Edgar Allan Poe daguerreotype in AAS collections

And Philip F. Gura in his Bicentennial History of the Society discusses some of the nineteenth-century notables who made their way to AAS in Worcester, including Henry David Thoreau and the infamous James Audubon tale (if you don’t know the story, be sure to pick up our bicentennial history).

Indeed, the Society is open to all uses. Even if you are doing a favor for a friend who is writing a book on the history of dags and your friend is unhappy with the one he took – even if it’s of a well-known AAS treasure, the 1848 Edgar Allan Poe Daguerreotype by S.W. Hartshorn.  And even if your friend’s name is Ansel Adams.

Black and white copy negative in AAS collections

In the 1950s when Curator and later Director of the George Eastman House, Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993), was researching his The Daguerreotype in America (1961), he wrote to then AAS President and Director Clarence S. Brigham:

…back in 1947 I copied a number of daguerreotypes in your collection for use in my book AMERICAN DAGUERREOTYPES…  I am now happy to write that I am getting the pictures ready for publication at last.  One of the daguerreotypes which I especially wish to features is your magnificent portrait of Poe.  Unfortunately the photograph which I took of it is not at all good.  My friend Ansel Adams has most kindly offered to take another photograph of the daguerreotype…  I am writing to ask if you would have the kindness to allow him to make this copy.  He will get in touch with you directly to make an appointment.  He will bring his own equipment and will only need a well-lighted area in which to make the copy.  I will shortly send you a list of the other daguerreotypes in your collection which I should like to include in the book…

[AAS Archives 1950-1959 Correspondence “N” November 16, 1958]

Now I can candidly disclose that the work of helping to secure permissions, rights and reproductions isn’t always very glamorous (albeit the choices and resulting projects are compelling). The allure of things like copy stands, strobe lighting and negatives of archival items kind of gets lost in the work of the day-to-day. So reading something this exciting is enough to send you bouncing to the signed reader registers (I know, we’re a lively bunch). And there noted on November 21, 1958 is Ansel Adams 131 24^th Avenue San Francisco in to photograph the Poe Daguerreotype.

Admittedly, signature gawking isn’t really our specialty (we’re kind of surrounded by manuscripts), but what these moments mean beyond the page makes them more noteworthy. They are kind of like nuggets of archiveness where different professions come together – artist, librarian, historian – around an object and capture that piece of history to share it with others. These little surprises show this intricate overlay where literally one archive is on top of another – through efforts of interpretation, preservation and creativity. It really gives something as already special as the Poe daguerreotype a life beyond the walls of Antiquarian Hall.

“Did he say anything about politics?”
“Not a word. We talked mostly about books.”
“Books! What does he know about books?”
From Henry Adams, Democracy

One of the more enjoyable aspects of working with old books all day is having the chance to see what past owners have tucked away for safe-keeping in the leaves of those books. Just the other day, I was looking at an 1873 copy of William H. Seward’s Travels Around the World and noticed that someone had inserted several newspaper clippings about the author, William Seward, the Auburn, New York, monument dedicated to him, and the death of one of his family’s former house slaves, “Old Judge.”

It was on this day, March 30, in 1861, that news of Spanish annexation of St. Domingo broke, an event that urged Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, to write a famous memo to Lincoln. Spain had pushed for annexation, believing that internal dissension in the states would keep the U.S. from responding. Over the next few days, Seward prepared and sent to Lincoln his “Some Thoughts for the President’s Consideration.” “Thoughts” criticized Lincoln for having no clear foreign or domestic policy, promoted fortifying gulf ports like Pickens to prepare for a potential war with Spain — a war that would help solidify union of the states — and argued strongly for union. Seward wrote:

“We are at the end of a month’s Administration, and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign…. The policy at home…. My system is built on this idea, as a ruling one, namely: that we must change the question, before the public, from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery, for a question upon Union or Disunion. In other words, from what would be regarded as a party question to one of Patriotism or Union.”

In his reply to Seward, Lincoln defended himself against attacks on his lack of policy and presidential ineffectiveness. He also dismissed Seward’s efforts to defend Pickens which, Seward implied, was more about union than party or slavery.

Seward was not one to slight the issue of slavery. His family had been slaveholders in early nineteenth-century New York, and in his autobiography, Seward expressed his early discontent with slavery and slaveholding:

I early came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and the ‘gradual emancipation laws’ of the State, soon after coming into debate, enabled me to solve the mystery, and determined me, at an early age, to be an abolitionist.

But Seward was not forward-thinking enough to call for full integration of the races. The clippings, which showcase how well-behaved and submissive Seward’s valet and loyal servants were, indicate Seward’s contentment with the subordinate status of blacks. His Travels, which lauds the U.S for abolishing slavery, became one of D. Appleton & Co.’s bestsellers. Appleton published the book, which was probably authored by Seward’s adopted daughter, Olive Risley Seward, by subscription only in the months after Seward’s death in October of 1872 (click here for the AAS catalog record for the salesman’s sample). This was at a time when subscription publishing was making more and a greater variety of books available in the hinterland. It is unfortunate, or perhaps only inevitable, that Seward’s message of American freedom, so widely disseminated, was thought by at least one reader to be inseparable from the vestiges of American slavery.

The Sawyer brothers lived in Manchester, New Hampshire in the mid 19^th century.  Brothers Joseph and Henry enjoyed life in the bustling city, and loved sharing their experiences with their cousin, William Carr, who lived in the country setting of Bradford, New Hampshire.  In the tradition of the classic story of the city mouse and his country cousin, the brothers wrote to William about all of the intellectual and social activities they enjoyed in Manchester.  The brothers’ lively letters discuss their desire for education, attendance at lyceum lectures, membership in temperance lodges, and membership in the Manchester Athenaeum.

