By Maggie Parfitt, Visitor Services Coordinator

What are paste gems made of? Seemingly self-explanatory questions like these pop up all the time in archival research. And this one I’ll bet you haven’t given too much thought, unless you spend a lot of time thinking about historic jewelry. The answer may seem obvious, and in a sense, it is – paste gems are made of paste. (Sorry to have lied to you in the title). But there is a trick! “Paste” in this context is a certain kind of glass. I will freely admit I did not know this until a few weeks ago. I, until then, perhaps embarrassingly, perhaps understandably, thought paste stones were made of some sort of hardened glue or resin compound. (Please don’t tell my archaeology professors.)

Paste jewelry isn’t just made from any glass; the base of paste is always leaded glass, the same as antique and vintage crystal. The lead both softens the glass, allowing it to be hand cut and shaped, and makes it more refractive, so it can sparkle in aristocratic candlelight. While leaded glass has been used jewelry since at least the 1600s, Georges-Frédéric Strass, eventual Jeweler to the King of France, launched paste stones into Western fashion’s mainstream in the 1720s. ^{1, 2, 3}

The origins of the term “paste” are debated, but the process and recipes are known. A trade book printed in Philadelphia in 1795⁴ describes the process in roughly these steps. 1. Put three ounces of lead in water, draw out the water and use it to wet a pipkin. 2. Dry minimum and mix it with the dried lead, calcined crystal, and copper filings. Pulverize them together and put them in the pipkin lined with lead water. Cover and leave in a glass furnace for three to four days. “At the end of that time you shall find you have got a very fine white paste, which you may cut as you like.”⁵ The book goes on to describe recipes to imitate what must be nearly every type of gem in nearly every color. In this way paste stones absolutely allowed more creative and economic freedom to jewelry designers and makers.

There’s a modern urge to think of “imitation” jewelry purely in economic terms – of creating a cheaper product for the non-elite. While there’s certainly an economic component to glass stone production, the primary driver of their success seems to be innovation and aesthetic appeal rather than industrialization.^{6, 7} The King of France doesn’t need cheaper gems – but he does need novelty to impress his peers. (As much as the motivations of the aristocracy can ever be separated from their economic status.)  We now think of paste stones as “imitation gems” or “false diamonds,” relegating them in our minds to the status of knock-offs for non-elite pretenders. In the 18th century these concepts weren’t mutually exclusive. One Thousand Valuable Secrets describes “how to make white sapphires to imitate true diamonds”⁸ and how “to counterfeit diamonds”⁹ but also details the rich color and beauty of these paste stones¹⁰, likening them to the highest European fashions.¹¹

In the 18th century paste stones were cutting edge, used to experiment with the known forms of jewelry. The softness of paste allowed it to be cut and formed in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, with small, near invisible settings impossible to achieve with real gems. Uses of paste stones were varied, from elaborate necklaces to smaller items like buckles and shirt buttons.

While small (this buckle is only around 3 cm square), touches like these were often considered extravagant; especially to New Englanders with Puritan roots. Finery was almost always saved for evening or state events,¹² but that doesn’t mean they were unpopular or uncommon for those who had the means. Advertisements for all kinds of paste jewelry from necklaces to buckles appear frequently in 18^th century Boston newspapers.

I love items like these that give us small glimpses into technology, innovation, and cultural values of given time periods. And I hope next time you encounter paste jewelry you’ll take a moment to give it its due!

1. Bohm-Parr, Judith. “The Iconography of Colour: Exploring Glass as a Jewellery Medium,” 2008. James Cook University, MA thesis, (James Cook University, 2008). http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/9625. 81
2. Fales, Martha Gandy. Jewelry in America, 1600-1900. ACC Distribution, 1995, 48.
3. Friedman, Wendy Ilene. “Exquisite Paste | Who Needs Diamonds?” T Magazine, 21 July 2009, archive.nytimes.com/tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/exquisite-paste-who-needs-diamonds.
4. One Thousand Valuable Secrets, in the Elegant and Useful Arts: Collected From the Practice of the Best Artists, and Containing an Account of the Various Methods of Engraving on Brass, Copper and Steel. Of the Composition of Metals … And a Variety of Other Curious, Entertaining and Useful Articles. 1795. Microform. Massachusetts Historical Society, Evans Fiche: 29242, 2. 76-77
5. Ibid.
6. Bohm-Parr, Judith, “The Iconography of Colour,” 15.
7. Friedman, Wendy Ilene.
8. One Thousand Valuable Secrets, 82.
9. Ibid, 91.
10. Ibid, 78.
11. Ibid, 87.
12. Fales, Martha Gandy, Jewelry in America, 45-51.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist 

