By Anna J. Clutterbuck Cook, Reader Services

Today, we return to the line-a-day diary of Margaret Russell. If you missed the January installment of Margaret’s diary, you can find it here, along with a brief introduction to this monthly series.

During the month of February 1916, Margaret traveled south from wintery New England to Atlantic City by rail and spends nine days at the upscale Marlborough Blenheim hotel. While the weather in New Jersey was not particularly spring-like (“foggy and cold” reads one day, “sleeting” another), Margaret still walked daily and took in many local amusements including outdoor concerts and a performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — first performed just three years earlier — starring the actress who is said to have provided the inspiration for Eliza Dolittle, Beatrice Stella Tanner (“Mrs. Pat”).

Where do you think she collected this bit of plant matter tucked between the diary pages?

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February 1916

1 Feb.* Tuesday – Stay in bed every morning till 10.30.Feel better. Went to tell Dr.Balch so then to Friday Club. Miss Abler came to dine.

2 Feb. Wednesday – annual meeting of Chilton. Mrs.Ward’s class.Heavy snowstorm so did not go out again.

3 Feb Thursday- Heavy snowstorm.Clearing by 12 – took Mrs  A–out in the P.M. for a short time. Feel better.

4 Feb. Friday – Concert. Geraldine [word]. Dined at Bowker’s with Prof & Mrs. Dupriez of [Belgium].

5 Feb. Saturday. Meeting & service at Good Samaritan.  Bowker’s dinner another night not Friday

6 Feb. Sunday. Walked to Cathedral with Miss A & lunched at H.G.C.’s. Family to dine.

7 Feb. Monday. Lunched at Marian’s. Dined at Cousin Edith Perkins’ to meet Mrs. James Perkins.

8 Feb. Monday – Packing & errands. Came to N.Y. on the 3 o’k train. Went to Hotel Belmont.

9 Feb. Left for Atlantic City at 10.15 & got there for lunch. Morning [word] went out to walk. Lovely rooms [word].

10 Feb. Am at Marlborough Blenheim. Pleasant day. Walked in the A.M. Sat out & then took Hollingchair. Enjoy salt water baths.

11 Feb. Friday. Walked in the morning. Went to moving pictures in the P.M.

12 Feb. Saturday. Foggy & cold but went out to see Harry Lauder in the P.M. Very amusing.

Harry Lauder, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harry_Lauder_1922.jpg

13 Feb. Sunday – Sleeting. Walked & church. In the afternoon went to hear Italian band – delightful. Snowing & blowing.

14 Feb. Monday – Bitter cold but went out to hear Italian band again on the Pier. Crowds very amusing.

15 Feb. Tuesday not so cold & bright. Went to walk. In the P.M. to hear the Italians. Took our [word].

16 Feb. Wednesday. Lovely day & warmer. Walked to the Inlet & back on the beach. Went to hear Mrs. Pat Campbell in Pygmalion.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell / Beatrice Stella Tanner, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mrs-patrick-campbell-2.jpg

17 Feb. Thursday – walked over four miles (same yesterday) & back on beach in the other direction. Last time to hear Italians.

18 Feb. Friday – Took last walk. Left at 2.30 – N.Y. at 5.40. Went to Belmont. Saw Mr. Moorfield Storey, Jack Peabody, Henry Harves, Bob Sbaros all going to Atlantic for holiday.

19 Feb. Saturday – Very cold & windy. Went to the new Colony Club & a few errands. Come home on 1ok. Feeling very well.

20 Feb. Sunday Church – to see Parmans. Lunched at H.G.C’s. Family to dine. Richard goes off this week.

21 Feb. [word]. Lunched at Marian’s. Went to Mrs. Fitz musical. Very cold but clear.

22 Feb Walked down to thee Charley Pierson with Marian. Drive out to see Mrs. Hodder. Lovely spring day.

23 Feb. Wednesday – Mrs. Ward’s lecture. Lunched at Club. Art Mus. lecture. Went to [word] at Higginsen’s.

24 Feb. Thursday – Lunch club here – fair. Went to call on Mrs. Wulhin. Dined out at C.S. Sargent’s big affair. CPC went with me.

25 Feb. Friday – Errands & Dr. Cockett. Splendid concert. Rainy & slippery.

26 Feb. Saturday – Mrs. Lysen’s reading. Raining hard & warmer. Went to [word] & hard no trouble. To concert again.

27 Feb. Sunday – Church. Lunched at H.G.C.’s Went to war lecture by Palmer at Mrs. N Thayer’s. Family dinner.

28 Feb. Monday – [word]. Lunched at Marian’s. Went out to Museum for botany lecture. Very interesting. Dined at South End H. Mr. Words took me in.

