By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist 

I’d like to use the blog today to highlight two manuscript collections that recently crossed my desk, collections that document the work of two very impressive and accomplished women.

The first is the papers of social workers Dina D’Alto Malgeri and Francesco P. Malgeri. During the early and mid-twentieth century, the Malgeris, both immigrants from Italy, devoted themselves to the Italian immigrant communities in their adopted homes of Boston and Chicago. The collection consists mostly of papers of Dina Malgeri, who survived her husband by 49 years.

Dina Malgeri worked tirelessly to help immigrants access educational and employment opportunities, government and medical assistance, and recreational activities. She taught English, Italian, and citizenship classes; organized clubs for children and adults; translated and interpreted; led cultural tours and outings; delivered lectures; and even wrote and directed plays. It seems wherever she saw a need, she stepped up.

One of the nice things about the Malgeri papers is that the MHS’s crack digital team has digitized the collection in its entirety, and you can access these images through our collection guide. There you’ll find papers of many of the associations with which Dina was affiliated, as well as papers documenting her efforts to help individuals arrange medical care, straighten out legal matters, and become U.S. citizens.

Literally the same day I cataloged the Malgeri papers, I also cataloged the papers of M. Virginia Morrissey McDermott of Medford, Mass., a woman described in her obituary as “a pioneering lawyer, businesswoman and activist for women’s equality.” After graduating second in her high school class, McDermott told her parents she wanted to attend law school. As she described in a 2007 newspaper article, “My father stared out the window for 10 minutes. Then he said, ‘Well, if you want to, I think you have the brains. Go do it.’” In 1939, she proved him right by graduating second in her class again from Portia Law School, now the New England School of Law.

McDermott was the first female secretary of the Newspaper Guild union, treasurer and president of the Newman Club, president of the Massachusetts Federation of Business and Professional Women, nominating committee chair for the National Foundation of Business and Professional Women, member of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women, and Boston’s Woman of the Year. And this is only a partial list. She not only achieved personal success, but devoted her professional life to boosting other women. She fought for the Equal Rights Amendment and was still working as a lawyer in her nineties.

When asked why she didn’t marry until the age of 50, she explained,. “I was just too busy doing everything else to think about it.”

Her papers at the MHS consist mostly of printed matter related to her professional activities. However, the collection ended up having an unexpected personal connection to yours truly. Leafing through miscellaneous clippings from the 1950s and ‘60s, I noticed one in particular that made me stop.

The woman in the middle is Virginia McDermott. The woman on the left is my great-aunt Beatrice Corliss!

By Emily Petermann, Library Assistant

If your name is Gaius Julius Caesar (and it’s 44 BC…and you’re the tyrant of Rome) you may want to stay home today. For everyone else—are you ready for the Ides of March?

The Ides is the 13th or 15th day of the month in the Roman calendar. It is the third of three named days in the Roman month: the first is the kalends, or first of each month, and the second is the nones, the 5^th or 7^th day of each month. The Ides of March is a particularly famous Ides—it’s the day the tyrant died. On thisday in 44 BC Julius Caesar was assassinated by 22 Roman senators. You may know his final words—according to Shakespeare—as “et tu, Brute?” or “and you, Brutus?”

To celebrate this year’s Ides, I decided to look through our holdings for Caesar and for Latin related items.

The first item that drew my attention was this 1826 volume of Shakespeare’s Works, which has some beautiful engravings. The engraving pictured below appears at the beginning of the play Julius Caesar and depicts that fateful Ides in 44 BC.

We also hold quite a few non-Shakespearean works related to Julius Caesar. The most relevant is written by Caesar himself: the MHS holds a few editions of his work “Hoc uolumine continentur haec. [C. Iulij Caesaris] Commentariorum de bello Gallico...”  The title translates to “These chapters contain G. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War…” This volume is Caesar’s account of multiple wars that he was involved in, with the most famous being the Gallic War.

Pictured above is an edition of Caesar’s work published by the Aldine Press, a company started by Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer responsible for creating the italic typeface. Manutius also notably put out small and affordable editions of Latin and Greek texts, like our copy of Caesar’s work, which is the perfect size to hold in your hand.[i] Open this copy of “Commentariorum de bello Gallico…” and you can use the map of part of Western Europe to follow Caesar’s campaign through Gaul as you read!  