The letter shown here, dated June 1846, describes many exciting goings-on in Manchester.  Henry tells William about his busy work schedule, his attendance at a military convention, and even about a street robbery by “some Irishmen”.  In another letter, dated March of 1845, Henry writes to William about an offer to introduce his cousin to a unique experience should he visit the city –

“With regard to the Kankamagus Lodge” F. F. of T. B. I will just inform you that if you will come to Manchester I should be extremely happy if you would like, in my official capacity of ‘Warden’ to bandage your eyes and lead you into the circle of ‘True Brothers’…

What I wish we could see are William’s responses to the letters.  Did he envy his cousins’ urban lifestyle, or did he prefer the tranquility of his country home?  Either way, he surely was interested in learning about his cousins’ lifestyle, as the letters were exchange frequently, and over at least a six year time span.

This collection of Sawyer Family Letters provides an excellent look at the lives of young working men in the early days of the industrial era in New England.  Please considering adopting this collection!

The Adopt-A-Book Catalog features a variety of items acquired by AAS curators in recent months, which are available for “adoption.” Your “adoption” gift is a fully tax-deductible charitable contribution and will be used by curators in the coming year to purchase more interesting items like those in the catalog.

As it is the bicentennial, we have 200 items up for adoption with an initial 150 items below. The night of the event, there will be an additional 50 items for that night that will not be posted until after April 3rd. Come that night and see what we’ve held back.

Mr. Kahle was quoted in a recent article in The New York Times by David Streitfeld.  “We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Mr. Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

We could not agree with him more, and we’ve been doing it for 200 years come October.

This letter is only part of a rich, textured epistolary. Goddard, a native of Plymouth, moved to Worcester about 1850 and beginning with her arrival was active in the area community and relief societies. She also was an enthusiastic lecture-attendee, a writer of “Home Letters” for the Worcester Evening Transcript, and later Spy, a noted acquaintance of Henry David Thoreau, an unsurpassable admirer of Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) and an avid reader and reviewer. On the whole, Goddard’s correspondence represents an example of a letter-writer able to cull countless subjects on two sides of a sheet of paper. In short, she could describe her thoughts, the weather, war, politics, friends, health, reading and social events – all in about 500 words. She probably would have made a really good blogger (and I suppose, in a way she now is).

Letter from Allen-Johnson Family Papers, Box 4, Folder 19

Worcester, March 10th 1862

My dear Mrs. Johnson,

Last Wednesday afternoon I saw Nelly Livingstone, on her way to Framingham, & she told me that you were not well: I have thought of you a great many times a day since them, but have not been able to write you until to-night. I hope you are already well again, & that your illness was not serious.   We were all very glad to see your husband, & were grateful for his little bit of a visit, having learned, by experience, that we need never hope for a longer one.

Last Friday I went to Clinton to the reception of Capt. Henry Bowman, one of the returned prisoners, of the Mass. 15th & I had a very nice time.  The talk was good, witty, & short: the Capt. Himself is one of the handsomest men I ever saw, & his young wife is a little beauty.  We did not get home till one o’clock at night — the night was delicious & I enjoyed its peacefulness.  My companions were very kind neighbors of ours, but I do not know them much, so my midnight ride was a little lonely to me: & I thought gravely, & went deeper down into my own heart than I often like to go. Such still hours are very good for us, I believe, tho’ the light & care of the next day seems to efface all the impression left by the night.

To-day we have unmistakable announcement of Spring’s coming: the snow is still heaped up in the streets, but thaws everywhere: & the day makes one languid & miserable, taking away all elasticity of body & spirit.  I was glad to come early to my room & take off my warm heavy clothes, & now I sit, thought a fire, with a light sack on, as if it were a summer night.

I have read nothing so splendid for a long while, as Carl Schurz’s New York speech, published in last Friday’s Tribune.  Before this I have thought that Schurz’s reputation was beyond his deserts: but now I think he has surpassed his reputation.  The enthusiasm with which his words were received must have been fine.  My hope is emerging from its long eclipse & growing bright again in the light of Lincoln’s proclamation, or advice or message or whatever the thing is that he has <just> sent to Congress.  I wonder if it has been written for some time, & Mrs. Lincoln’s influence has kept it back!  Now I suppose she is really grieved about her boy, & private sorry will kept her from interfering in public matters for awhile at least — so we may look for more good things.

Some evening this week there is to be a dance in honor of Capt. Studley — a returned prisoner.  I have promised to go, but it seems to me a queer way to show respect for a man: I dare say we shall all have a funny time — but as I enjoy novelties, I am ready for the experiment.  With love to Mrs. Johnson, your husband, & Harriet,

I am affectionately yours

Martha

Note: Capt. Studley is Captain John M. Studley – a notice appeared in the March 12^th Worcester Spy describing the upcoming event.

After Chatterton authored the 1787 work, which contains such picks as “The Printer and Plagiarist,” “The Segar,” and “Epitaph on a Mean Wretch,” he and his work seemingly damped off. Buds of Beauty was published in (at least) Baltimore and New York, and several American newspapers advertised its publication It was illustrated with a handsome Abraham Godwin engraving, “Liberty Introducing the Arts to America,” which complemented Chatterton’s message that the “Muses…follow liberty.” It even included a dedication to Benjamin Franklin, a “Philosopher–a Man–and a Patriot” who “induced [Chatterton] to embellish [his] little effort with [Franklin's] name.”

In his Early American Poetry, Oscar Wegelin, who partly rooted his bibliography in AAS collections, guessed that Chatterton was a pseudonym. Wegelin must have guessed correctly, as many Buds poems reappeared in an anonymous 1795 Belfast work, Poems on Different Subjects. The Belfast work contains a list of its Irish subscribers and an updated tribute to Franklin, “On the Death of Doctor Franklin.” The anonymous author also included a double acrostic, “News-Printer’s Letter-Box,” dedicated to an American printer (see below). But there’s still no hint of who “Chatterton” was and why he published a meager book of poems in the states in 1787.

Wegelin was unable to identity the pseudonymous author in the early twentieth century, and today digital aids refuse to yield the authorship of Buds. Copies of the book, its newspaper advertisements, and engraved frontispieces, only pieces with which we can reconstruct a historical period and the production of a book, remain. But the author must remain anonymous and, so to speak, dead.

“News-Printer’s Letter-Box”

( A Printer at Baltimore, having got a Lion’s-head painted on the window, with the mouth open for the reception of Essays, &c. wished for something poetical on the occasion, and the Author sent him the following double Acrostic, which he published in his paper: )

In order to favour the efforts of merit,
Let Genius and Wit to my station repair;
Of all their effusions, their fire and their spirit,
I’ll quickly relieve them, and take a due care.