29 Feb. Tuesday – Ronlet reading in the morning. T. Club in the afternoon. Paid some calls.

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If you are interested in viewing the diary in person in our library or have other questions about the collection, please visit the library or contact a member of the library staff for further assistance.

*Please note that the diary transcription is a rough-and-ready version, not an authoritative transcript. Researchers wishing to use the diary in the course of their own work should verify the version found here with the manuscript original.

By Dan Hinchen, Reader Services

In the news recently there is a lot of coverage of the Zika virus and the late rise in outbreaks related to it. With that in mind I wanted to check our collections to see what the MHS holds relating to viruses. When I searched our online catalog, ABIGAIL, using Virus as the subject term I came up with no results. Using a method I briefly described in my last post on the Beehive, I started clicking around to see what related terms there might be. Instead of Virus diseases, ABIGAIL pointed me to three narrower terms: Influenza, Measles, and Rabies. Not satisfied with these options and the results they yielded, I tried searching for simply Diseases instead. The first result I found with this search is what this post is all about. 

Andrew Croswell (1778-1858) was a student at Harvard University in the late 1790s. He later studied medicine in Plymouth, MA, and practiced there and in Fayette and Mercer, ME. In the collections here we hold two notebooks that were kept by Croswell. The first is a mathematical notebook which contains definitions and problems in geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. The second is a physician’s notebook that contains notes on the treatment of diseases and injuries, as well as the use of some medicines. 

The second notebook, relating to various diseases and treatments, is text-heavy in its content. Croswell – who had very nice, neat, and even handwriting – copied observations from published medical texts, especially the work of Dr. Benjamin Rush. 

Observations on the cholera infantum

Rush’s observations vol 1 p159

Also, Croswell includes illustrations of a few little villages in Maine where he practiced medicine.

Mercer Village, ME 1805

While it was the search for disease that exposed me to Mr. Croswell, it was his non-medical notebook that really captured my attention. Given my aversion to math in my educational career, this was an accomplishment. Croswell’s mathematical notebook, kept while a student at Harvard, was impressive not only in its order, clarity, and neatness, but in the embellishments that he included. The title page gives us a very good idea of what to expect in terms of content before we get into the notebook:

The first section of notebook deals with geometry. Croswell started by writing out definitions of terms relating to the subject and then goes on to tackling geometric problems. It is here that the notebook becomes, to me, much more visually striking as he starts to include geometric figures alongside the various problems. Generally, the figures start out fairly simple and then get more complex.

After his work on geometry, Croswell moves into the field of surveying and problems of trigonometry. Again, he steps-up his detail and the intricacy of his illustrations, adding color and tables as he solves problems relating to land area:

He then proceeds to “Mensuration of Heights and Distances” through the use of trigonometric functions. Again, Croswell takes his illustrations up another level, this time depicting full scenes which represent the mathematical problems at hand. The problems contain variables such as whether a location is accessible to people and the situation of the ground from which observations are made.

PROB. 1. _ To take the height of an accessible object by one observation.

PROB 4^th. To take the distance of any inaccessible object. | PROB 5^th. Upon a place of known height determine the distance betwee two objects, lying in the same direction.

The last section of this mathematical notebook concerns itself with matters of maritime navigation. 

Again, Croswell draws out intricate geometric designs to illustrate the problems of navigation and sailing. He even includes a hand-drawn and colored map of the Atlantic Ocean (the judges deduct one point on this for his representation of the North American coastline). 

Pretty cool, right? To think, that from hearing about a modern medical issue in the news, I ended up with such a meticulously written and illustrated mathematical guide to solving problems of navigation! Now it’s your turn. Pick a starting point in ABIGAIL and see how far afield you find yourself after just a few minutes. Then visit the library and check out what you discover!

By Rakashi Chand, Reader Services

In the late nineteenth century the Reverend Gaetano Conte created a scrapbook about the founding of the Society for Protection of Italian Immigrants in Boston, Massachusetts. The scrapbook, titled Societies for the protection of Italian immigrants: documents and illustrations, 1894-1906,  is a unique collection of notes, letters, newspaper clippings, annual reports, and photographs kept by Conte during his years in Boston and through his return home to Italy.

Interestingly this organization was not formed with the intention of protecting the newly arriving Italian Immigrants from Americans or other immigrants, but from fellow Italian immigrants! Why was there such a need as described by the Reverend and the inhabitants of Boston’s North End? What were the Italian Immigrants exposed to that other immigrants were not? What was it that put fear and anger in the hearts of families and young men when they arrived on American shores? The answer to each question is the same: The Padrone.

