In the 17th century, a book was a relatively expensive luxury, but single-sheet printed items were much more widely affordable. One particularly popular form was the broadside ballad, each containing a song that might be funny, scandalous, politically charged, or perhaps all of those at once. These printed ballads continue a long oral tradition of…
Houghton From Home: Declaration Signers
Currently, we are at a remove from our physical collections. The silver lining we’ve found in this is an opportunity to highlight our born-digital and digitized collections so you can explore them from wherever you are. We’re going to do just that in a series we call “Houghton From Home.” For more items from across…
Announcing the Winner of the Inaugural American Trust for the British Library Fellowship at Houghton Library
The American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) and Houghton Library are pleased to announce that Lauren Eriks Cline, Assistant Professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, has been awarded the first American Trust for the British Library Fellowship at Houghton Library. This visiting fellowship, a joint initiative between the two institutions, supports a…
The Castañé Collection Series: “Four: Ambiguity”
By Michael Austin, Manuscript Cataloger, Houghton Library For this fourth installment of posts on the Castañé collection of material related to conflicts of the 20th century, held by Houghton Library, I wanted to wrap up our survey of items from the era of the Second World War as shown in parts One, Two, and Three….
2020 Philip Hofer Prize Winners
On April 8, 2020, three Harvard students were named winners of the Philip Hofer Prize for Collecting Books or Art. The Hofer Prize was established by Melvin R. Seiden, A.B. ‘52, L.L.B. ‘55, to encourage student interest in collecting. It is awarded annually to a student or students whose collections of books or works of art…
Announcing Houghton’s 2020-2021 New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Fellows
The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium consists of 30 major cultural agencies. Annually, NERFC offers about two dozen $5,000 grants so researchers in a broad array of fields can conduct a minimum of eight weeks of research at several participating institutions, which include Houghton Library, Baker Library, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Harvard University…
An Instrumental Patron
By Dale Stinchcomb, Assistant Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library Even for a dance company as innovative as the Ballets Russes, the staging of “Les Noces” (“The Wedding”) in 1923 was a radical leap forward. Bronislava Nijinska’s raw evocation of a peasant wedding has been called feminist in its portrayal of a bride…
“The love of a ghost for a ghost”: T.S. Eliot on his letters to Emily Hale
By Leslie A. Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Library On November 25, 1960, four years after Emily Hale told him she was giving his letters to her to Princeton, T.S. Eliot wrote a letter to his Executors with an accompanying document. Revised on September 30, 1963, the document was sealed…
A Missionary Recipe to Celebrate Christmas
By Rana Issa, Department of English, American University of Beirut, and 2017–2018 Houghton Visiting Fellow I love the archive. Mostly, I love all the wonderful scraps of paper that do not have any direct bearing on the stories I like to tell. Scraps that encapsulate their own story and that may not fit into seamless…
Now in Print: Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James by Ermine Algaier
A hearty congratulations to 2017–2018 Houghton Visiting Fellow Ermine L. Algaier IV, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Monmouth College in Illinois, who recently published his book, Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James: Markings and Marginalia from the Harvard Library Collection (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Dr. Algaier provides a comprehensive account…