We also hold quite a few (55!) Latin primers and readers: books intended to teach Latin to students. Quite a few of them claim to teach in new and innovative ways. I’ve taken several years of Latin, so I’m always looking for “new” ways to learn the language. My favorite of the primers is titled “A Demonstration How the Latine Tongue May be Learnt With Far Greater Ease and speed then Commonly It Is.” This primer was published in London in 1669 by Arthur Brett. Brett begins his primer with a complaint that the “older” ways of teaching Latin negatively affected student’s health. He said of the old way: “Least pouring on hard Rules should crack their brains, impair their health, and make them to nauseate all kind of knowledg[sic].”

To the modern eye, Brett’s Latin is also likely to crack our brains – he expected students to know to write “What wouldst thou have” (“What would you like?” in 17^th century English) as “Nihil moror quid objicis,” instead of the apparently obviously incorrect “Quid tibi vis?” (which he translates as “What wilt thou to thee?”) It took me a few passes to figure this sentence out, thanks to 354 years of language changing- I’m glad I wasn’t learning Latin from Mr. Brett!

Finally, I thought I would look for some familiar Latin phrases-like “et tu, Brute?”- in the collection. I was excited to find  a volume titled, “Adagiorum chiliades Des” by Erasumes Desiderius, which contains Latin adages and explanations for those adages broken down by the century they were common in.

One of my favorites from this collection is “Elephantum ex musca facis” or “you are making an elephant out of a fly.” This adage sounds a lot like our contemporary phrase, “you’re making a mountain out of a molehill!”

If you’re not supposed to stay inside today (looking at you, Caesar), consider visiting the Reading Room to check out some of our materials on Caesar and the Latin language. You can find out more about visiting the Reading Room here, and can request an appointment here.

[i] Kuiper, Kathleen, “Aldus Manutius” in Encyclopedia Brittanica, updated Feb. 2, 2023.

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate

Annie Adams Fields (1834‒1915) was an author and social reformer who made her home at 148 Charles Street the center of literary Boston. Her circle of friends included authors published by her husband, James T. Fields, of Ticknor & Fields, as well as European writers visiting Boston. The MHS holds Annie Fields correspondence, travel and other diaries, translations, and a scrapbook on Charles Dickens.  

Fields made a number of literary friends during her travels in Europe, 1859‒1860, and these writers later came to her salon in Boston along with New England and other US authors. What makes these friendships of particular interest today are Fields’s descriptions of the writers, penned with a keen eye. For example, she hosted a dinner on 21 November 1867, that included Charles Dickens. Afterward, she wrote about Dickens in her diary:

“Dickens bubbled over with fun & I could not help fancying that Holmes bored him a little by talking at him. I was sorry for this because Holmes is so simple and lovely but Dickens is sensitive, very. He is fond of Carlyle, seems to love nobody better and gave the most irresistible imitation of him. His queer terms of expression often convulsed us with laughter and yet it is difficult to catch them as when in speaking of the writer of books always putting himself, his real self in ‘which is always the case,’ he said ‘but you must be careful of not taking him for his next door neighbor.’”

Many visitors found Fields to be a sympathetic listener and confided in her, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. After his visit with Fields on 6 December 1863, following a funeral, she wrote this passage about him:

“As the sunset deepened Mr Hawthorne talked of his early life. His grandfather bought a township in Maine and at the early age of eleven years he accompanied his mother and sister down there to live upon the land. From that moment the happiest period of his life began and lasted until he was thirteen when he was sent to school in Salem. While in Maine he lived like a bird of the air so perfect was the freedom he enjoyed. During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight alone upon the icy face of Sebago Lake with all its ineffable beauty stretched before him and the deep shadows of the hills on either hand…. All the long summer days he roamed at will, gun in hand through the woods and there he learned a nearness to Nature and a love for free life which has never left him and made all other existence in a measure insupportable. His suffering began with that Salem school and his knowledge of his relatives who were all distasteful to him. He said, how sad middle life looks to people of erratic temperaments. Everything is beautiful in youth—all things are allowed to it.”

Fields also observed Hawthorne on his way to the funeral on 4 December 1863, and wrote, “He says in it ‘pleasure is only pain greatly exaggerated’ which is queer to say the least if not untrue. I think it must be differently stated from this. He was as courteous and as grand as ever—and as true. He does not lose that all saddening smile, either.” This last sentence leads the reader to surmise that Hawthorne always had a “saddening smile.”