The Padrone System was a network that began in the towns of Italy and spread to the cities and towns of America. The Padrone -from the Italian word for manager or boss- were labor brokers. These were men who victimized their fellow countrymen as they arrived lost and alone in a foreign land. The new immigrants were in need of guidance, guidance that the Padrones would provide…at a price. The Padrone would offer employment opportunities to young men in Italy, often promising them safe passage and housing. The Padrone also offered banking for the immigrants; providing them with a “safe” place to save the money they earned and a way to “send” money home to Italy. Other Padrone would simply solicit Italian men who were already in America with the prospect of a “great” new job; all they had to do was agree to go to Maine for a year…

The degree of corruption varied, but the Padrone always profited from the relationship. Passage from Italy was on ships owned by companies with whom they had contracts. Housing was poor tenement apartments shared among many immigrants in sub-human standards.  The jobs they offered in America were often extremely hard with very little pay. The Padrone “banks” would often make large portions of the immigrant’s savings disappear for various fees. The money the immigrants would try to send home to their families in Italy would often never arrive. And the “great” new jobs would often be far from their new homes in Boston, such as in the woods of Maine where they would labor endlessly under the Padrone, often without seeing the wages they had been promised. The Italian immigrants often found themselves lost and confused in this new country; they couldn’t speak the language, they didn’t understand the customs and they were often uneducated. So the services of the Padrone seemed the only choice they had to survive; they felt they had no one else to help them.

The Immigration Act of 1864, supposedly to encourage immigration, created the opportunity for Padrones in America; it allowed manufacturers to bring in a cheap foreign labor force under contract, hence needing a middleman or labor broker to negotiate between the laborers and the employers. Although largely unheard of, the Padrone Act of 1874 tried to stop the padrone system to protect immigrants from “involuntary servitude.”  

Rev. Conte came to the United States in 1893 to help his fellow Italians who had moved to America. Upon arriving in America and beginning his work here, the Reverend began to keep records of the social situation of the Italian immigrants. He found the Italian immigrants needed more than just their souls saved, and the Reverend was not going to allow his people to suffer. He became the superintendent of the Boston Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants. He was also involved in the North End Italian Mission, the Association for Protecting Italian Workmen, and the Society for Protection of Italian Immigrants.

Rev. Conte’s work with Italian Immigrants in Massachusetts was pioneering and heroic. His notes are aptly named after the Society that he created. The revered was not only interested in protecting Italians from the Padrone; he also sought to improve schooling, housing and health care.  The collection here at the MHS covers many aspects of the immigrants’ lives, social, political, religious and moral. It illustrates elements of the social aspects of immigration and life in the North End along with observations of religious, moral and ethical issues. It also contains photographs, illustrations and legal records, annual reports and statistical information. Finally the collection has many newspaper clippings from both American and Italian immigrants portraying the victimization by the Padrone and the actions of the Societies for the protection of Italian immigrants.

Also in the collection are two versions of a memoir written by Conte and focusing on issues of Italian emigration to North American at the turn of the 20^th century. There is a 1903 Italian-language printing, Dieci anni in America: impressioni e ricordi, and a 1976 translation titled Ten Years in America: impressions and recollections…  

Interested in U.S. immigration over the years? Try searching our catalog, ABIGAIL, for subject terms like United States Emigration and immigration

By Dan Hinchen, Reader Services

As I sat trying to think of ideas for this post, I opened our online catalog, ABIGAIL, to brainstorm and see if I could think of any odd subject headings I wanted to explore. There, in that sentence, lay the answer. I typed in “oddities” to see what we might have in our holdings with that tag. The number of results I got with that search was a big fat goose egg. Thankfully, ABIGAIL, though often cruel in her adherence to a controlled vocabulary, offered me a bit of help and gave me another term that I should look into: “Curiosities and Wonders.” 

And so I was off, looking into what curious and wondrous items the MHS holds. There are 33 titles associated with that subject heading in the catalog, with further subdivisions pointing to specific geographic locations (Lawrence and Boston, MA; NY, NY; Great Britain), photographs, even juvenile literature. Confining myself to the original 33, I started browsing the titles for common themes or links among them. It was soon apparent that we had a decent little number of items relating to the grotesque, freakish, and monstrous. 

Opened by Daniel Bowen in 1795, the Columbian Museum showcased a broad range of curiosities: waxen figures of John Adams; larger-than-life depictions of Scriptural scenes, like David and Goliath; and exhibitions of various animals. “A procupine, a bear, a raccoon, and a rabbit were announced by their proprietor as ‘very great curiosities.’ There was an elephant which, in conformity with the habits of the day, drank ‘all kinds of spirituous liquors;’ and the public were assured that ‘thirty bottles of porter, of which he draws the corks himself, is not an uncommon allowance.’… spectators were informed that ‘he will probably live between two and three hundred years,’ — an announcement which shows that the effect of alcohol upon animal tissue was not then so well understood as it is thought to be at present.”¹ The Columbian Museum operated until 1825 when the collections were acquired by Ethan Allen Greenwood for his New England Museum.

