Tag Archives: Digital Humanities

March 6, 2021

Postal Perspectives, Salem Edition

By daseger

I was enthralled this week with news of the new technology which has unlocked “letterlocked” letters from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: before the onset of the envelope in the nineteenth century there were often-intricate practices of folding, cutting, creasing and sealing letters to secure their contents, making it impossible for modern scholars to pry them apart without causing considerable damage to invaluable sources. With every discovery of a locked letter, or a cache of locked letters, the pressure mounted to discovery another way to reveal the writing inside, and this very week, a team of scientists announced their process of “Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography.” This is BIG news: the letters are scanned and “virtually unfolded,” rendering their physical integrity intact. Secrets are revealed! I just can’t think of anything more exciting.

I’ve worked with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters before but they had already been opened up: hopefully they weren’t quite as “locked” as some examples and no harm ensued. It’s so interesting that envelopes became common so late in western history: really only from the 1830s. With the completion of my manuscript (and before readers’ comments come in) I had the time to indulge my curiosity a bit this week, the first opportunity in over a year, so I engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, putting a Salem spin on a much larger and more global topic. I haven’t engaged in “ephemeral history ” for a while so it was also nice to look at some pieces of paper. Both epistolary and postal history can reveal all sorts of interesting things, even on the surface, and two great sources for all things philatelic are the Stamp Auction Network in general and Daniel F. Kelleher Auctions in particular: all the letters below come from the latter source unless otherwise noted. First up, some folded 18th-century Salem letters from the Kelleher archive: addressed to Mrs. Hannah Pickering, Widow from 1725, and the nephews of John Hancock, Thomas and John, from 1796 (via the Salem “packet”).

Once envelopes arrive, they become increasingly elaborate, especially with the coming of the Civil War. The Phillips Library has a large collection of Civil War Covers which I hope to see one day but the one below is from Kelleher: as you can see, it contrasts quite strikingly with the simple letter addressed to Mr. Robert Manning, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle. The Salem printer-publisher J.E. Tilton specialized in embellished envelopes: here is one showcasing John C. Frémont’s western expeditions in support of his presidential campaign in 1856. In the next decade Tilton moved his business to Boston, but other Salem printers took up the patriotic paper trade. The envelope illustrations seem to get larger and more colorful over the second half of the nineteenth century, leaving little space for the address—illustrated by the Spanish-American War cover from 1898.

In addition to patriotic purposes, envelopes were great means for advertising and commemoration: all sorts of engines start to appear from the 1870s on, along with a variety of other industrial (and agricultural) goods and of course, the company headquarters. Salem’s famous hotel, the Essex House, appeared on numerous envelopes in the later and early twentieth centuries. Clothing and shoe manufacturers took full advantage of their stationery (the 1895 letter to the Naumkeag Clothing Co. in Salem is from Downeast Stamps), and before the stamp became the chief expression of commemoration, it was all about the envelope.

2 Comments | tags: advertising, Antiques and Collectibles, Digital Humanities, ephemera, Letters, paper | posted in Culture, History, Salem

March 24, 2020

Corona Courses: My Top Ten Sources of Digital Content

By daseger

So I have just finished converting my lecture courses into online formats: difficult to do midstream. A well-designed online course is a beautiful thing, but if a course is based on a more personal form of delivery and has to become virtual overnight there are going to be challenges. Fortunately, I teach history, and not a discipline that requires a lab or a studio: I can’t imagine what those professors are going through! And I also feel very fortunate to be able to depend on a variety of institutions—libraries and museums—which have made so much of their collections accessible AND provided road maps and guides to these same texts and images in the form of interpretive essays, questions for consideration, and extra-special digital features. I’ve had digital content in my courses for the last decade or so, but again, a course based on all-digital content is another thing entirely. I could not have accomplished such a thing—in such a short time— a decade or so ago; I can now, thanks to the diligent and creative efforts of these institutions, which take the “education” and “engagement” directives in their missions seriously. So here’s my top 10 list, with one qualifier and one comment: 1) I teach medieval and early modern European history and world history, so this is not going to be a US-centric list; and; 2) these institutions are focused on general education, not just formal education: they have made their collections accessible to those who have more casual or independent interests as well as those working within a curricular framework. (oh, and this list is in no particular order and is by no means exhaustive).