I’m happy to report that the records of the Algonquin Club of Boston have been processed and are now available for research. The Algonquin Club was a social club founded in 1886 “for the purpose of maintaining a club house and reading room in the city of Boston.” For most of its existence, the club was located at 217 Commonwealth Avenue, a beautiful Renaissance Revival limestone building in Back Bay designed specifically for the club by noted architects McKim, Mead & White in 1888.

The club served as a gathering place for members (originally only men), including politicians, businessmen, lawyers, judges, financiers, academics, ambassadors, and other movers and shakers in Boston and surrounding towns. The name of the club appears in countless “who’s who” biographies. Prospective members were nominated by existing members, subjected to a vetting process, and approved by the Executive Committee.

The clubhouse offered a number of amenities. Members could play cards or pool; smoke cigars or pipes; read in the library; enjoy a meal in one of several restaurants; attend a talk, party, or other event; and even reserve a bedroom for an overnight stay. Members also had the benefit of reciprocal relationships with similar clubs in other cities and countries.

The Algonquin Club records contain a small amount of older material documenting the club’s early years, such as a book with the signatures of original members, a volume of Executive Committee meeting minutes from 1898 to 1927, a visitors register kept from 1917 to 1921, and a time capsule compiled in 1936 and opened for the club’s centennial in 1986.

Unfortunately there’s a gap in the collection through the middle of the 20th century; most of the extant papers date from about the 1980s to the 2000s. That being said, the collection is a great resource for anyone researching elite Boston clubs, as well as other subjects. For example, foodies might enjoy the specially designed dinner menus printed for club events. And anyone interested in the building itself should appreciate the oversize architectural plans and details.

Processing this collection proved challenging for a few reasons. The first was the sheer size of it. The final collection measures approximately 46 linear feet, and that’s only after I weeded out eight cartons of duplicate documents. The bulk consists of 63 manuscript boxes containing almost 3,000 member files. That’s 3,000 individual folders that needed alphabetization, weeding, refoldering, and labeling by hand. (Because of privacy concerns, these member files have been closed until the year 2041.)

Secondly, the papers came to us with about 70 pieces of digital media, both 3.5 inch floppy disks and CDs. These media and the files they contained—files in a variety of formats, many obsolete—needed to be assessed by the Digital Processing Archivist, reformatted as necessary, then incorporated by me into the arrangement and description of the collection.

It’s not news to any of the archivists out there that repositories are acquiring more and more “born digital” records alongside (or even independent of) paper documents. Just think of your own files: you probably have texts, emails, Word documents, spreadsheets, digital photographs, videos, etc., not to mention social media content. Many files probably exist only in the cloud, but others may be on hard drives or backup drives.

In the fall of 2021, the MHS purchased the digital preservation system Preservica, and the digital preservation team has been developing policies and procedures for ingesting, processing, preserving, and providing access to these records. Each collection will probably require its own unique approach, but when Preservica goes live (eta: spring 2024), researchers will be able to link to digital material directly from a collection guide.

Keep an eye out for Preservica!

The MHS also holds the Algonquin Club of Boston photographs.

By Hannah Goeselt, Library Assistant

In my last blog post I introduced one of the grandfather clocks (‘clock 007’) held here at the MHS, as well as its clockmaker, Joshua Wilder. In this next post we will explore some of the other craftspeople that contributed to the creation of this piece.

