By Anna Cook

For the past six weeks, one of the digital microfilm readers in our library has been occupied by a researcher working his way through the microfilm edition of the Adams Family Papers. He is painstakingly transcribing passages from the handwritten correspondence of John Quincy Adams (JQA) in preparation for an intellectual biography of the man who witnessed two generations worth of political events play out on a world stage.

As the @JQAdams_MHS Twitter project highlights, John Quincy Adams was an obsessive chronicler of events in his own life and the global political networks in which he moved. Our dedicated researcher has set out to document JQA’s life as an observer of the world. De-centering the biographical subject, he hopes to write an outward-looking biography, “the autobiography [JQA] never had time to write” because he was so busy keeping diaries, writing letters, and otherwise documenting the events and interactions he took part in.

When asked for some of his initial observations, our dedicated researcher points to JQA’s antislavery agitation, which made him an outlier in his generation of Americans. The biographer suggests, echoing JQA’s own penchant for Biblical metaphors, that John Quincy Adams was a “John the Baptist,” helping prepare the way for the abolition of slavery decades after his death in 1848.

We wish our researcher the best of luck with his work and look forward to the biographical study to come.

By Elaine Grublin

In May two volunteers, Beth Hirsch & Liz Francis, joined the library reader services team.  The two women, both currently students at Simmons College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, will assist with the selection of documents to be featured in Looking at the Civil War: Massachusetts Finds Her Voice on the MHS website. The web-presentation features one document per month selected from the MHS’ own collections & written 150 years prior by a Massachusetts resident reflecting on some facet of the Civil War.  For more information about the overall project, click here.

Beth’s first assignment is to canvas a variety of collections looking for a document to be featured in June 2011 — meaning the document must have been written in June 1861.  We are hoping to find a document that allows for a woman’s voice to be heard.  Right now we are looking at a number of likely candidates.  Once the final selection is made Beth will complete a transcription of the document and research & write a contextual essay to accompany the digitized images of the document on our website (see our April document for an example of what this looks like).  After completing her work with the June document, Beth will likely dive right into collections containing letters written by Massachusetts soldiers who participated in the Battle of Bull Run in search of an item to feature in July. 

Liz’s first task is to complete a survey of a body of letters written by Hannah Elizabeth Stevenson contained in the larger Curtis-Stevenson Family Papers.  Hannah served as a nurse in various Union hospitals in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington from July 1861 through October 1862. Liz is challenged to identify and summarize all letters of particular interest, which may be used in a number of different MHS projects over the course of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and also to select one single letter from the collection to be featured in Massachusetts Finds Her Voice in the coming months.  Again, once a selection is made Liz will be working on the transcription and contextual essay to support the document when it is added to the web-presentation. 

While our summer spots filled up fast, there will likely be additional opportunities for volunteers in the fall.  Please contact Elaine Grublin if you would like further information about volunteering for this project.

By Anna J. Cook

This spring, the MHS staff  welcomes short-term fellow Laura Prieto, one of our 2010-2011 Ruth R & Alyson R. Miller fellows in women’s history. Dr. Prieto is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Simmons College here in Boston. She received her Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1998, and her dissertation on professional women artists in the United States, 1830-1930, has been published as the book At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

In addition her work on women artists, Dr. Prieto has done extensive research on gender, race, and imperialism during the past ten years.  Her MHS fellowship project, “New Women, New Empire: 1898 and its Legacies for Women in the United States” is a part of this research.  During her fellowship, Dr. Prieto will be exploring the “real and imagined collection relationship between American and colonized women,” with a focus on the Spanish-American war and the immediate post-war period, as the U.S. began to realize imperial ambitions.  She will be reading the private writing of women (correspondence and diaries) on the “splendid little war”, as well as newspaper coverage and the more public responses to the war made by public figures such as Charles Francis Adams and by leaders in the Anti-Imperialist League.

Laura Prieto will give a brown bag lunch talk about her research at the MHS on Wednesday 4 May from 12:00-1:00pm. The event is free and open to the public.

The MHS staff is pleased to have Dr. Prieto with us throughout the spring and wishes her a fellowship period full of discoveries.

By Elaine Grublin

Keeping the reader services staff on their toes, three short-term fellows and one New England Regional Fellowship Consortium recipient are in residence at the MHS this February. Here is a look at what they are working on:

Marc Friedlaender Fellowship recipient Marc-William Palen, University of Texas at Austin, arrived early in the month to work on his project “The Cleveland ‘Conspiracy’: Mugwumpery, Free Trade Ideology, and Foreign Policy in Gilded-Age America.” Palen began his visit by working through an impressive list of almost two dozen late 19th century pamphlets, and has been working primarily with the papers of Edward Atkinson for the past week. He also plans to also work with the Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, George Bancroft Papers, and the Adams Family Papers (among others) during his time at the MHS.

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship recipient Rachel Herrmann, University of Texas at Austin, also arrived at the beginning of the month to delve into “Food and War: Indians, Slaves, and the American Revolution.” In her first two weeks at the MHS Herrmann focused her research in the papers of Henry Knox, William Hudson Ballard, and John Sullivan. This week she has worked with the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America Records and the microfilm edition of Revolutionary War Orderly Books at the Massachusetts Historical Society . She also plans to consult the Benjamin Lincoln Papers, Timothy Pickering Papers, Moses Greenleaf papers, and several other relevant collections during her visit.