1. The Newberry Library, Chicago: For an American library, the Newberry has very rich European collections and it has created online exhibitions and curated primary source sets that I find invaluable for my courses: its librarians and fellows are very attuned to key curricular and historiographical trends. The Newberry is also a leader in American history and culture in general and local history in particular: it just won the top prize for “Oustanding Public History Project” at the National Council on Public History’s virtual conference for “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots”. Digital Newberry offers about a million high-resolution texts and images: this is a small fraction of the library’s collection but still quite a lot to see.

Theodor de Bry’s famous 1594 engraving showing Amerindians pouring molten gold into the mouths of Spaniards driven by insatiable lust for the stuff.

2. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: is a timeline which pairs works of art from all eras and regions of the world with curatorial essays. You can search by region, by period, or by theme, and there are many thematic essays to explore: one leads to another and before you know it, hours have gone by. I teach with images, so this is the first place to I go to find perfect visuals for my presentations, but I also encourage my students to explore this resource themselves. And they do.

Jan Steen, The Dissolute Household, 1663-64.

3. Speaking of timelines, check out the British Museum’s History Connected: A Museum of the World, in which objects can be explored across time and place while visualizing connections, the essential links of world history, and listening to curators share their expertise and perspectives. This is the result of a partnership between the Museum and Google: Google Arts and Culture can provide a engaging platform for a cultural institution to broaden their reach in more ways than one, but there needs to be some intent in terms of design and curation. Some institutions just share images of their objects and leave it at that (I’m looking at you, Peabody Essex Museum: 323 objects; 2 stories, but what BIG story is being told? And could we possibly have some more Salem objects?): this is parking, not driving engagement.

It’s all about connections at the British Museum (above) and the Rijksmuseum (below).

4. Another exemplary Google partner is the Rijksmuseum: which offers up 164,511 objects, 11 stories, and 8 museum views, taking us right into the building. We can “walk” around the galleries, focus on particular paintings, examine them in “street” or catalog views, organize them in chronological order, discover connections to other works. The collection is so comprehensive (though again, only a fraction of the museum’s 8 million objects), and the connections go on and on, in all sorts of directions.

5. This semester I really need to get my students into the Vatican, as I’m teaching the Renaissance and the Reformation, and that particular place is a powerful connecting link between the two eras and movements: while a succession of Renaissance popes reveled in its creation and majesty, Martin Luther was repulsed by it. The Vatican Museums‘ website features 360-degree tours of many rooms and a more virtual experience with headsets, but just getting us into those spaces will be fine.

6. Anniversary Digital Exhibitions: Both private and university research libraries characteristically observe historical anniversaries by putting together digital exhibitions of images and texts. 2017 was the anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses and the beginning of the Reformation, so there were many such exhibitions which are now archived: two of my favorites are Cambridge University Library’s Remembering the Reformation and the University of Arizona’s Special Collections Library’s After 500 Years: the Protestant Reformation. This year, digital exhibitions on the anniversary of Woman suffrage abound: see my previous round-up here.

7. Digital Bodleian: 914,832 images and counting at the digital portal of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, through which you can do your own curation and share “collections” with students (or friends!). A very diverse and visual database, including some great ephemera, which I also love to teach with: I’ve got to cover both the “old imperialism” and the New in my European and World History courses, and I think some educational ephemera will illustrate the transition.

8. The British Library, of course, because it has everything. I like the smaller, more curated collections, the “Turning the Pages” feature for complete texts, and when I am teaching medieval history (not this semester), the digitized illuminated manuscripts collection is indispensable. This is my favorite image of Henry VIII: from another anniversary exhibition and his own personal psalter: in the bedroom!

9. Harvard Digital Collections, of course, because they have everything: 6 million objects assembled from all of Harvard’s libraries, which you can search through with purpose or browse through an array of diverse topic collections. Because Salem is so source-challenged, I’ve come to rely on the Colonial North America collection quite a bit for this blog, but I use several of the other collections regularly for teaching. Then I just jump in from time to time: another rabbit hole: tread with caution!

