By Peter X. Accardo, Scholarly and Public Programs Librarian Born into slavery in 1840, William Harvey Carney and his family left Virginia sometime in the 1850s before settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an active hub on the Underground Railroad and the same town where Frederick Douglass had brought his own family in 1838 at the…
Houghton From Home–Dickinson Family Library
Why read your own copy of Charlotte Brönte’s novel Jane Eyre when you could read Emily Dickinson’s copy? Can you find the two passages the poet marked in pencil? (Hint: the marks are in the margin on page 418 and the passages are devastating.) Houghton Library is in fact home to 30 volumes known to…
Announcing the winner of the 2020 Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) undergraduate fellowship at Houghton Library
By Adrienne Chaparro, Scholarly and Public Programs Assistant The Harvard College Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (URAF) and Houghton Library are pleased to announce that Madeleine Klebanoff-O’Brien, Class of ’22, is the winner of the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) Fellowship. Houghton offers fellowships through SHARP, a program that supports arts and…
Three Bostonians and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1721
By Peter X. Accardo, Scholarly and Public Programs Librarian Among the texts available through Harvard Library’s online collection Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics is Some Account of What is said of Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox (*AC7.M4208.721s), anonymously printed in 1721 and long thought to be written by Puritan minister Cotton Mather…
Houghton From Home–Kinderballets
Houghton Library is home to the distinguished collection of George Chaffee (1907-1984), a dancer, balletophile, and collector. Although he specialized in the French Romantic ballet, some delightful bits of his collection available digitally are a series of illustrations showing “kinderballets” staged in Vienna during the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Horschelt (1793-1876). Horschelt was a…
Houghton From Home–Medieval Charters
Houghton Library has a famously strong collection of richly illustrated medieval manuscripts, many of which can be viewed online here. But, if your eyes grow weary of beautiful illuminations, I invite you to explore our collection of charters relating to the Cistercian abbey of Buckland in Devon, England (MS Lat 10, digitized here). While less…
Houghton From Home–The Life of Samuel Johnson Illustrated
In the preface to his 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (including his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales), George Birkbeck Hill laments how intervals of time and distance complicated his task of reviving Johnson, England’s greatest eighteenth century man of letters, for a…
Houghton From Home–Geoffrey Chaucer
Experience the works of the father of English poetry the way some of his earliest readers did via digital copies of his works held in our collections. Houghton has digitized two 16th century editions of Chaucer’s works. Richard Pynson published editions of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame together in…
Houghton From Home–Angus McBean’s Surreal Portraits
Feeling disconnected at home? You’re not alone. Diana Churchill is literally beside herself in this zany portrait by Angus McBean from 1940. Angus McBean’s portraits of actors are among the most complete visual records of the British stage from the 1930s through the 1960s. Early in his career, he dabbled in the surreal, producing a…
Houghton From Home: Edward Lear
The multi-talented Edward Lear is probably best remembered today for The Owl and the Pussycat and other “nonsense books” as he called them, but his artistic skills far surpassed the whimsical sketches with which he illustrated those books. Our collection of Edward Lear Landscape Drawings includes more than 6000 digital images of Lear’s work, drawn…