While cataloging American Civil War broadsides, I found this playbill advertising Wesley’s War Tableaux, to be presented in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Lyceum Hall from February 23-25 [1863]. Moving panoramas were large painted scenes on rolls of canvas, framed by a proscenium to hide the mechanism; they were unwound from one roll to another, to…
New acquisitions: Unpublished Robert Gould Shaw letters
Robert Gould Shaw famously wrote more than two hundred letters to members of his family over the course of the Civil War. Five unpublished letters from Shaw to his family, and two letters from Shaw’s sister Susanna to Shaw, have recently been added to Houghton’s collection….