This broadside relates a piece of correspondence written by Samuel Hanson to his brother. Hanson, along with two other soldiers, is ordered to travel from Louisville, KY, to New Orleans in order to assist General Jackson there. Along the way, the three men stop for a night in the town of Versailles, KY, on the Ohio River. They are told tales of an enormous serpent that has been menacing the town and eating livestock. With all the able-bodied men of the town already off in New Orleans to join in the fighting, the townspeople aske these three soldiers to help them get rid of the threat. They agree and, the next day head out with their two dogs to search for the beast in the woods. After some time, they finally find “a monster, of the serpent kind, full twenty-two feet length, and the thickest part of his body of the size of the thigh of one our largest men! his eye sparkling like fire, and venomously shooting forth his forked tongue…” The men eventually succeeded in killing the beast and taking its head. 

Finally, this broadside caught my eye mainly because of the image that dominates the center. However, after a closer look, it is the feature at the bottom that really stands out. Upon closer reading, we find that the audience has the opportunity to see a living man who, early in life, promised to be a robust man later on. However, due to some unexplained circumstance, the man lost all flesh and was, seemingly, a living skeleton, and one that could play the violin, to boot!

Clicking through ABIGAIL with little direction can yield some interesting and entertaining items. Take a trip down the rabbit hole, see what you find, and then visit the library!

^1. Winsor, Justin, The Memorial History of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Boston: Osgood, 1881

By Susan Martin, Collections Services

The Fay-Mixter family papers here at the MHS includes a folder of material related to the fascinating story of the Wanderer, a luxury yacht refitted in 1858 to engage in the illegal trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved persons. The importation of enslaved people to America was prohibited by the U.S. Congress fifty years before, but smuggling was common. Multiple sources cite the Wanderer as the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States, but we now know that the Clotilda arrived the following year.

By all accounts, the Wanderer was a very fast vessel, capable of sailing up to 20 knots. William C. Corrie of Charleston, S.C. purchased the yacht in early 1858. He and his business partner, Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar—cotton planter, radical Fire-Eater, pro-slavery secessionist—immediately began refitting the yacht for its nefarious purpose. Their work aroused the suspicions of officials in New York, who temporarily seized the ship for inspection. Newspaper articles speculated (rightly, it turned out) about the true reason for the modifications, excessive provisions, and foreign crew. But with no definite proof, the ship was released.

The ship sailed on 3 July 1858, arriving at the African coast in September. Corrie got past the British and American anti-slavery patrols stationed there, according to one account, primarily using a charm offensive—friendly dinner parties, etc. The crew of the Wanderer claimed to be on a pleasure cruise up the Congo River. They even sailed under the pennant of the New York Yacht Club. And it worked: the vessel was apparently never inspected.

The Wanderer returned to the U.S. on 28 Nov. 1858, landing at Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia with over 400 African captives. Dozens had died en route. The arrival of these new enslaved people, along with some questionable documentation, attracted the attention of the authorities, and the jig was up. The ship was seized and the conspirators arrested. In May 1860, Lamar, Corrie, and others were tried for piracy in federal court in Savannah…and acquitted. One of the judges in the case was Lamar’s father-in-law.

The Wanderer material forms part of the Fay-Mixter collection because James Story Fay held a bond of indemnity for the ship. The papers include twelve letters to Fay’s colleague E. D. Brigham in Boston, dated 5 Jan.-10 Apr. 1860, in the run-up to the trial. During this time, Charles Lamar regained possession of the ship and sent it to Havana, under the care of C. R. Moore, to be sold. Three of the letters were written by Moore in Havana, and these are, I think, the most interesting of the group.

Moore praised the speed and agility of the Wanderer, but not its mission: “She is one of the finest little vessels that it was ever my fortune to get on board of, and I wish she could be in some legitimate business, that I could sail her.” He had “fixed her up like a fiddle” and thought he could get $18,000-20,000.

Because of its history, the Wanderer held a certain fascination. Moore received many visitors onboard, including American tourists and British lords, all curious to see the famous ship. But selling proved difficult. The vessel was simply “to[o] expensive and to[o] notorious.” Moore felt the watchful eyes of the English and Spanish fleets and guessed that the English in particular resented the ship. He wrote: “I am asked all kinds of questions here and have to be carefull what I say.”

In his letters to Brigham, Moore discussed his future plans and weighed his options. More than once, he expressed a desire to captain the Wanderer, but he refused to resort to the trade of enslaved people, which was still legal in Cuba. He had received offers:

“There was some parties offered me $16,000 to go to the Coast [of Africa]. I refused. […] If I cannot get a livelihood without going in a Guineaman I will starve in the streets although I am no abolitionist. […] I will stay [in Havana] until I feel that its unhealthy for me to stay. You know I am fat and hot weather and musketoes operate bad on a fat man. […] I love the Wanderer but I cannot feel she will ever give me any permanent business.”