Has Damon a wish to convey his lost passion?
Or Phyllis a mind to reveal her keen pain?
No more let them sigh, but compose in the fashion—
Nay bring it to me, and I’ll publish the strain.

Has Franklin a plan to convey to the nation—
Such plan as might answer the good of the whole?
As soon as he perfects his skillful relation,
He safely may drop it, when dark, in the hole.

Young authors who blush at their youthful beginnings,
Ev’n while they are conscious their talents are bright;
Each here with due ease may get rid of his findings,
And leave them secure under the shield of the night.

Soft, sweet, sentimental, or witty, or smart,
Deposit it here, and ‘twill steal the heart.

(Click here for the solution to the double acrostic.)

For More Information:

A new resource for the study of early American poetry, A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 Through 1820, will be published this spring but is available for preorder now. Much of the research for it was done at AAS by Roger E. Stoddard (who worked for forty-two years in the Harvard Library, retiring in 2004 as Curator of Rare Books in the Harvard College Library, Senior Curator in the Houghton Library, and Senior Lecturer on English) and is edited by David R. Whitesell (curator of books at the American Antiquarian Society).

After supper Pap took the jug, and said he had enough whiskey there for two drunks and one delirium tremens. – Huckleberry Finn

Delirium Tremens: the strange affliction of “being tormented by devils” (Root 14) while under the influence of alcohol.

The Book: The Horrors of Delirium Tremens by James Root; New York: Josiah Adams, 120 Broadway, 1844. [AAS Online Catalog record]

Found among the American Antiquarian Society’s collection of nineteenth century books, The Horrors of Delirium Tremens seeks to warn its readers of the dangers of alcohol. Root, the narrator, begins by explaining that his drinking patterns consisted of long periods of abstinence and days-long periods of intoxication; he would “refrain and not taste of any kind of spirits for a number of weeks, and then after drinking again for one night, it would perhaps be several days before [he] became perfectly sober” (14). He did this for nine years, seeing no problem with his pattern as he experienced no unusual side effects (except, of course, the “ordinary effects” [14]).

Although almost 500 pages long, Root’s book, unfortunately, has no illustrations. The image above is a political cartoon published by J.H. Varney titled “A Representation of the Progress of Intemperance in New-England, 1841″ [AAS Online Catalog record]. The image below was engraved by J.C. McRae and is found in temperance gift books [AAS Online Catalog record].

In Root’s book, he recounts how after one particular drinking spree, he experiences the effects of Delirium Tremens. As he wanders from Manilus to Syracuse to Geddesburgh, he begins to hear strange, shrill noises and whispers. He strikes up conversation with the source of the noises, finding little to be unusual about his experience until he follows the voice to a group of “fiends” (32) and devils who threaten him with damnation. He climbs up a tree to try to escape them and even enlists the help of a local landlord, but to no avail. The hallucination does not fully pass until two weeks later. After it ends, he reverses his atheistic beliefs and prophesies to those whom he believes may be at risk of a similar experience.

The Context: Delirium Tremens was utilized as a piece of temperance propaganda, as J. C. Furnas writes in The Late Demon Run. Stories of frightening DT experiences worked as both urban legends and public service announcements. Sometimes exaggerated, but always effective, they scared men into becoming teetotalers. Furnas tells the story of a man who was jailed in Jefferson County, New York circa the 1830s. A “chronic alcoholic denied drink after a heavy spree,” (Furnas 118) he began to hallucinate and experience symptoms of withdrawal. His screams were so loud in the jail cell that three equally intoxicated prisoners were recruited by the jailer to keep him still. The recruited men, so disturbed by the man’s outbursts, vowed to become teetotalers. Indeed, even simply hearing the stories secondhand terrified men into abstaining from alcohol. Furnas recounts a particularly effective anecdote of a man who, believing a rat had run down his throat, used tongs to retrieve the imaginary rodent.

Captured in verse, the hallucinations are described:

See how that rug those reptiles soil! They’re crawling o’er me in my bed! I feel their clammy, snaky coil. On every limb—around my head—With forked tongue I see them play, I hear them hiss – tear them away! …

Delirium Tremens can result in hallucinations that are real symptoms of withdrawal.  The stories surrounding the condition, however, have proved just as important as the physical reality. The myths build off of one another, creating increasingly terrifying stories. Root’s book is unique in that it is a firsthand account. Readers are subjected to nearly 500 pages of his hallucinations and prophesying. However, the book did not prove particularly popular as Root wrote only one other speech [AAS Online Catalog record] in addition to the novel, perhaps showing that the best legends are the ones with multiple storytellers.

Further Reading:

•  The poem “The Devil and the Grog-Seller” on Google Books

•   Remarks on the history and treatment of delirium tremens: From the transactions of the Massachusetts Medical Society [AAS Online Catalog record]

•   The Life and Times of The Late Demon Rum [AAS Online Catalog record]

• Temperance poem “O, thou invisible spirit of rum! If thou had’st no name by which to know thee, we would call thee–Devil” [AAS Online Catalog record]

• AAS Fellow Xi Chen, a PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University, is working on a project on “The Life and Times of John B. Gough” (who was a temperance orator)

I knew nothing about Ruggles at the time and was more than curious. In the broadsheet, Ruggles relates his family history (New England extraction and migration to a frontier Michigan homestead). At his Bronson “odditorium,” Ruggles said that:

with his correspondents in the principal literary centres, catalogues strewing in from all parts of the world by every mail, records of most of the works published since the origin of printing, no marvel that he is prepared to furnish any obtainable book ever printed.

When the broadsheet was printed, Ruggles had been selling books for over twenty years, rebuilt his shop after a devastating 1889 fire, and undoubtedly would have tried to provide his customers with any book ever printed.