The process that goes into creating the finished piece is complex and involves many distinct types of artisans, of which the internal brass movements is only one contributing piece. The base components themselves involved purchasing brass casts from a local foundry, and sheet iron dial plates imported from Boston. So too the outer casing, iron weights, decorative painting, protective glass, and crowning metal finials must be outsourced and brought together to create the final clock, either by the clock movement manufacturer or as was sometimes the case by the cabinetmaker.

The wood casing that houses the clock movements is one of the more visible qualities in the final product. This particular one was attributed to Abiel White (1766-1844), a cabinetmaker from Weymouth, during the clock’s conservation and restoration in 2011-13. White was a long-time collaborator of Wilder’s, though he also worked with other clockmakers in the region in housing their brass clock movements in mahogany or pine. Attributions to him or his workshop, when not signed, are often based on construction techniques that are peculiar to him, such as using textured paper to seal together board-seams, double “dovetail” notches to attach the hood to the case, and a construction technique that uses numbered pieces fit together in a clockwise pattern. While currently hidden from view, these qualities were uncovered during its conservation and were very helpful in identifying White’s work.

To me, the most eye-catching feature is the mechanism set directly above the clockface. Here, a painted seascape in a semi-circle, or lunette, depicts a coastline with an old stone building situated on a grassy outcrop and what may be a small burying ground with three gravestones. Set in front of the scenery is an articulated three-masted frigate that teeters gently to and fro with the ticking of the seconds, an upper extension of the clock’s pendulum hidden behind the door of the case. The vessel waves a 13-star Cowpens variant of the US flag from its stern, and from its main topmast flies the first Naval Jack (the “don’t tread on me” rattlesnake, an anachronistic addition, is absent). These details seem to indicate that the moving dial is meant to represent a ship from the Continental Navy, though the exact design of both flags have contested histories of their actual use in the Revolutionary War. Rather, this is a 19th century vision of national origin-building, made more within the historical context of the War of 1812.

Likely imported from an artisan in Boston, the rocking ship dial is seen in multiple other examples from this period and region, with its popularity beat only by a painted disk that rotates through the phases of the moon. A brief look into the Boston ornamental painting business in the 1790s through the first three decades of the 19th century shows a small collection of highly specialist artisans who worked closely with and depended heavily on commissions from the much larger furniture and clock making industries. While much of the work remains unsigned, some individuals may be identified based on the clockmakers they were known to work regularly with. Names of Boston decorative artists such as John Ritto Penniman, John Minott, Samuel Curtis and Spencer Nolen are some of the more researched today, but certainly not the extent of the community in the period.

As for provenance, there is no official recording of when and from where the Society acquired this clock, other than its old MHS artifact number, 0979. Most of the MHS’s clocks were donated in the 1960s and ‘70s, with a couple coming to us in the early 1920s; the earliest recorded purchased from the manufacturer directly in 1857. Checking the piece itself for information proved equally fruitless. Other than a small clipping that outlines Wilder’s biography, no interior markings offer clues to its journey here. If we were lucky, the presence of ephemeral bills of sale or a creator’s name inscription would provide hints as to its past.

If you are interested in learning more on the inter-related industries at work in creating clocks in New England, a great starting point is Paul J. Foley’s “Biographies of Patent Timepiece Makers, Ornamental Painters, Cabinetmakers, and Allied Craftsmen” pp.207-339, in his monograph Willard’s Patent Time Pieces (2002).

BIB:

Jobe, Brock, Gary R. Sullivan, and Jack O’Brien. Harbor & Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710-1850, University Press of New England, 2009. (Oversize NK2435.M34 J55 2009)

Forman, Bruce R. “The American White Painted Dial”. The Decorator: Journal of the Historical Society of Early American Decoration 50 no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1995-96): 7-24. 1995 Fall.pdf (hsead.org)

Foley, Paul J. “Ornamental Painters” in Willard’s Patent Time Pieces: A History of the Weight-Driven Banjo Clock, 1800-1900, Norwell, MA: Roxbury Village Publishing, 2002. 178-183. (NK7500.B35 F65 2002)

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

The recent argument that almost became a fistfight on the floor of the US Senate is not something new. There have been many political arguments that have resulted in duels, fistfights, and beatings among elected and appointed officials, as well as among political activists.