In his third and longest letter, dated 10 Apr. 1860, Moore painted a broader picture of the trade of enslaved people in Havana:

“They prefer the old vessels here for the Coast and there are 7 or 8 fitting out here for the Coast. The ship Erie cleared yesterday, and everybody knows where she is bound. The Captain an American, Gordon his name, cleared before the Consul without difficulty. The Gov Gen is poor and winks at it. He gets $50 a head. I have had offers to go in this vessel, they would bye her for me, but I have tried to live an honest life so far and as long as I have sailed out of Boston. If the Merchants will not give me legitimate employment I will starve before I will go after blackbirds, although I do not think a negro as good as a white man, and am not an abolitionist. But when I coil my ropes up for the last time, I shall feel happyer if I have lived and practised the precepts that my parents taught me.”

The more I researched the Wanderer and the people connected to it, the more interesting the story became. A biography of Charles Lamar, for example, could fill volumes. C. R. Moore described rumors of the firebrand’s colorful exploits: “What I can learn about the young man is not much to his credit […] They tell me here that he is a remarkable small man always carryes Revolvers in his belt has shot 1 or 2 men […]” The rumors were apparently well-founded; in the month of May 1860 alone, Lamar was not only tried for piracy, but also participated in a prison break and a duel!

The Wanderer was seized once more by the U.S. government in 1861 for use against the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the war, it passed into private hands and sailed commercially for a few years before sinking off the coast of Cuba.

So what happened to the hundreds of enslaved Africans smuggled across the Atlantic on the Wanderer? Unfortunately, their fate was no different than that of the millions who preceded them. They were trafficked across the South, and the brazen Charles Lamar even kept some of them himself. The federal government showed as little interest in protecting them as it had in punishing their enslavers.

Because of its notoriety, there has been significant research into this case over the years. One of the earliest studies I found is a 1908 article in American Anthropologist by Charles J. Montgomery. Published fifty years after the ship’s fateful passage, while many of the “Wanderer Negroes” were still alive, the article contains an uncomfortable anthropological focus and some unfortunate language. However, it also includes specific information about a few of the captives, as well as their histories and photographs.

In 2008, the state of Georgia erected a monument to the ship’s African survivors on Jekyll Island, and some of their descendants attended the dedication ceremony.

For more information, see The Slave Ship Wanderer by Tom Henderson Wells (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1967) and The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails by Erik Calonius (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006).

By Anna Clutterbuck-Cook, Reader Services

After receiving positive feedback on last year’s serial documenting a journey up the Nile by an anonymous diarist, I decided to repeat the format in 2016 but with a very different type of diary from the MHS collections.

Between 1913-1922, Margaret Russell kept track of her activities in Ward’s line-a-day diaries pre-formatted to accommodate five years worth of daily records. As historian Molly McCarthy documents in her history of the daily planner, these standard blank books rose in popularity toward the end of the 19th century. The Samuel Ward Company of Boston, Massachusetts copyrighted their format in 1892, offering a “condensed, comparative record for five years” with the tagline, “nulla dies sine linea (not a day without a line).” Russell’s volume, which she began filling in 1913 at the age of fifty-five, offers prefatory instructions for the inexperienced diarist:

Russell appears to have found satisfaction in keeping her line-a-day record, because three years later in January 1916 she is still diligently writing daily in her Ward’s volume. The first month of the year is punctuated by poor weather and ill-health, as well as a full slate of social activities. While brief, in aggregate form the diary entries grant us view of daily life for a white, upper middle-class woman in middle age, living in Boston in the second decade of the twentieth century.

1 Jan. Saturday. Snowing & raining. Ear & Eye hosp. & errands. Went to Cambridge to see Katey & Aunt E–. Concert with Mrs. Schelling & Mrs. Sears.*

2 Jan. Sunday – Church – Lunched at H.G.C.’s. Family to dine & then to Slater musical. Gov. W– very prominent.

3 Jan. Monday – Hosp. meeting. [word] lunch at Marian’s. Botany lecture & drove to Swampscott. Very heavy roads.

4 Jan. Tuesday – Paying bills – walked downtown to Dr. Crockett for third time about my ear. Lafayette Fund show with Georgie.

5 Jan. Wednesday – dancing – Ward lecture. Throat sore again. Going to [word] I put up car.

6 Jan. Thursday. Felt poorly with [word] cold. Went to tableaux with Marian R. A beautiful show.

7 Jan. Friday Walked for errands & Dr. Crockett who says I better go to Woodstock to have [word]. Stayed at home all the afternoon.

8 Jan. Saturday. Mr. Surette’s first lecture very interesting. Went to Ellen’s dancing school. Meant to go to assembly but throat prevented.