Ruggles recently reappeared to me as I’ve been working on an inventory of AAS’s collection of booksellers’ labels and binders’ tickets. The collection ranges from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and provides just one entry point into the history of booksellers and bookstores in the U.S. The labels in the collection have not been cataloged fully, not to mention the labels still in books that have received little to no attention here at the library. Tucked into the thousand or so labels in the collection proper is an earlier label from Ruggles’s store. Dated 1875-76, the label advertises Ruggles’s ability to “supply any legitimate publication” with the aid of “representatives on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Was Ruggles superhuman or just the type of bookseller who knew what a customer needed and tried to supply it? In that, he was not unlike some of the great booksellers (the Sabins and Rosenbachs) or the less well-known (the Frank Shays [see an exhibit on Shay from the Harry Ransom Center] or Irving Ephraims [20th-century Worcester bookseller]). AAS has a number of collections that are ideal for the study of booksellers in America, including the manuscript Book Trades Collection and Isaiah Thomas Papers, and a vast number of bookdealers’ catalogs. But the bookstore is dead. The bookstore remains dead. And how shall we comfort ourselves but by the study of the history of booksellers and bookselling?

See also:

Marge Scott’s article on Ruggles in volume 23 of the Chronicle: The Magazine of the Historical Society of Michigan.

Michael Winship’s “‘The Tragedy of the Book Industry’? Bookstores and Book Distribution in the United States to 1950″, from volume 58 of Studies in Bibliography.

First, we have an entry from Walter Goodrich.  Walter lived in Portland, Maine, and kept a diary from January through June of 1846.  While the diary doesn’t cover a long time span, his entries are lengthy (about a full page per day) and detail his life at school and in his community.  In one entry, Walter recounts the all too familiar issues dog ownership -

Eight o’clock in the morning About seven o’clock this morning it looked as clear and fair and I thought it was going to be a pleasant day, but now it snows and I don’t know when it will stop.  This morning Ring hearing a dog bark down on the new road somewheres thought he must put in the chorus so he began to bow wow wow the worst kind.  And there then two dogs barked so much as half an hour, and this morning as I was going after the milk I met John Dunham in the road and he said he was going to kill ring he came over by my house this morning and kept barking and waking my baby up and just as sure as he comes over there again I will kill him!!

Another entry comes from a new addition to our unidentified diaries collection.  The diary was kept by a school girl from Rhode Island.  Another short diary, she kept daily entries for only three months, from November 1852 through January 1853.  On a Thursday during the cold winter, our author writes of a promise made with a friend to get up at 5am the next morning for some exercise.  And much like we still all hit the snooze button and ignore our good intentions, she too slept in -

Last night Minerva and I made an agreement to get up at 5 o’clock this morning and take a walk.  So at the appointed time I was awoke but could not think of getting up out of such a nice warm bed and going out into the cold air, and perhaps have Jack Frost bite my nose.  So I did not get up until the regular time.  Auntie overslept herself this morning.

I love how diaries can capture these real life moments and make us realize how some of the simple things in life never change!

Both of these diaries will be up for adoption during AAS’s annual Adopt-A-Book event on April 3, 2012.  [You can read about last year's event here.]  More information about this year’s event, as well as other items up for adoption, will be available on our website soon!

Learn more by reading:

• the front page story in today’s Telegram & Gazette (be sure to check out the slideshow of images from the event)
• a blog post from current AAS fellow, Joseph Adelman, explaining the impact of Lampi’s work on historical scholarship

Here are quotes describing the significance of Lampi’s life work:

Back in 1987, Walter Dean Burnham referred to “the lost Atlantis of nineteenth century politics.” If that is indeed the correct description, then Phil is the Captain Nemo. — Erik Beck, A New Nation Votes project coordinator, in the AAS Annual Report for 2009-2010 [Download a PDF]

Indispensable for understanding politics in the early Republic is Philip Lampi’s monumental collection — Gordon S. Wood in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford University Press, 2009

One of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research — Jill Lepore in “Party Time,” The New Yorker, September 17, 2007

The Society issued the following press release written by director of outreach, James David Moran:

James Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded Philip J. Lampi, a researcher at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a Chairman’s Commendation in a ceremony at AAS yesterday. Leach cited Lampi’s life-long research into the voting records from 1787 – 1825 and his compilation of local, state and national election data from newspapers and archives from throughout the nation. The award “commends Philip Lampi for his diligence in collecting, collating and preserving the most basic records of American democracy.”

This award is all the more remarkable because Lampi possesses only a high school diploma. Lampi first became interested in election returns as a teenager while living in the Stetson Home for Boys in Barre, Massachusetts. When he could not get access to the television, he wandered off to discover a collection of yearly almanacs. The election statistics contained within them fascinated him as did the fact that no statistics were listed before 1825. What happened prior to that date became a lifelong obsession that took him to libraries and historical societies throughout the country. Supporting himself by various jobs including night watchman, Lampi suffered great privations including sleeping in his car in his quest of voting returns which he would discover in newspapers, deed books, and manuscripts scattered in repositories throughout the nation. Eventually his research brought Lampi to the AAS when in 1974-75 he was the recipient of an AAS Fred Harris Daniels Research Fellowship to mine the Society’s collection of over two million pre-twentieth century American newspapers. Lampi eventually joined the staff of the Society.

Today, Lampi is recognized by political scientists and historians as the most authoritative expert on early national election returns. Lampi’s research has been cited by numerous scholars including: George A. Billias, David Bohmer, James P. Broussard, David Hackett Fischer, Ronald P. Formisano, William J. Gilmore, Roy R. Glashan, Daniel P. Jordan, Kenneth Martis, Richard P. McCormick, Donald J. Ratcliffe, Andrew W. Roberston, and Jeremiah Slade, among many others.

The fruits of Lampi’s life’s work are now part of an online searchable database of early American voting records entitled A New Nation Votes created in collaboration with the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives and with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Please join us in paying tribute to the remarkable achievements of this remarkable man.

As this article suggests, Vince Golden is committed to his mission of rescuing historic newspapers. How committed? Well, he’s so committed that he periodically rents a U-Haul and drives it across half the country, stopping along the way at prearranged sites to pick up newspapers that can no longer be properly housed. Just picture it: rather than a covered wagon traveling along the Oregon Trail, imagine a “Newspaper Trail” being blazed by a lone curator in a rented U-Haul. The best part, though, from our point of view is that rather than staying out West, Vince brings the newspapers back to a safe forever home at the American Antiquarian Society.

