The central scene in this engraving (left) faithfully reproduces an engraved vignette that depicted a method of drawing a silhouette. The vignette was printed in the second volume of Johann Caspar Lavater’s treatise on physiognomy, Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe published in Leipzig between 1775 and 1778….
Remembering Eleanor Steber
Eleanor Steber (1914-1990) was a leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera for over two decades. Today is her 100th birthday. Over the past weeks this blog has featured items drawn from Steber’s papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection that document two significant collaborations with American composer Samuel Barber: Vanessa (1958) and Knoxville: Summer of 1915…
“Footprints on the sands of time”
Rejecting the Psalmist’s solemn emphasis on death and the life hereafter, Cambridge poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “A Psalm of Life” famously exhorts his readers to seize the day and leave their mark in this world: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints…
What’s New: “Boston’s Crusade Against Slavery” exhibition opens
During the Civil War era Boston led the national crusade against slavery and the struggle over emancipation and citizenship. Owing largely to activists in Boston, Massachusetts became one of the first states to end slavery. It soon granted black men full suffrage, ended the ban on interracial marriage, and in 1855 became the first state…
What’s New: In Search of Things Proust
This weekend, expect the smell of madeleines to fill the balmy spring air of Harvard Yard, as Proustians from around the world gather in Cambridge for the conference Proust and the Arts. Coinciding with the centennial of the publication of Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time, the co-organizers…
Tickets? Please!
From the perspective of today’s theatregoer, the current method of admission seems like a forgone conclusion: pay ahead of time for a ticket entitling you to a specific seat for a specific performance. But it wasn’t always this way, as evidenced by a wide range of ephemera in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Surveying even one…
Auspicious Debuts: “A captive, but a lion yet”
John Brown’s raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16th, 1859, and his subsequent martyrdom elicited an immediate outpouring of abolitionist sentiment across the Northern states. In Columbus, Ohio, twenty-two-year-old William Dean Howells responded with “Old Brown,” his first separately printed work; the poem was soon reprinted in the Ashtabula Sentinel,…
What’s New: Poetry on the line
A story in this week’s Harvard Gazette covers a new exhibition at the Woodberry Poetry Room called PHONE-A-POEM: A Selection of Archival & Newly-Commissioned Answering Machine Poems. Started in 1976 by Cambridge poet Peter Payack, for 25 years Phone-a-Poem offered callers recorded poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall. Visitors…
Visualizing Edward Lear
[Thanks to Matthew Battles, Senior Researcher at metaLAB, for contributing this post on the new Edward Lear Visualizer.] I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but let me just get this out: a library is no mere set of bookshelves, no simple windowpane through which to view the wonders of books and the discoveries…
You’ve Got Mail: “A sort of crisis came in my life”
Harriet Beecher Stowe was paid $300 for 40 installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly by the Free Soil newspaper National Era, which began running them in June 1851. Encouraged by their success, Stowe decided to publish them as a novel, and the first edition, published by the Boston firm of John…