9 Jan. Sunday – Felt feverish so stayed in all day. Family to dine.

10 Jan. Warm & rainy. Drove to Cambridge with Miss A– for botany lecture with slides. Much depressed by my ignorance.

11 Jan. Monday-Felt very poorly. Dr. C.sent me home & I passed the P.M. on my couch with pleasure. Gave up dinner at Burr’s. 

12 Jan. Wednesday – In the house all day this is the fourth sustained attack I have had.

13 Jan. In the house – better.

14 Jan. In the house. Sat in the window for a short time.Miss A- sent for as sister has pneumonia but she died before Miss A- got there.

15 Jan. So cold I gave up going out but sat in the window in the warm sun. Susan Bradley came to see me.

16 Jan. Sunday – did not go out. Mr Fenno came to call & family came to dine.

17 Jan. Monday – very cold & windy but drove to May R.’s birthday lunch and back .Botany lesson here. Ellen & teacher to play here.

18 Jan. Tuesday – lovely cold day.Feel better at last. Sat in the open window & went to Swampscott in P.M. Roads very good.

19 Jan. Wednesday. Went to Mrs.Ward’s lecture.Llunched at Chilton. Lecture at Art [word] & tea for Emily [word] at Mrs. T. Motley’s.

20 Jan. Thursday – Errands but began to snow and then rain so stayed at home in the P.M. Feeling better.

21 Jan. Friday. Went to concert & took Mrs.Hadder

22 Jan. Saturday Went to Mrs.Tyson’s in the P.M. did not feel so well.

23 Jan. Sunday Stayed in bed till dinner time & felt better. Family to dine.

24 Jan. Monday. Stayed in bed in the morning. Botany lesson & then rested.

25 Jan. Monday. Sat in the window & after lunch went to drive. Really warm. Gave up Lyman dinner.

  26 Jan. Wednesday.Drove morning & afternoon & feel better.

27 Jan.Thursday. Drove in the morning & went to bank. Lunch club at [word]. Went to see Dr. Balch who says I must be careful.

28 Jan. Friday – [word] not get up in the A.M. Lunched at Bell’s – took a drive & feel better.

29 Jan.Saturday-Mrs.Tyson’s in the A.M. To see Dr. Balch who called in Dr. W.D. Smith in consultation. Both say be careful.

30 Jan. So tired after yesterday’s performance that I stayed in bed until P.M. Lucy Bradley & Jessie came to call. Family to dine.

31 Jan. Monday -Feel better. Had my hair washed. Lunch at Marian’s & home for botany lesson. Rested. Mrs. McL– called home.

Join me once a month throughout the year as we continue to follow Margaret Pelham Russell’s daily activities as she recorded them one hundred years ago.

If you are interested in viewing the diary in person in our library or have other questions about the collection, please visit the library or contact a member of the library staff for further assistance.

*Please note that the diary transcription is a rough-and-ready version, not an authoritative transcript. Researchers wishing to use the diary in the course of their own work should verify the version found here with the manuscript original.

By Wesley Fiorentino, Reader Services

As I mentioned in a previous Beehive post, there are all kinds of interesting discoveries to be made when exploring MHS collections. This time around I will be talking about a collection of books that I came across almost by accident while navigating through ABIGAIL, our online catalog.  I found a link to a book on Norse mythology, written by Rasmus Bjorn Anderson, which intrigued me quite a bit.  Working in an institution with a clear focus on Massachusetts history, I admit I was confused when I found an item on Scandinavian antiquities.  I put in a request for the title, and when it came to me, it was in a large record carton with a number of other books. 

To my surprise, when I opened the carton there were ten volumes inside, only one of which was the book by Rasmus Bjorn Anderson.  Of the other nine, all were written by different authors, with the exception of a two volume edition of Evelina, by Fanny Burney.  In addition to Anderson’s Norse Mythology are included an English edition of Goethe’s fable Reynard the Fox and Edward B. Lytton’s historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii.  Why was Anderson’s volume on the mythology of ancient Scandinavia housed with these other intriguing yet disparate works?  The books are all part of the Guild Library, an eclectic private collection which is one of several such private collections gifted to the MHS throughout our institutional history consisting of books on a truly broad range of topics.  The library belonged to Curtis Guild, Jr., Governor of Massachusetts and MHS member, and was donated to the MHS under the terms of the will of his wife Sarah Louisa Guild in April of 1949 (MHS Proceedings, vol. 69).  Below are a few of the works I found particularly interesting, and just a taste of what the Guild Library has to offer.

Rasmus Bjorn Anderson, born in 1846 to Norwegian parents in Wisconsin, heavily promoted the Viking exploration of the New World and also originated Leif Erikson Day.  In his bookNorse Mythology, Anderson celebrates the linguistic and literary heritage of the Scandinavian countries, as well as that of Germany and England.  Anderson praises the efforts of nineteenth century scholars who promoted the study and spread of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature.  He then goes on to provide a preface to some of the major poems and written works that have survived in Old English and Old Norse, mainly from England and Iceland. 