The descriptions Fields wrote about her literary friends were used by her husband to create essays on Hawthorne and Dickens, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1871 and in his book Yesterdays with Authors in 1872.

You can read Fields’s transcribed diaries in the online edition of The Brownings’ Correspondence.

By Klara Pokrzywa, Library Assistant

Like probably pretty much anyone that works in an archives, I love looking at old books and their lovely bindings! We have plenty of pristine old bindings here at the MHS – but just as interesting are the bindings in various states of wear and tear. Today I wanted to take a look at some books that are showing their age in one particular way: exposed wastepaper bindings.

Wastepaper has been used in book bindings for centuries – essentially, it’s the practice of using scraps of used paper to reinforce or mend the bindings of newer texts. Most of the scholarly work on wastepaper bindings deals with fragments of medieval manuscripts, which are hand-scribed and generally produced on parchment. Atlas Obscura has a fascinating article on how researchers try to identify and reconstruct manuscripts found in the bindings of other texts. And if you’re interested in seeing some examples of what it looks like when a beautifully decorated manuscript is used as a binding, Princeton Libraries has a blog post with some very cool pictures. Finding a fragment of a medieval manuscript is a pretty big discovery, however, and it’s much more common for bindings to be reinforced with more modern printed paper. That doesn’t mean that these printed materials aren’t interesting!

Our copy of Volume 1 from The works of John Adams, written by his grandson Charles Francis Adams, is one such example of printed wastepaper. The series was published between 1850-1856. As you can see above, under the leather of the binding, there are scraps of printed English language text on paper. If you look closely, you can see that this paper is actually a page from another book, complete with footnotes at the bottom.

This one is interesting because only the first volume in this series has the binding paper exposed. Perhaps the first volume was bound less securely than the rest, or perhaps it saw more use over the years than the later volumes! If the spines on the other volumes ever disintegrate (which they hopefully won’t!), it would be interesting to see if they were all bound in paper from the same source.

It’s frequently difficult to read binding fragments, because the narrow strips of paper mean you only ever get a few consecutive words, and never a full sentence. In this volume especially, the binding paper has separated out into even narrower little scraps, which makes it even harder! From what I can tell, the binding here looks as though it’s a history text – I think the text at the top where the title of a book or chapter would be says “American Evolution,” and some of the body text talks about food, turkeys, and agriculture.

This next book has only the edge of a page in its binding. There’s enough complete words to determine that it’s a German language text, which makes sense, seeing as this copy of Platonis dialogi : Graece et Latine (Platonic dialogues in side-by-side Greek and Latin) was published by the Berlin publisher Bekkeri. It dates a little earlier than the Adams text, likely between 1816-1818. Let’s take another view of the binding:

I love the slightly Gothic font! There are also a few numbers in this text, which look as though they might be dates, although they don’t correspond with the dates of publication. I can’t read German, so it’s difficult for me to tell anything further than this – although I think one of the words I managed to identify was “murden,” German for “murder,” which piqued my curiosity. If anyone can make more sense of this, let me know!

The last binding I want to talk about is from a book called A statistical view of the commerce of the United States of America : its connection with agriculture and manufactures; and an account of the public debt, revenues, and expenditures of the United States, by Timothy Pitkin. This was published in New York in 1817; I took a look inside while photographing it, and to be honest, it’s kind of slow reading! But the contrast between the very dry text of the actual volume and the commercial, upbeat tone of the binding is a little amusing to me, because as you can see, it’s bound with an advertisement for dandruff products.

These bindings are interesting because of the contrasts they occasionally draw with the content of the volumes they hold together, as with the Pitkin tome here, but also because it can tell us about what publishers did and didn’t value – these aren’t called wastepaper bindings for nothing! And while perhaps it isn’t particularly surprising that an old newspaper advertisement for dandruff cream was seen as waste, there’s also a tension here: it’s precisely because these scraps of paper were designated as disposable that they have survived.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

The Guardian, “America’s greatest race journal,” was a Black-owned newspaper published in Boston. The paper was founded in 1901 by businessman William Monroe Trotter and librarian George Washington Forbes. The MHS collection of Garrison family papers includes one full issue of The Guardian, dated 16 December 1905, the bulk of which is dedicated to commemorating abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on the centennial of his birth. It’s also a fascinating snapshot of Black activism during the Jim Crow era.

