MHS Blog Feed
1 week ago
By Heather Wilson, MHS Library Assistant You never know what you’re going to find in the archives! While digging into a collection of papers belonging to Edmund Munroe, a 19th century merchant, on the behalf of a long-distance researcher, I came across his 1794 mathematics example book from his boyhood days. (The schoolmaster asked practice questions […]
Carol Knauff
3 weeks 3 days ago
By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist I recently stumbled on a fascinating document in the collections of the MHS that I’d never seen before, and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a twelve-page family history, written neatly in thick pencil, called “A True Story of happenings of The life of John […]
Carol Knauff
3 weeks 5 days ago
By Gwen Fries, Adams Papers The first extant letter from John Adams to his daughter was written on 19 Sept. 1774, when Nabby was nine years old. He opened the letter by praising the “Improvement in your hand Writing and in the faculties of the Mind” but quickly transitioned into talking about her brothers, filling the […]
Carol Knauff
1 month ago
By Heather Rockwood, Communications Associate It may not seem likely that a wet-plate photograph, a towel, and a grieving widowed mother in Boston have Abraham Lincoln in common, but the following stories from the MHS collection, along with a Boston ghost story, may change your mind. Although I enjoy tales of the gruesome, grotesque, and […]
Carol Knauff
1 month ago
By Viv Williams, Processing Assistant and Library Assistant Hello again, Beehive readers! As I prepared to write this blog, knowing you would see it during peak spooky season, I wondered what other seemingly nonthreatening items in our collection I could relate to a terrifying bit of horror pop culture. If you’ve read the title, you’ll have already […]
Carol Knauff
1 month ago
by Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant “We here and now christen this book with the good old razor that Martie – and then Dick shaves with- Signed ‘Martie’ Rapp ‘Dickie’ Bostwick. Oct 23 , 1920-” Martha A. Rapp was a young woman from Brockton who travelled to New Zealand in 1920-21 with her parents, Walter and […]
Carol Knauff
1 month 1 week ago
By Nym Cooke, NERFC fellow, choral conductor, independent scholar I worked at the MHS for several weeks on a New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) grant which is allowing me to inventory all the pre-1821 American materials containing sacred music, both printed and manuscript, in a number of New England libraries (next up: 27 different Harvard libraries, […]
Carol Knauff
1 month 2 weeks ago
Every year, the MHS selects one or more high school students for our John Winthrop Student Fellowship. This award encourages high school students to make use of the nationally significant collections of the MHS in a research project of their choosing. Applications for the 2022 Student Fellowships will open in November, 2021. Learn more and apply! This […]
Carol Knauff
1 month 2 weeks ago
By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist A fellow archivist and I often talk about that instinct you develop after working in this field for a few years. I call it the “I think this is a thing” instinct. It happens when you’re working with a manuscript collection and stumble on a passing reference, unfamiliar to you, […]
Carol Knauff
1 month 4 weeks ago
By Rakashi Chand, Senior Library Assistant “We are all individuals, and also parts of the human family, and our best life is found in the way each of these capacities illuminates and vivifies the other.” Helen Bigelow Merriman wrote in her Treatise Concerning Portraits and Portraiture in 1891. “Portrait painting has, after all, for its deepest secret, the same rule that […]
Carol Knauff
2 months 1 week ago
By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist Last year, the MHS acquired a small collection of account books attributed to John Henry Clifford of New Bedford, Mass. Clifford was a lawyer who served in the Massachusetts legislature and as attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. This acquisition supplemented a large collection of Clifford’s papers that we already […]
Carol Knauff
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2 hours 28 minutes ago
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