While Vince is willing to go to great lengths to successfully corral newspapers, he would probably be the first to admit that the newspaper that walks in the door by itself (or more accurately, carried by a generous donor) just may be his favorite. So if you wanted to help out by walking in your own donation of newspapers published before 1876 in the U.S. (or the West Indies) that are not yet in AAS’s collections, I’m sure you would make Vince’s day (and save some gas in the U-Haul).

On AAS’s website, you can catch a short video featuring Vincent Golden in which he describes the history and characteristics of antebellum American newspapers. Filmed in the newspapers workroom at the Society, the video features examples of various newspapers and illustrated magazines from the Society’s collection.

Antebellum American Newspapers from American Antiquarian Society on Vimeo.

More information about AAS’s newspaper collections can be found on the newspaper section of our website.

Even if you don’t get C-SPAN, the presentation will be streaming live on the internet. And even if you are busy all this weekend, early next week the entire broadcast will be available to watch at your convenience in C-SPAN’s video library.

A preview is available on C-SPAN’s website now.

Click on the portrait to learn more about it and others in AAS's portraits collection

Synopsis of the Talk
In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? David Jaffee will talk about the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States – chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing – to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. His lecture will focus on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence.

About the Speaker
David Jaffee is Professor and Head of New Media Research at the Bard Graduate Center. Trained as a cultural historian, he has extensively studied the culture of the preindustrial northeast. His 1999 book, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860, looked at town founders and local historians in Worcester County. He is now at work on a new project, New York as Cultural Capital, looking at how the nineteenth-century domestic interior – and the parlor in particular – was filled with furniture, displays of stereographs, plaster figures, and chromolithographs. He has held fellowships at several institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and he is on the board of the Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC).

Professor Jaffee is also interested in pedagogy and the incorporation of new media. He has published several essays on teaching and learning with new media publications, as well as directed two NEH projects to develop multimedia resources for the history classroom. He has led numerous new faculty development seminars and programs, including the NEH-supported New Media Classroom, Learning to Look with the American Social History Program and AAS’s CHAViC Summer Seminar on Interpreting Historical Images for Teaching and Images.

The Brownies "Piling On" (more images at the end of the post)

The items featured in this post were originally intended to be on display in the Reading Room of Antiquarian Hall by way of noting the Super Bowl. But the Curator of Graphic Arts instead installed archival items relating to the upcoming Leap Year in February. This is probably more fitting as, statistically speaking, Leap Year has seen fewer appearances on the calendar in the past decade than the Patriots have been contenders for the championship. And though last night didn’t work out in their favor, it may help to put the game of football in a historical perspective to ease the blow.

Football is arguably a game about reminiscences – a contact sport undoubtedly – but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who enjoys the game who is not quick to reveal their earliest memories of encountering it.  What better place to help alleviate the burden of recollections than in an archive?

So sit back and enjoy the visual post-game show.

Figure 1

Figure 2

While the true game of American football as we know it today did not make an official appearance until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (alas, out of the AAS scope date of 1876), we certainly have items concerning its early history. British children’s author Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, enormously popular in the nineteenth century, was recalled constantly as an introduction to Rugby. AAS has not one, but two copies of School Days at Rugby published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields 1857. Also in this vein of early depictions of the game from the late 1850s and early 1860s is Haverford School, a lithograph by W.H. Rease depicting a group of young men playing a game remarkably close to football; the men are outside what is now Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania (Figure 1).

Figure 3

Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports, published in New York in 1893, offers an impressive overview of the history of the game as well as rich interior illustrations by Henry Alexander Ogden (1856-1936) and Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948), in addition to diagrams, regulations, strategies, descriptions of costumes, shoes, and players (Figures 2, 3, 4).

Figure 4

Camp’s text American Football: with thirty-one portraits, published by Harper Brothers in 1891, illustrates the sport’s most outstanding figures on the field in the late nineteenth century including the player (and later coach) Hector Cowan (Figures 5 & 6).

Figure 5

Figure 6

Football for Player and Spectator, published in Ann Arbor, MI in 1905, is a heavily illustrated guide to the game with more photographic depictions than Walter Camp’s Book. The author, Fielding H. Yost, was both a player and coach; in his preface, he states that his hopes are that:

The perusal of the work will give the reader – player or spectator – an adequate idea of the spirit in which the game is both played and viewed in its best form.

Following are rules, development, formations and diagrams of play (Figures 7, 8, 9).

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

While our variation of the game came from the more collegiate practice, it quickly became a sport known, and played, by children as is illustrated in Farmer Gooding’s Circus by Harriet Putnam published by the McLoughlin brothers ca. 1905 (Figure 10).  In the text, Jack and Bart Bailey make short work of mastering the game. Palmer Cox’s famous The Brownies also have a notable, and humorous, attempt at the game in The Brownies Through the Union (1897). Their attempts at American Football are replete with illustrations of piling-on and injuries as they attempt to maneuver their way through the rules of the game (Figures 11, 12, 13).

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

A Conversation with Ronald J. Zboray & Mary Saracino Zboray

In this issue, Public Address Division members Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray discuss their study of an eight-page letter by Eliza Bancroft Davis (1791–1872) of Worcester, Massachusetts, written to her husband, John Davis, a U.S. Senator, on 18 June 1840. The original letter is in Box 1 (“Family Correspondence”), Folder 7 (“1840”), in the John Davis Papers at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Zborays’ transcription of the letter appears below as Appendix 1, and a facsimile of the original letter accompanies this conversation on the Public Address Division’s Web site. The transcription and facsimile of the original appear by courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

A transcription of Eliza Bancroft Davis’s letter of 18 June 1840 appears as pages 7–9 in the PDF of the Zborays’ conversation, available here:
2012-01-VibrantVoices

What do you find especially compelling about this artifact?