Edward Hanson received the Paine Publication Fund Fellowship to continue his work editing the papers of Robert Treat Paine for publication. During this visit to the MHS library, Hanson, who has been working with the Paine papers since the late 1980s and co-edited with Stephen T. Riley the material for volumes 1 & 2 (1992), and edited volume 3 (2005), has been working with material from the Robert Treat Paine Papers held at the MHS preparing material for the 4th & 5th volumes in the series.

Finally, Joshua Smith, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, recipient of an award from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), returned to the MHS this past Monday to complete his fellowship research toward his project, “Yankee Doodle Upset: New England’s Yankee Identity in the War of 1812.” Smith settled into his research consulting the Binney Family Papers and the Orderly Book of the Alfred Company of Cavalry. Later in the week he plans to work with the Vaughn Family Papers and the Caleb Strong Papers. Smith will also be visiting the Maine Historical Society and Mystic Seaport as part of his NERFC fellowship.

By Anna J. Cook

A local independent researcher recently made her way to the MHS to conduct research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Boston-area libraries. She reports that while a substantial amount of research for her project can be completed online, thanks to mass scanning projects like GoogleBooks, the Society holds a number of early library circulars and catalogs that are unique and which she is unable to locate in digitized format.

Two examples of the types of documents she has found useful in her research are a small notice printed in 1818 for the Charlestown Social Library, and a catalogue of books belonging to the subscribers of the library of Milton and Dorchester (1790). The Catalogue of Books includes some 95 titles including a handful of works still familiar to readers today: John Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith.

Subscription libraries were “Netflix for an era of readers,” according to the historian Robert E. Sullivan [1]. An early type of lending library, they were privately funded and one paid a fee in order to join and have access to the collections. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Boston metropolitan area boasted a large number of these institutions. Our researcher is attempting to flesh out the history of individual libraries. She reports that she shares the fruits of her labor on Wikipedia, thus making the information available in these rare documents accessible to a much wider audience. This is a unique example of the working relationship between brick-and-mortar institutions like the MHS, the researchers who work in them, and the world of internet-based, crowd-sourced information.

[1] Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 409.

By Elaine Grublin

In the library this morning, while looking for information in a manuscript collection, I found something else entirely: hope.

Sitting safely ensconced in the warm and flake free library, I watched as just outside the window Boston received yet another solid coating of snow — adding to the several inches still on the ground from the storm last week. And I began to despair. Is there any hope that warmth and sunshine will return to us? Will the snow ever melt?

As a life long New Englander, deep down I know that the melting will happen. But I also know you cannot predict when the winter weather will end. And even with the Red Sox preparing to depart for spring training, actual spring seems so far away. So after drudging through the over 40 inches of snow we have received so far this year, and seeing the below zero temperatures predicted for the coming weekend, I was having a hard time feeling hopeful about a change in the weather.

Until I sat down with the microfilm edition of the diary of Sarah Gooll Putnam (Sally), that is. I had gone to the diary looking for her observations about Civil War soldiers in the city of Boston, but in browsing the diary’s pages I found words of hope, as her entries for January reminded me of the truth in the old saying “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a few minutes.”

On 13 January 1863, twelve year old Sally writes about wrapping herself in layers in order to go outside of the house and of a skating party on Jamaica Pond. Just days later, on 24 January, she writes “It is just like summer now. we [sic] such nice warm weather.”

Here is hoping there is nice warm weather on the way for us.

By Anna J. Cook

While the majority of researchers who use our library are adults – college students and above – the MHS often fields research questions from and serves patrons who are in their teens and even younger. Last week, we were visited by a family from California who were visiting relatives in Boston. The youngest daughter, currently in second grade, was working on a class project for Black History Month focusing on the poet Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784). The family came to the library in hopes of viewing an artifact or document in Wheatley’s own hand.

After giving the family a short introduction to the research library and our procedures for handling rare books and manuscripts, we arranged for them to view two items from our collection. One item was the first edition of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, printed in London in 1773 and now held at the MHS as part of the Waterston Library. The second was a letter written by Wheatley to David Wooster on 18 October 1773 about a recent visit to London, where she traveled in hopes of recovering from ill-health and to attend to the publication of her book of poems. We discussed the care and handling of fragile books and manuscripts, and our eight-year-old researcher delighted us by reading the poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” aloud.

All of the items held at the MHS that relate to Wheatley’s life and work have been digitized and made available online as part of the African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts web presentation.

By Elaine Grublin

Last week the American Historical Society (AHA)  held their annual meeting in Boston.  The meeting spanned January 6 through January 9 and brought an influx of historians, graduate students, and other history professionals to the Back Bay area. 

Many of those in town for AHA, made it a point to stop at the MHS as part of their trip to Boston.  Some even arranged to come to town a few days early so they could fit in a few full-day sessions in the reading room before attending AHA events at the end of the week.  We were happy to see many familiar faces returning to the library, as well as a large number of first time researchers.

Over the course of the week, the library was visited by 72 individual researchers for a total of 119 research visits.  In servicing those researchers the members of the library staff offered 35 new reader orientations for first time researchers, paged over 260 requests for materials from the closed stacks, produced over 300 pages of photocopies, and engaged in countless one-on-one interactions with our researchers.  These numbers exceed what we typically see in a single week during our busy summer months. Kudos for a job well done to our Reader Services staff.  They managed the atypical mid-winter rush with smiles and quick delivery of all library services.  We hope everyone enjoyed the AHA meeting and hope to see all who visited us last week back in the library in the near future. 

By Elaine Grublin

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

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

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

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

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