The Guardian offices were located first on Tremont Row, but in 1907 moved to 21 Cornhill Street, the same office from which Garrison had published his famous Liberator. Trotter idolized the abolitionist, and that certainly comes through in his flowery prose. The masthead even features a Garrison quote: “Liberty for Each, for All and Forever.” But Trotter also didn’t pull punches when it came to those he opposed: segregationists and white supremacists, of course, but also Black accommodationists like Booker T. Washington.

On the 10th and 11th of December 1905, citizens of Boston paid tribute to Garrison with ceremonies, prayers, and concerts. This 12-page issue of The Guardian includes details of these events, transcriptions of speeches, and photographs of a number of the participants. I’d like to highlight a few of them here, but I encourage you to click on this link to see the whole issue, which includes about 40 more and has been beautifully reproduced by the MHS digital team.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930) was an author, editor, and lecturer whose ancestors fought at Bunker Hill. When she spoke at Faneuil Hall, she declared, “I am a daughter of the Revolution, you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution but we are going to take that right.”

Attorney Clement Garnett Morgan (1859-1929) was the first African American to receive both an A.B. and an LL.B. from Harvard. The list of his academic honors and achievements could fill up a blog post of its own! At a speech in 1890, he declared, “I am glad to be a Negro […] I mean to be a Negro. On the bottom of my heart is written Negro.”

Nellie Brown Mitchell (1845-1924) was a classically trained singer and voice teacher who performed throughout New England, including at both Black and white churches, as well as the west and south. She performed at Garrison’s funeral in 1879 and at the centennial.

J. Nathaniel Butler had worked with William Lloyd Garrison at the Liberator. He is described as “venerable” and “aged” in 1905, so he was probably the same man who had assisted at an attempted rescue of freedom seeker Anthony Burns 51 years before.

Other photographs in the paper depict clergy, artists, military men, individuals affiliated with the Niagara Movement, and many more. Among them are Mark R. DeMortie, Wesley J. Furlong, Eliza Gardner, Byron L. Gunner, Martin L. Harvey, Reverdy C. Ransom, William L. Reed, William H. Richardson, Hannah C. Smith, and John J. Smith.

Francis Jackson Garrison (1848-1915), the youngest child of William Lloyd Garrison, delivered a rousing speech that tied racism to other societal harms, including sexism, xenophobia, imperialism, and political corruption. If his father were still alive, he said, he would not only see the wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans, but also…

He would find Negroes excluded from juries, from all town, city and state governing bodies, denied legal intermarriage with whites, restricted to Negro galleries in the theatres and Negro cars on the trains, subjected to excessive penalties for violations of law […] He would find women denied their full political rights in all but four states of the Union, and the Chinese […] still excluded as outcasts. He would view with amazement the spectacle of the United States seizing distant lands, slaughtering their people by tens of thousands, and establishing colonial government.

For a detailed blow-by-blow of the commemorations that took place on 10-11 December 1905, see The Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of William Lloyd Garrison, published the following year.

Apart from Garrison-related material, this issue of The Guardian contains several other items of interest. For example, multiple articles relate to the resignation of John Gordon as president of Howard University. Under Gordon’s leadership, the curriculum of the school had been changed to one focusing more on “industrial education.” Students considered this change an insult to their academic abilities and protested, eventually forcing Gordon out. One protest involved as many as 400 students.

Another article rails against a vagrancy law in Macon, Ga. that would allow police to arrest any Black person they deemed to be “loitering” or “idle.” According to the article’s author, some Black men had achieved a level of relative comfort that enabled their wives not to work. Chief Conner of Macon, to help the “suffering [white] housewives […] issued orders for all idle Negro women to be rounded up, and unless they can show that they have employment they will be sent to the chain-gang, there to cook without pay and clothed in stripes.”

Finally, I’ll draw your attention to this eye-popping headline: “Negro Has Legal Rights. Court Rules He Is Entitled to Protection Under Law Against Lynching—Great Decision.” This brief bulletin refers to the case of Thomas M. Riggins v. United States. Riggins had participated in the lynching of a Black man named Horace Maples, but argued that he had committed no crime because the protections afforded by the Constitution simply did not extend to African Americans. The Supreme Court ruled against him.

The Guardian closed up shop in either 1955 or 1960 (sources differ). I hope you’ll take some time to read through this fascinating newspaper or visit the MHS to check out the rest of the Garrison family papers.