We located this letter by Eliza Davis, the wife of a Whig U.S. Senator, in 1994 while researching a book about nineteenth-century reading practices. All about politics, the letter said nothing about reading. But it stuck with us, and it inspired our 2010 book, Voices without Votes. According to the “woman’s sphere” paradigm, women of the antebellum era were not supposed to voice partisan allegiances. To be sure, a few pioneering activists spoke out for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and other moral reforms. But hard-core electoral party politics? That was thought to be in the sphere of men. Eliza Davis showed us otherwise. As we contextualized the letter with newspaper reports, we learned that the partisan press and some speakers used it as 1840 campaign propaganda. Truly, we concluded, such personal letters can be the stuff of public address.

What do you believe are the most important contexts for understanding the rhetorical functions of this artifact?

The artifact captures a crucial moment in the birth of American mass politics, with all the hoopla that Robert Gray Gunderson sketched in his Log-Cabin Campaign (1957) on the 1840 election. Whigs, more so than Democrats, recruited nonvoters, including women, for campaigning. Yet would they be anything more than faces in the crowd? This letter, a self-revelation of the partisan activities of one disfranchised woman, portrays Eliza Davis as she steps from her private world into the political limelight. The document can be read as a testament of women’s fluency in the new argot of mainstream party politics and as an argument that they could and should be part of it.

Davis wrote from her home in Worcester to her husband John, the day after the Massachusetts Whig nominating convention, with its 30,000 attendees, was held there on 17 June 1840. She was heavily involved because John was to be nominated for governor of Massachusetts, at the same time that presidential nominee William Henry Harrison’s state electors were to be selected. She knew her letter’s importance to her husband. Being in Washington, he relied upon her overall persuasive effectiveness in responding to the situations that she faced. As she explains, her rhetorical activities involved meeting with convention committee members, accepting calls from Whig movers and shakers in town, and, ultimately, standing up before a parade of 10,000 to acknowledge cheers to “the Lady of John Davis.” One line about her publicity in this parade reveals her transition to self-conscious partisan efficacy: “[A]fter the first five minutes I forgot myself entirely; and received it only as a part of the enthusiasm of the day in which, such is the power of sympathy, I fully participated.” She had become part of the machinery of political persuasion.

Davis, like many political wives, was “on” all the time, and she had to strategize rhetorically before the public. For example, she was challenged to a verbal duel before a delegation of 150–200 Whigs. When its leader supposed that she would forget them, she admitted, “my memory was poor for names,” and quickly added, “but at such a time the name of Whig was enough.” Her adversary retorted that the opposition candidate, Martin Van Buren, “never forgets any one,” to which she parried, “I hope . . . I am as unlike Van Buren in every thing else as that.” The delegates applauded her. It was a verbal performance not unlike stump speaking, where the ability to respond extemporaneously to challenges from the crowd demonstrated character and tested one’s mettle. We would not have known about this unpublished, yet public rhetoric if we did not peer into “private” letters.

After being moved to tears by her letter, John Davis gave it to renowned Senate orator Daniel Webster, who deemed it the best letter he had ever read. It reached William Halstead, a New Jersey Congressman, who used it in a speech at a Whig rally in New Brunswick. Replete with misquotes about unexpected delegates who devoured her food, the speech also fabricated Webster’s tears. After excerpts appeared in the papers, Democrats had a field day. The Ohio Statesman proclaimed on 23 September: “The Great Whig Boobies, Daniel Webster and John Davis, crying!” due to “the guzzling propensities of a band of two hundred hungry Federals.” Other newspapers attributed Webster’s tears to envy of Eliza’s superlative rhetoric.

How would you characterize your critical approach to the artifact? Why have you chosen this approach?

This letter’s public afterlife shows that a critical reading of such rhetorical artifacts is contingent upon the context of their creation, as well as their dissemination and reception. If we had stopped at the text of the letter, we could not have known just how much Davis addressed the public from the confines of her home.

Woman’s sphere scholarship dating from the 1970s had left the impression that women’s partisanship was so proscribed that our finding of even a few nineteenth-century women writing such “personal” material in a partisan register was significant. That women could be political transformed our understanding of woman’s sphere from a discourse constitutive of women’s “experience” to an admonitory and contingent rhetoric. It also altered our critical approach to interpreting women’s letters and diaries: we adopted a hermeneutic that assumed that their partisanship would manifest itself under close textual reading and contextual research.

Through this interpretive practice, supported by chasing down (through online newspapers and other resources) unidentified politicians and events tossed into letters, we have constructed a sense of a vernacular of partisan awareness and activity that can apply to other marginalized groups engaged in their own forms of public address beyond the podium and pulpit. At least for the women we have studied, the vernacular rhetoric of partisanship turned out to be not just possible, but quite prevalent, sustained, and often eloquently expressed.

Such partisanship on the margins prompts a reimagining of what being marginalized means from a civic perspective. Is it a way of countering exclusion—by resisting civic alienation through thinking, expressing, and acting oneself into a sense of inclusion—or is it playing the hand one is dealt as best as one can? Or both?

Using a different lens, we wonder to what degree and under what conditions dominant groups recognized the vernacular political culture of the disfranchised. When interpreting speeches by privileged nineteenth-century white politicians, for example, should modern critics pause and consider that these speakers may have been addressing women as well as men?

How would you incorporate this artifact into a class?

We believe that historical manuscript letters and diaries have special pedagogical value in classes on the history of American public address, women’s rhetoric, and political communication. They show how vibrant political life was among groups whose members could not vote or easily obtain access to the podium. Granted, such materials by white, lower- to upper-middle-class women are easier to find than, say, those of African Americans or working-class people. But digging in archives can prove beneficial. Many letters appear in digital collections such as the North American Women’s Letters and Diaries database, North American Immigrant Letters and Diaries, and American Civil War Letters and Diaries. Several archives post facsimiles or transcripts of manuscript letters and diaries (e.g., Historical Journals and Diaries Online).

For this artifact specifically, one classroom activity might involve dividing the class into six groups, all of which read the Davis letter but in conjunction with a different piece of scholarship on women’s public address. Questions for discussion could be: What light does the scholarship throw upon the Davis letter and vice versa? In what types of political rhetorical activity did nineteenth-century American women engage, as seen in the scholarship and the letter? How did their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers shape their rhetoric? What kind of roles can private letters play in the study of American public address?

