As International Women’s Day was originally celebrated on the last Sunday in February and March brings us Women’s History Month, it seems fitting to highlight a letter in Houghton’s collection emanating from a woman’s pen. The indefatigable Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was so much more than simply the author of The Battle Hymn of the…
Three upcoming lectures at Houghton
Houghton Library is pleased to announce three upcoming lectures in March and April. On Monday, March 5, Ken Pennington, Professor of Ecclesiastical and Legal History, Catholic University of America, will lecture on “Reading the Ius Commune: The Secrets of Roman and Canon Law Manuscripts.” This lecture is co-sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies and…
You’ve Got Mail: Keats in love
In the autumn of 1818, 23-year-old John Keats confessed in a letter to his brother George a fascination for one of his neighbors: “Mrs Brawne…still resides in Hampstead…her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange we have a little tiff now and then.” The woman who caught Keats’s attention…
Pot o’ Pudding
This image comes from a collection of souvenir programs from the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The Hasty Pudding Club was formed in 1795 when twenty-one Harvard students crowded into a dorm room to celebrate the establishment of a new on-campus society. Along with their goals of cultivating friendship and patriotism a special mandate was made that…
You’ve Got Mail: A Melville note resurfaces
Like an item consigned to the Dead Letter Office where Bartleby the Scrivener once worked, this brief note from Herman Melville lay undelivered to scholars and editors for nearly a century until the autograph collection of which it is a part received a full electronic finding aid in 2007. The note, perhaps clipped from a…
Ultra-effective for street ballyhoo purposes!
As cataloging of the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theater, Dance and Music (Harvard Theatre Collection) progresses, the treasures it contains are ever more in evidence. A recent standout is a group of fifteen cinema pressbooks for films from the 1930s, from studios including Warner Bros., Columbia, and RKO. Pressbooks, or campaign books, were a…
You’ve Got Mail: “I learn this from the knowledge of the laws of nature”
René Descartes (1596-1650) and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), two of the greatest 17th century French minds, carried on a regular correspondence. In this lengthy 1640 letter to Mersenne, Descartes ranges widely, discussing a dispute with Pierre Bourdin, a Jesuit who had advanced a number of objections to Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, then circulating in manuscript…
New on OASIS in February
Finding aids for 16 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including buttons, seals, and other theatrical realia, as well as trade cards, portraits and more….