One occurrence is recorded in a letter from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924) to Theodore Roosevelt, 4 April 1917. Lodge decided against meeting with a group of pacifists who wanted to keep the United States out of WWI, while he himself supported US intervention. However, he did step outside of his office to speak with them. They exchanged insults, and then blows. He described the scuffle in his letter:

The pacifist crowd I went out in the corridor to speak with was composed of one woman and half a dozen men. They were very violent and very abusive and I was engaged in backing away from them and saying that we must agree to differ when the German member of their party said “You are a damned coward”. I walked up tp hit and said “You are a damned liar” and he hit me and I hit him. Then all the pacifists rushed at me and I thought I was in for a bad time buy my secretaries sallied forth to my rescue and there was a mixup. The pacifist who attacked me got badly beaten up and it all ended very comfortably and without hurt to me. At my age (66) there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing and yet I am glad that I hit him.

What occurred next was that the leader of the pacifists, a 36-year-old Alexander Bannwart was arrested, and Lodge became an abashed national celebrity. He continued in his letter:

The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted with my having [hit him] and some of them told me today that the further one went from Washington the more complete my action seemed. Watson [James E. Watson (1864–1948) Senator from Indiana] said that in Indiana the general belief was, he gathered, that I had beaten him to a pulp and that when one got across the Mississippi the general belief probably was that I had killed him, – all of which for the moment has made me extremely popular.

Lodge did not press charges against Bannwart, however a year later Bannwart pressed charges against Lodge for slander. Lodge settled by acknowledging that he punched Bannwart first, thereby starting the fight, although by his own hand above, his story, at first, was that Bannwart was the instigator.

The most famous attack on the Senate floor occurred on 22 May 1856. Senator Charles Sumner, (1811–1874), an abolitionist, had given a speech two days before, in which he insulted Representative Preston Brooks’s first cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, who had coauthored the legislation that would bring Kansas into the country as an state allowing enslavement. Brooks attacked Sumner, beating him brutally with his cane, which eventually broke. Even after Sumner had lost consciousness, Brooks kept beating him. Although other senators tried to help Sumner, a Brooks ally prevented them by brandishing a pistol. After the assault, Brooks walked away, leaving the remnants of his cane. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined $300 but never spent time in jail. His constituents reelected him that same year, and he spent much of his remaining lifetime making threats of duels and accepting duels that never took place. He died in 1857 of croup before his new term could begin.

Brooks’s attack demonstrated the political polarization in the United States. In the north, Sumner was a martyr, in the south, Brooks was a hero. Sumner’s speech insulting Brooks’s cousin was printed and distributed; Brooks was sent canes to replace his broken one, the remnants of which went on to have two distinct lives. The bottom part was cut into small pieces that Senators sympathetic to Brooks wore around their necks. The top part was eventually donated to Revolutionary Spaces in Boston, and can be viewed here.

Although Sumner was reelected in November 1856, he spent three years away in recovery, his empty chair a symbol and reminder of the assault. He would later be diagnosed with “psychic wounds”—today’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—and severe brain injury, for which he suffered lifelong pain. He returned to the senate in 1859 and gave his first speech in 1860—appropriately, against enslavement.

Despite Sumner’s importance as a Massachusetts senator and his national political status, the collection of his papers at the MHS is surprisingly small. The reason for the shortage is political and personal. Sumner had a lengthy and bitter political feud with his boyhood classmate from the Boston Latin School, Robert C. Winthrop, who was the MHS president from 1855 to 1885. They had disagreed over the Mexican American War (1846–1848), causing Winthrop to block Sumner from becoming an MHS Member. The two enemies eventually reconciled in 1873, the year before Sumner’s death.

