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MHS E-mail Newsletter
May/June 2005


Welcome!
Welcome to the May/June edition of @MHS! This bi-monthly newsletter will keep you informed of events and milestones at the MHS and will provide updates on new publications and website exhibitions. We hope you will find this newsletter useful and informative. Please send your feedback to webmaster@masshist.org — we would love to hear from you.


Herbert Ross Brown Prize, The New England Quarterly

In 2005, the editors of The New England Quarterly established a new essay contest, the Herbert Ross Brown Prize. The prize of $2,000 established in memory of Herbert Ross Brown, editor of the NEQ from 1945 to 1980 and author of The Sentimental Novel in America, will be awarded for a distinguished essay in New England literary history, 1820-2000.
More information...

http://www.masshist.org/about/news.cfm?newsitem=12


Object of the Month

This month's feature looks at the correspondence of the Peabody sisters of Salem, Mass., three extraordinary women who are receiving fresh attention in Megan Marshall's celebrated biography, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.

Click here to see the Object of the Month:
http://www.masshist.org/objects/

Coming in June: Fort Independence, Castle Island in Boston Harbor


Civil War-era Portrait Photographs
Brigadier General Charles Pomeroy Stone - click to view the photograph
MHS staff have recently finished work on a large and unique collection of Civil War-era portrait photographs. The Charles W. Jenks Carte de Visite Collection contains 1,358 carte de visite portraits of Civil War soldiers and officers, American politicians, and other public figures who were active during the years immediately before, during, and after the Civil War. The collection, processed by photograph cataloger Megan K. Friedel, is a comprehensive holding of portraits of prominent figures such as Abraham Lincoln and John Brown and of more obscure, minor figures who held influence on the battlefield and in the stateroom during the war. The latter group includes Charles P. Stone ("Stone Pasha") of Greenfield, Mass. who commanded the Egyptian army after the Civil War; George Francis Train, the Democratic politician who supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton and women's rights to counter black enfranchisement; and Clement L. Vallandingham, the North's most notorious Copperhead, whose attacks on the Lincoln administration got him expelled to the Confederacy. Most of the cartes de visite in this collection were taken by the great Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady. A guide to the Charles W. Jenks Carte de Visite Collection is available at http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fap040. Since cataloging work began on the photograph collections in May 2002, 42,000 photographs in 230 different collections have been cataloged in the Society's online catalog, ABIGAIL. Guides to many of these photograph collections are located on the MHS website at:

www.masshist.org/findingaids/list.cfm


Upcoming Events

Click to buy on Amazon.com 19 May 2005

Neil J. Savage, lecture and booksigning
"Extraordinary Tenure: Massachusetts and the Making of the Nation from President Adams to Speaker O'Neill"
More information...
Click to buy on Amazon.com 2 June 2005

Megan Marshall, lecture and booksigning
"The Peabody Sisters"
More information...
Click to buy on Amazon.com 16 June 2005

Philip Lee Williams, professor of creative writing, University of Georgia
2004 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction Ceremony
More information...



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