The secondary public address scholarship to draw from offers such an embarrassment of riches, that it is difficult to choose which articles to assign. A small sample of six, selected for breadth, might include the following pieces. Analyzing the text of one abolitionist’s published letter, Stephen Howard Browne’s 1996 Quarterly Journal of Speech essay, “Encountering Angelina Grimké,” locates rhetorical public action in the epistolary form. Lisa M. Gring-Pemble’s “Writing Themselves into Consciousness,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1998, argues that by corresponding, Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown honed a feminism that prefigured their women’s rights activism. In their 2002 Rhetoric and Public Affairs essay, “The Rise of the Rhetorical First Lady,” Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Diane M. Blair examine letters to find nineteenth-century precedents for the more activist contemporary political wife. Nineteenth-century partisan women’s more overt challenges to disfranchisement can be seen in Angela G. Ray’s “The Rhetorical Ritual of Citizenship,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2007. Susan Zaeske’s “Little Magic: Martin Van Buren and the Politics of Gender,” in Martin J. Medhurst’s edited volume Before the Rhetorical Presidency (2008), demonstrates the power of women’s Whig rhetoric to disrupt the President’s agenda. Susan Zaeske and Sarah Jedd’s “From Recovering Women’s Words to Documenting Gender Constructs,” in Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan’s volume Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (2010), guides public address scholars through the archives.

Where can interested readers find additional information?

Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. “Gender Slurs in Boston’s Partisan Press during the 1840s.” Journal of American Studies 34 (2000): 413–46 [See especially 422, 429, 430.]

——. Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010. [See especially 50–63, 81–88.]

——. “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts.” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 277–315 [Davis discussed on 285–95, illustration on 304.]

Contributors: Ronald J. Zboray (Professor of Communication, Affiliate Faculty in Women’s Studies, and Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies), and Mary Saracino Zboray (Visiting Scholar in Communication), both at the University of Pittsburgh, have published extensively on women in antebellum political life and on nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Their paper “I Have Said My Say: Ordinary Women and Partisan Speech Making in the Antebellum Era” won the NCA Public Address Division’s 2010 Wrage-Baskerville Award. Their book Voices without Votes won the 2011 Everett Lee Hunt Award of the Eastern Communication Association. Their other coauthored books include Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (2006), Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (2005), and A Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States (2000). Ronald Zboray also published A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993). The Zborays’ articles have appeared in American Quarterly, American Studies, Journalism History, Journal of American Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, Libraries and Culture, Libraries and the Cultural Record, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. They are working on a new book, tentatively entitled “The Bullet in the Book: Reading Cultures during the American Civil War”; this work in progress is supported with a research grant from the American Journalism Historians Association and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Editor: Angela G. Ray, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, is chair of NCA’s Public Address Division for 2012.

George Hull of Binghamton, NY, buried the statue on a friend’s farm in Cardiff after having a frustrating debate with a preacher about the presence of Giants on earth – Hull disagreed with the preacher’s too literal reading of the Bible.  In probably one of the most extravagant practical jokes ever, Hull decided to find an over 10 foot piece of gypsum, have an artist carve the slab into a statue, and cart it all the way to Cardiff for a proper burial – not an easy feat for 1868!  However, hoax or not, people were still interested.  People still wanted to see the Giant, not only because some might have thought it the real thing, but because of the controversy it was stirring.  Hull made a fortune charging people to view the statue, as well as exhibiting it across the state.

Many people over the years made offers to buy this piece of practical joke history.  P.T. Barnum actually offered Hull $60,000 just to lease the Giant for three months (after being turned down, he went ahead and carved his own and displayed it as “The Original of all ‘Cardiff Giants’” much to the dismay of Hull).  The Giant was eventually purchased by Calvin O. Gott of Fitchburg, MA, who kept the Giant in storage with his friend, Sumner Lawrence.  The Giant stayed in the Lawrence family until the early 20^th century, when the storage bills were not being paid.  Newspapers had a field day with the story, saying the Cardiff Giant was behind on his rent, being evicted, etc.  By 1948, the Giant found a final resting place at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

What struck me most while looking into the story of the Cardiff Giant was the wealth of information I was able to find.  Researching a topic such as this serves to remind me of what incredible resources can be found at AAS.  A single topic as esoteric as the Cardiff Giant actually has a presence across all collections.  I was able to find newspaper articles about the Giant, written days after its discovery all the way until the early 20^th century when it made news again.  I could read a poetic tribute to the Giant written in 1871, and even see advertisements for exhibitions.  Scrapbooks (believe it or not, we have two scrapbooks devoted to the Giant!) in the manuscript collection bring together multiple mediums and show how the topic held the interest of everyday people.  Even modern takes on the subject have been written and are available at AAS.  As James Taylor Dunn of the Farmers’ Museumwrote in his pamphlet about the Giant in 1948, “a fake, well established, is long lived.”  Fortunately for us, the hoax created so much debate and speculation, many resources were left behind so that the Giant’s memory can live on at AAS.

This first question is a relatively easy one: the donor, Emma DeForest Morse, bequeathed her collection to the Society in 1913, evidently feeling that the American historical scenery found on the faces of the plates would prove to be well-matched with AAS’s notable collections (and even more so with the impressive visual record found in the Graphic Arts holdings).

The second question is one which Ruth Ann Penka, AAS volunteer and curator of the newest online exhibit Beauties of America: The Staffordshire Pottery of John and William Ridgway, has been working on for years. It has been no easy task, since she is willing to do it only with gold-standard results. Penka wanted maps, illustrations, corresponding prints – and most importantly – documentation to follow the trail. So while on a Kinnicutt Fellowship in the United Kingdom, she found a treasure: the journal potter John Ridgway made during his journey to the United States in 1822 to accumulate views for his new series, The Beauties of America. Ridgway’s journal introduced Penka to some of the period’s cosmopolitan artists and allowed her to follow – through a Staffordshire potter’s own hand – the making of what would become an entire dinner service. This journey is preserved in her well-researched Curator’s introduction. Indeed, in Penka’s narrative and work the three big archival pieces of evidence – manuscript, books and graphics – coalesce. But they unite under an unusual medium: pottery. To this end (and in the hopes of providing the best surrogate for research possible) we have photographed the fronts and versos of the pieces, as well as the corresponding prints – painstakingly located by Penka – and we have made available her text-rich descriptions. The site also features photographs of the original set-up of Penka’s talk, at which this material was first presented, complete with dynamic maps of the places Ridgway visited.