By Hannah Goeselt, Library Assistant

“My grandfather’s clock was too tall for its shelf, so it spent 90 years on the floor…” Did you sing this nursery rhyme as a child? Written in 1876 by American composer Henry Clay Work (1832-1884), the oddly morbid song told from the perspective of a child observing the tall-case clock owned by his grandfather, is why this style of timepiece today is commonly referred to as a ‘grandfather clock’. In the period they were in fashion, however, they were termed ‘eight-day clocks,’ referring to how many days it ran before you had to wind it again.

Now, if you’ve ever visited the MHS for more than an hour, you may know that it is home to a wide assortment of old clocks, which you can hear chime throughout the day. Each week many are wound by a staff member with their own specialized keys and cranks. In this sense they are both a functional aspect of the building, and a part of the MHS’s collection, with their own individual records in Abigail.

The tall-case clock in the reading room, cataloged as ‘clocks 007’ is a beautiful example of New England clock design in the early republic, or the “Federal Period.” Southeastern Massachusetts, aka the South Shore, specifically between the years of 1790-1830 became a major center of weight-driven clock movement production in the region. This clock is and was a luxury household item, with its size and use of mahogany wood, the cost of the entire thing would be upwards of 60 dollars, more than a year’s worth of pay for the average American at the time. The trendiness of the grandfather clock was relatively short-lived, its cost being one major factor in its downfall. By 1825, regional manufacturers were struggling to compete with the new availability of Connecticut-made shelf clocks on the market, made with wooden movements rather than brass, and at a fraction of the cost. In fact, even by 1812 the grandfather clock was waning in popularity, in favor of patented banjo clocks and other smaller scale timepieces.

When I sit at the circulation desk, I occasionally feel my eyes slide toward its stately figure in the far corner and listen to the subtle clunk of internal gears several minutes before it prepares itself to ring.

The man responsible for these internal workings, “Old Quaker” Joshua Wilder (1786-1860), was a successful clockmaker in Hingham, Mass. and is today best known for his skill in crafting ‘dwarf clocks’, a scaled-down version of the grandfather clock (an example shown here from Historic New England collections). This was a style pretty much exclusively produced in Hingham and Hanover during the first quarter of the 19th century and was the solution to competing with the banjo clock patented and produced by the Willard family-owned workshops in Boston (the MHS also has an example of a Willard banjo clock, see ‘clock 006’). Within that circle, Wilder stood as one of the most prolific producers of dwarf clocks, though he still continued making movements for tall-case versions to a smaller extent.

Wilder began his career as an apprentice to another prominent manufacturer, John Bailey II, in Hanover, MA and moved to Hingham around 1809-1810 to set up his own shop. We can see that that is where this piece originates- beneath the ornate brass hands the words “Joshua Wilder / HINGHAM” are painted in flowing script across the white dial. Quakers made up a disproportionate number of the clockmaker community, taking on as apprentices the sons of other Quakers and so on. Because of that, I was not surprised to learn that Wilder was involved in Hingham’s Temperance Society and Peace Society. I was, however, pleased to find out that the MHs owns one other piece by Wilder, showcasing his literary skills in addition to his skill in clockwork. The bound pamphlet, printed in Hingham in 1840, is a series of published letters to local Representative Thomas Loring (1789-1863) sharing Wilder’s opinions on forced conscription into military service. It reads more like a religious tract, each letter attempting to reconcile the observance of those who take a vow of non-violence with a duty to the law (both governmental and religious) to take up arms. In essence, he was advocating for a paid, as-needed Volunteer Service. While perhaps not the most exciting piece of writing, I did think it was interesting to have the inner thoughts behind an artifact’s manufacturer, a category of creator that can so easily be relegated to “anonymous” or “once known.”

Stay tuned for part 2!

