived all her siblings, dying on 20 October 1888, and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. In the 1930s, the Tappans’ home, Tanglewood, was donated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra by their daughter and granddaughter.

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Caroline Sturgis Tappan as much as I have!