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote A Defense of Poetry, which just happens to be the same year Ridgway took his journey abroad (saying nothing of his comparable British roots). In Shelley’s Defense, he made candid his thoughts on beauty, goodness and the inexplicable connection between the two. He states that the poet’s functions are twofold:

One it creates new materials of knowledge, power, and pleasure; the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.

Shelley’s posthumously published essay, written in response to a piece calling for more reliance on sciences and less on arts, is one heightened by the poet seeing and making visible through his gift language ideas about the world. The poet’s purpose is of language favoring this impulse – towards a pattern, rhythm and order. Indeed, Penka’s project underscores (and preserves) this fact – that is, seeing the work of Ridgway as facilitator and pattern-finder, she brings together the beauty and elegance of his work and time by charting his course and showing his vision of the new nation. It seems only fitting that the project was originally destined to be on display at the 2010 CHAViC conference “History Prints: Fact and Fiction” where participants were able to see and engage with these fascinating pieces and the print culture surrounding them.

Seem a stretch to relate poetry to pottery?

Good. I was hoping you’d say that.

The lasting effect of this seemingly inoffensive piece of dishware is well-played in American poet Gwendolen Haste’s 1946 poem entitled “Dorchester Plate”.  In the piece, she describes the problematic history represented on a plate’s face – a scene which ignores the grass darkened by death and the sweat in the voiceless mill. In fact, Haste seems to take issue with Shelley who felt that “poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” whereas she concludes this Dorchester plate (itself a creation) is instead a “mirror of the unreal.” Overall, Haste’s poem bridges this gap and highlights a challenge of historic scenery – that being how the representation is played out (and for what audience).

I guess I cannot help myself: I see a certain cadence, arrangement – and yes, poetry – in cataloging and in this exhibit. Perhaps it’s because there is sense being made of items – and allowing caverns of human knowledge and experience to come within reach. The twenty-two plates featured in the exhibit are just a taste – only a small part of the Society’s collection. Beauties of America will be augmented this year and a visual catalog of 100 plates will be made available by the end of 2012. So we encourage you to engage with this new site – and feast your eyes on this dinner service.

Frank Leslie (1821-1880) was a British native who immigrated to North America in 1848. He was a well known engraver, publisher, and illustrator and the work that he and his associates undertook of illustrating the Civil War received much praise. The collection contains clippings from Budget of Fun beginning in 1859 and ending in 1867.  Excerpts from this publication which are present in the collection depict an entire range of subjects from excessive drinking among soliders to Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis parodies. One theme that really stands out is that of recruiting Union Soldiers, as seen in the two full pages illustrated to the right (click on the full pages bottom right to view larger images). 

One of the images is a cartoon entitled “The Conscription in Prospect – The Would-Be Exempts” from May 1863 and it parodies evasion of the Enrollment Act of 1863. The Enrollment Act was passed by the Federal government to supply new troops to the Union Army, but this form of conscription caused a lot of unrest in the North and led to the New York Draft riots. The law allowed for men to pay substitutes to enlist in their stead, but this led to widespread desertion.

It seems that there was still a great need for more soldiers, because the next tactic depicted in Budget of Fun encouraged women to make the men in their lives feel obligated to go and fight. In “The art of inspiring courage” which appeared in October 1863, Leslie parodies this task of women. Most of the methods tout emasculation as an effective means of persuasion. In one scene you will see a woman has dressed up in her husband’s clothes and threatened to go to war in his stead. There are also two scenes with an older man encouraging his son to fight. The more efficient way to do this is by convincing your son that joining the army is a way for him to support himself, then there is the “less economical means,” which suggests you buy him a commission in the army.

Based on these examples, it seems that for some young men the main impetus for going to war was tied up with a personal sense of honor and masculinity rather than only the stated need to preserve the Union or serve one’s country.

We commenced baking to issue bread every day instead of every other day on new years day it toke [sic] nearly 800 loaves per day.  It is no easy job for three of us…to do the work it takes us from sunrise till after dark to do it.

He later writes proudly, “I have got so that I mix and mould same and am getting to be quite the baker.”

The winter seems to be setting in, and Henry hopes this will be the last winter he sees away from home.  We unfortunately know Henry was still in service through the next winter.

I don’t know how long this fighting trade is going to continue but hope not long I would like to get home but do not want to come until the comp’y returns for good which I hope will be before another winter comes on.  We had a little snow this morning not but a little though.

The tone of this letter is certainly different from the previous.  All seems calm for the moment, and Henry is relishing in his new task.  Not quite what one may expect from war letters.  We’ll catch up again with Henry soon!

Below are transcriptions and copies from a diary from AAS’s Unidentified Diaries Collection.  The diary belonged to a woman from Andover, Massachusetts.  Her diary, with entries beginning in 1852 and continuing through 1855, describes her life as a teacher, and also includes many reflective entries about her experiences in church.  Her entries of December 29^th and January 1^st show this reflective spirit, and how the changing of the year has inspired her.

In reflecting on a sermon delivered on December 29^th, 1854, the woman writes

Oh! That I might rule my own spirit.  It seems to be perfectly beyond my control.  I hope this year may commence in a better manner than past years have been.

A few days later on January 1^st, after the arrival of the year 1855, she writes

A new year has commenced.  The old one has gone never to return.  How many sins has it borne to the judgment, with a new-year may I commence a new life – one of self denial, one of active preserving effort to do good…What can I do for my scholars to induce them to commence a new year aright?  May God enable to say something which shall affect their hearts.

Even though it seems more dramatic than many of our resolutions today (lose weight!  save money!) it all still boils down to us wanting to be better people, and do better things, for the benefit of both ourselves and for those around us.

So make those resolutions, and write them down.  Who knows, someone 150 years down the road might be interested to see what kind of self reflection and self improvement we were embarking upon in the year 2012.