BIB:

Jobe, Brock, Gary R. Sullivan, and Jack O’Brien. Harbor & Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710-1850, University Press of New England, 2009. (Oversize NK2435.M34 J55 2009)

Jobe, Brock. “A Tale of Two Clocks.” Historic New England (Summer 2011): 24-26. https://issuu.com/historicnewengland/docs/historic_new_england_summer_2011

Keane, Maribeth, and Brad Quinn. “Call Them Grandfather or Tall-Case, Gary Sullivan Knows Big Clocks.” Collectors Weekly, February 26, 2010. https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/an-interview-with-tall-case-antique-clock-collector-gary-sullivan/

By Hilde Perrin, Library Assistant for Reproductions

Every time the new year rolls around, I find myself feeling the obligation to make a resolution. New Year’s resolutions are supposed to give us the chance to finally try things we always wanted to do or set lofty goals that will make our lives better. And yet, every year I find myself either failing to choose a resolution in the first place, or starting one, only to forget about it by the time we reach February (or earlier, if I’m being honest).

One person who was not afraid to set goals for the new year was Lilian Freeman Clarke (1842-1921), a Boston native and the daughter of James Freeman Clarke, a unitarian minister heavily involved in social reform, from the abolition movement to women’s rights. Following the example of her father, Lilian was actively involved in social reform, particularly working to establish and run the Society for Helping Destitute Mothers and Children. The MHS collections hold several documents from Lilian herself in both the Perry-Clarke Collection and the Lilian Freeman Clarke correspondence. One of these, from the Perry-Clarke Collection, is her pocket diary from 1864. Written when she was 18 years old, it contains entries of her daily activities, from visiting friends to attending church events, weather reports, and musings. On January 3, she recorded a list of resolutions for the new year. They are as follows:

“Resolutions

1. Not to speak sharply to any one
2. Practice on the piano 2 hours a day
3. Draw for two hours a day
4. Read German one hour a day
5. To walk out of doors 2 hours every day
6. Exercise with dumb bells
7. Eat no supper
8. Not to speak evil of any one
9. Rise at seven
10. Read a sermon every day”

Her list is slightly imposing for people trying to come up with their own resolutions. How was she able to fit in her schedule two hours of piano, two hours of drawing, and an hour of German, and also stay active by walking and exercising with dumbbells? While some of her resolutions are admirable, and I would love to be able to also read German an hour a day and not speak sharply to anyone, I don’t think I would adopt the resolution to “eat no supper” and probably wouldn’t even attempt to devote two hours a day to practicing an instrument. Such a long list of resolutions makes me wonder whether she kept them up.

The very next entry in her diary records that she “rose about 7.30,” already breaking the resolution to rise at 7, if only by 30 minutes. While I was not able to find any more mentions of her list or updates on the resolutions in the diary, I think we can assume that she probably attained some of her resolutions and gave up on others. She kept up her diary entries regularly until about August–recording things like teaching her younger sister, visits to friends, and dreams she had–when she drops off and only includes a few entries here and there for the remainder of the year. Though “journal everyday” was not one of her resolutions, she did not keep up the habit. Whether she successfully completed a year following her New Year’s resolutions or not, we might be able to find inspiration in her list to create our own resolutions for the coming year.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

You hear a lot of discussion nowadays about whether schools should still be teaching students to write in cursive. Less than half of U.S. states require it, usually sometime between third and fifth grade. I don’t know about writing cursive, but reading it is certainly a requirement for my job. And sometimes it’s especially challenging.

One of the things we see in almost every manuscript collection here at the MHS is cross-writing. Your garden-variety cross-written letter looks something like this.

This is the first page of a four-page letter, written on folded stationery. As you can see, the writer got to the end of the fourth page and had a little more to say, so went back to the front, turned the paper on its side, and finished the letter there. The idea was to save paper and postage.

MHS archivists see pretty much every variety of cross-writing. The kind pictured above is very common. Here it is again in a letter from Margaret Fuller to Mary Peabody.

Letter writers have also been known to snake their writing around the margins of a letter or even to turn a written page upside down and write in the gaps between the lines. Sometimes they’ll change the color of their ink for the cross-written portion to make it easier for their correspondent to read.

Then there’s this madness.

What you’re seeing here is a triple cross-written letter. It starts in the usual way, from top to bottom. The second pass goes from left to right, and the third is diagonal down the page. I don’t know about you, but trying to read this makes my eyes cross. With a lot of time and some fancy Photoshopping, I might be able to figure out what it says, but it would be tough!