The copy of Reynard the Fox has been translated from Goethe’s German into English verse by Thomas James Arnold.  Arnold, a nineteenth-century English barrister and magistrate, was known for his translations of Goethe and other German writers.  In addition to Reynard the Fox, Arnold translated Goethe’s Faust and Friedrich von Schiller’s ‘Song of the Bell’ into English.  Reynard the Fox is an epic verse adaptation of the story of Reynard the Fox, the central character in a cycle of fables dating to the Middle Ages, mainly from England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.  The main character, Reynard, is a trickster figure whose adventures involve a number of other animal characters including Bruin the Bear, Sir Isegrim the Wolf, and Noble, the King of Beasts.  The stories surrounding Reynard’s exploits seem to parody the political and religious institutions of the Middle Ages, as a number of characters are clearly modeled on such familiar positions as the monarch, the priest, and the soldier. 

The Last Days of Pompeii, written by Lord Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1834, is a work of historical fiction focusing on events in the city of Pompeii leading up to the fateful eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.  The novel was popular throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, although today its popularity has severely waned.  The plot centers on a number of the city’s inhabitants.  The principal characters include a Greek aristocrat, an Egyptian sorcerer, an enslaved noblewoman, and a Christian persecuted for his faith.  The novel has been adapted to a variety of other mediums, including opera, film, and television.  Notably, the 1959 film version, directed by Sergio Leone, is considered a standard of the “sword-and-sandals” epic genre.  The cover is beautifully decorated with an image of townspeople fleeing as Vesuvius erupts, as well as with gilding and patterning along the borders. Throughout the book are intricate illustrations of scenes from the novel, though the illustrator’s name is not included.  The book is a perfect read for those hoping to learn more about nineteenth century printing, historical fiction, or romanticized memories of classical antiquity.

My curiosity about a book on Norse mythology would lead me to a number of other exciting discoveries.  I never thought that I would find a translation of a Goethe poem or a copy of a nineteenth-century historical fiction novel in the MHS collections, let alone boxed together with Anderson’s text.  The Guild Library collection covers a number of other topics as well, including African exploration and big game hunting in the nineteenth century.  There are all sorts of interesting items for the steadfast researcher or the inquisitive reader.  I can personally attest that hoping to examine just a single item, namely Anderson’s Norse Mythology, led me down a literary rabbit-hole I would not have thought existed.  Yet another example of what can happen while just browsing through MHS collections (http://www.masshist.org/library).  

By Kittle Evenson, Reader Services

That was the line in our online catalog that caught my eye last week. Sandwiched between portrait descriptions and mention of a family crest, this hint about a tintype dating to the 1870s in the Homans family photographs collection was too arresting not to follow up on.

I pulled the appropriate box from our photograph collection and sure enough, the second-to-last folder bore the title “four unidentified girls exercising, ca. 1870-1880. Photographer unknown. Tintype.” Four girls exercising? My interest was well and truly piqued.

Tintype of four girls lifting dumbbells, ca. 1870-1880. Found in the Homans family photographs.

Facing the camera, the four girls wear matching outfits, complete with white handkerchiefs tucked into their chest pockets and shiny black shoes. They appear to be in their mid-to-late teens and are standing straight-spined, each holding aloft two dumbbells.

In a collection of unremarkable individual and group portraits, this photograph raised a multitude of questions for me, chief among them being, why are these girls lifting weights? What group are these girls a part of that they are identically dressed and posing for this photograph? Was this common practice for Boston-area women in the 1870s? While common practice today, weight-lifting women were not always so familiar.

I took a two-pronged approach to answering these questions, first searching the Homans family papers, including the 1878 and 1881 diary of teenager Mattie Homans, to see if I could find reference to this type of exercise, and then looking at our collections more broadly for materials related to women’s gymnasiums in Boston and physical education for women.

The Homans family papers disappointingly failed to illuminate the context for this photograph, and so I moved on to other, related resources.

Ideas regarding health, fitness, and the role of physical activity for shaping personal and cultural character changed dramatically over the course of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and this photograph illuminates the pervasiveness of these changes. Puritan beliefs that illness was an unavoidable and even expected aspect of their daily lives, gave way to the active promotion of health and hygiene through personal actions and environmental changes. 19th century Boston played host to a multitude of facilities, practitioners, and publications devoted to shaping the public discourse on physiology and hygiene, and middle class citizens, particularly women, were at the heart of this movement.

In Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Martha H. Verbrugge posits that

“[A]ntebellum health reform prescribed self-governance to alleviate the problems of urban life. The world seemed unmanageable to Boston’s middle class . . . [i]n an unpredictable and seemingly uncontrollable world, [they] looked inward for stability. Self-control appeared to be the most reliable, perhaps only, mechanism for restoring order.” (47)

While Bostonians believed that a person’s biological characteristics (like a weak heart), and their physical environment (like a drafty house) contributed to their health, or lack-thereof, they placed the greatest emphasis on the role of personal behavior in actively shaping their lives.

Attempting to break the monopoly men held over early gymnasiums, Bostonians such as Dr. Dio Lewis and Mary E. Allen, opened gymnasiums catering specifically to women and children. In 1860 Lewis opened the New Gymnasium, focused almost exclusively on promoting muscular development in children of both sexes, and his Family School for Young Ladies in Lexington, MA, which centered its curriculum around both intellectual and physical instruction.

Dr. Lewis’s Family School for Young Ladies. Sketch found in “Catalogue and circular of Dr. Dio Lewis’s Family School for Young Ladies, Lexington, Mass. 1866.”

Mary E. Allen continued this trend into the 1870s, opening the Ladies Gymnasium on Washington St. in 1877 and offering facilities for women and children to conduct slow, careful, and progressively more difficult physical exercise in the pursuit of “symmetrical bodily development”. In addition to providing a gymnasium, Allen also taught a so-called “Normal Class . . . for the instruction of those who intend to teach Gymnastics, either in public or private schools, or in Gymnasiums devoted to women and children, an urgent need of which exists in the larger towns and cities.” Not only training women to improve their own physiques, but to become teachers of such methods themselves.

“The Ladies’ Gymnasium. Eighth Year, 1885-1886”

This broadening emphasis on physical culture was deeply intertwined with changes in beauty and fashion standards, the roles of middle class women in the private and public spheres, and developments in science and medicine. Verbrugge’s work does a wonderful job of addressing the intersectionality of these varied forces, particularly within the sphere of Boston society.

Taking these sources in concert, it is no longer strange to have found the image of young women lifting dumbbells, particularly within the family photograph collection of a prominent Boston family. Unfortunately, I was not able to identify the women in the photograph, or establish their affiliation with a particular school or gymnasium. That will have to be a project for another day.

If 19th century dumbbells strike your fancy and you would like to see the Homans tintype in person, please feel free to stop in and visit our library. If you are interested in seeing what other materials we have related to physical education, you can browse our online catalog, ABIGAIL from the comfort of your own home.

By Peter Steinberg, Collection Services

On 30 January 2015, my colleague Dan Hinchen introduced our readers to Eben W. Fiske (1823-1900), a Civil War veteran and librarian as well as a talented amateur illustrator, in his post Ishpeming Illustrators. Dan discussed Fiske’s artwork, which he broke out into two categories: Civil War drawings and other. The Fiske family papers (Ms. N-1227) also contains letters and compositions, as well as several volumes containing original pencil drawings.

Recently I was asked to review the collection to determine whether any of the drawings might be worth including in a forthcoming web project. I pulled Box 3, which houses “Volumes 3-6: E.W. Fiske writings, drawings,” from the shelves. Volumes 3 and 4 contain newspaper clippings; volume 5 is a notebook with writings on the Bible. The folder with the intricate drawings was labeled “Volume 6: Pencil drawings. Illustrations to ?”.

The small sketch book, measuring 16.2 cm x 17.8 cm, features highly detailed scenes that correspond to text that Fiske puts in quotes. Curious about the quotes, I learned from Dan’s prior blog post that Fiske drew in response to the poem “On Lending a Punch Bowl” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. As other poems are quoted and illustrated, I searched for word strings in Google and was happy to discover most of the works from which Fiske drew inspiration. Here is a list of the groupings of drawings:

Pages 1-4 respond to the poem “On Lending a Punch Bowl” by the physician and poet (among other things) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894);

Pages 5-12 illustrate (pun!) Holmes’s “A Song: For the Centennial Celebration of Harvard College, 1836”;  

Pages 13-16 react to a lecture given at the Mercantile Library Association;

Page 17 draws on (pun, again!) Holmes’s “The Stethoscope Song”; and

Page 18 takes inspiration from Holmes’s “The Morning Visit”.

There are also a few unfinished sketches and two instances where drawings were tipped in between pages.

Responding to a work of art using another form of art is called ekphrasis. It is most commonly seen when a poem is inspired by a work of art. See, for example, Sylvia Plath’s poems “Conversation Among the Ruins (1956) and “The Disquieting Muses” (1958) and Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings by the same names (the former1927 and the latter1916-1918). Those are just two examples; and it appears the term is flexible enough to include Fiske’s reactions to the poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

While there currently is no finding aid to the Fiske family papers, please do not let that stop you from coming into the MHS to enjoy the collection.