Month: November 2011

Front facade of Houghton Library

Saluting The Swerve

Congratulations to Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, for winning this year’s National Book Award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The Swerve concerns the rediscovery of the philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), written in the first century BC by Titus…

New on OASIS in November

Finding aids for 8 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos and letters of the actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Lady Maud Tree, and letters to Harvard President Joseph Willard from his sons….

Horrors of the Grand Guignol

[Thanks to Micah Hoggatt, Reference Assistant, for contributing this post.] Once a year at Halloween we surround ourselves with horror and fright for a day. From 1897 to 1962, terror was enjoyed regularly in Montmartre. Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol may have inhabited a former church (retaining the confessional seating and carved, suspended angels), but it…