This letter comes from the papers of William Blackler Gerry of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Gerry (pronounced “Gary”) was a master mariner in the China and India trade and commanded a number of ships, including the Charlotte, Beeside, Sappho, Farwell, Akbar, Cohota, and Noonday. The collection consists mostly of his correspondence with Mary Susan “Sue” Bartlett between 1841 and 1856, before and after their marriage. Included are letters written from Manila, Philippines; New Orleans; Liverpool, England; Pazhou (Whampoa) and Guangzhou (Canton), China; New York; Baltimore; Kolkata, India; Indonesia; and San Francisco.

If his surname sounds familiar, that’s because his grandfather’s brother was Elbridge Gerry, U.S. Founder, Congressman, governor, vice president, and inspiration for the word “gerrymander.”

William B. Gerry’s papers are chock full of cross-written letters. He even joked about it to Sue on 14 January 1843, when he wrote, “I fear your eyes will not like to behold a single letter now that you have been so used to those cross ones but I am afraid I shall have to close this without doing that for you.”

When it comes to reading handwriting, we all get better with practice. But every once in a while, something like this comes along to keep us from getting too confident.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

In a previous blog post I wrote about an astronomy book from the MHS collection called The Mysteries of Time and Space. I enjoyed that experience so much I decided to dig into another book to celebrate the winter solstice and clear winter skies. This time, I decided to tackle a children’s school primer called An astronomical and geographical catechism: For the use of children and selected the 2nd edition, published in 1796. I thought it would be interesting to compare it with what I learned in grade school in the early 2000s after over 2 centuries of exploration and advancement in both astronomy and geography.

Despite being written in the 18th century, the astronomy section was shockingly similar to what I remember learning. Reading through the question-and-answer style text, I was thrown back to 4th grade, learning about stars and planets again. Precise measurements of the distance between the planets and the sun, the length of different planetary years, and even information about moons matched up with what I remember from my grade school days. The one thing that didn’t was the fact that there were 7 planets, indicating that Neptune (and Pluto) had not been discovered yet. The 7th planet, which we call Uranus today, was named but some quick googling told me that William Herschel discovered Uranus so presumably Caleb Bingham, the author of the text, just used his name. It was also so interesting to see Bingham encourage the possibility of life on the other planets in the solar system, as I was certainly taught that there was no life outside of earth. All in all, it was strikingly similar to what I learned as a child. I love knowing that while scientific discovery does grow and expand, that does not mean that all knowledge is new.

Geography, however, was a more complicated section. While there was certainly some overlap (I also learned that a peninsula is land mostly surrounded by water, for example), there were a lot of very 18th century, Early Republic aspects as well. Some of this is inevitable, since the borders of the world have changed substantially since 1796, including the introduction of 34 additional states, but some of it was a bit more surprising. When Bingham is talking about longitude, I was surprised to see no reference to the Prime Meridian which goes through Greenwich, England. It turns out that the Prime Meridian was not established until 1884, long after this book was published. Instead, Bingham says to count longitude “from a certain meridian.”

The section on continents was perhaps even more fascinating. Today of course, we consider there to be 7 continents–Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. However the text only offers up 2 continents: the “eastern” continent with Africa, Asia, and Europe, and the “western” of North and South America. Australia makes a surprise appearance as “New-Holland” and a potential 3rd continent. And Australia is not the only place with a new name. There are references to Prussia and Persia, neither of which exist in the same form today. It was also really startling to realize that so many states in the U.S. moved their capitals at one point or another. While the capital of Massachusetts has always been Boston, 8/15 of the states had different capitals in 1796 than they do now. There was also an extreme bias in the descriptions of the states. There was a clear preference for the Northern states over the Southern, New England over other Northern states, and Massachusetts over other states in New England. No wonder we have multiple copies of this book here at the Massachusetts Historical Society! I loved the opportunity to take a peek into what students were learning over 200 years before I entered the classroom myself. So much was the same and even the things that were different were interesting windows into 18th century exploration.

The Mysteries of Time and Space
An astronomical and geographical catechism: For the use of children