10. IDEA: Isabella D’Este Archive at the University of North Carolina: I wanted to include one specialized site which demonstrates the full potential of what digital learning can encompass, and this is it. IDEA is an open-access digital “environment” dedicated to the life and letters of Isabella D’Este, the marchesa of Mantua (1490-1539). Isabella was by no means a “representative” Renaissance woman, but she left a blazing multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary trail, which is explored here in creative ways, including a wonderful, truly virtual, replication of her personal studiolo. I love to go here/there, and I bet you will too.

The incomparable Isabella D’Este and a site worthy of her.

5 Comments | tags: Archives, CoronaCampus, Coronavirus, Digital History, Digital Humanities, Exhibitions, Harvard University, Isabella D'Este, public history, Reformation, Renaissance, Teaching, The Bodleian Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Newberry Library, The Rijksmuseum, The Vatican | posted in History, Teaching

July 13, 2018

Baseball Bearings

By daseger

It’s high summer and high time for some baseball: of the ephemeral kind. The Library of Congress’s major summer exhibition, Baseball Americana, presents all sorts of compelling and colorful images of America’s pastime, but I want to add a few. The first two sections of the exhibition look particularly interesting to me–on the early game and the players–because I’ve always been curious how the “New York Game” beat out the “Massachusetts Game” (sometimes called Town Ball or the New England Game), which was basically a North American version of the rounders, a ball game that dates back to Tudor times. I think it would have been kind of cool if Massachusetts prevailed, if only because you could out someone by hitting them with a ball as they ran between the bases, but the New York game became “National” by the close of the Civil War.

The Base Ball Player’s Pocket Companion. Boston: Mayhew and Baker, 1859.

And once everyone was playing by the same rules, baseball took off, leaving a trail of PAPER in the wake of its ascent: scorecards, scouting reports, sheet music, advertisements, drawings and photographs and lots and lots of baseball cards. All and more is in the exhibition, but I’m going to insert a few of my own favorite items here, from my parochial perspective of course. For example, Baseball Americana features an uncut sheet of the first baseball cards depicting players from the Washington Base Ball Club in various stilted poses in 1887, when tobacco companies first started tucking these slips of paper into their product. There is nothing more charming than early baseball cards, and such uncut sheets are very rare, but Historic New England has a similar image that is even older: of just one famous Boston Red Stocking Player, George Wright, posing in a slightly more naturalistic way as he illustrates the key baseball “attitudes” or stances, for an 1875 instructional pamphlet. And as you can see, these images are by Salem photographers Smith & Bousley, who operated a studio at 214 Essex Street.

George Wright’s Book for 1875 containing record of the Boston Base Ball Club, with scores of base ball and cricket trip to England, and other items of interest, also, base ball attitudes, in twelve different styles, with an explanation of each. Hyde Park, Mass., printed at the Norfolk County Gazette Office, 1875; Historic New England.

Wright was quite the sportsman, in Boston and elsewhere, and he is also a Hall-of-Famer, so let’s stick with him—which is easy to do as he appears to be one of the first celebrity pitchmen in early baseball: featured in an 1871 cabinet card, and an 1874 advertisement for Red Stockings Cigars. I’ve also included a Red Stocking cigar label from 1874, just because I love it. You can also see images (and words!) of George and his equally-famous brother Harry “the original Wright Brothers”), along with other Red Stockings, in this million-dollar appraisal on Antiques Roadshow.

All images from Robert Edward Auctions, a sports memorabilia collector’s dream.

The Library of Congress has a great collection of baseball sheet music so I’m surprised more of these items are not included in Baseball Americana, but then again its breadth encompasses the entire history of baseball while I seem to be stuck in the pre-World War I era. To be worthy of its title, Baseball Americana has to deal with segregation and free agency and moneyball, while I can just dwell on the grand old game if I like.

Baseball Sheet Music covers, 1910-12, Library of Congress.

2 Comments | tags: Baseball, Digital Humanities, ephemera, Exhibitions, Library of Congress, Photography, Popular Culture, Summer | posted in History

June 10, 2018

A Revolutionary Apothecary in Salem

By daseger

Most of the students in my summer Research & Writing Seminar are pursuing local history topics related to the Revolutionary War and just after: conscription, taxation, the disruption to business, the involvement of African-Americans, Tories. This bunch seems to be drawn to that era like moths to a flame, and with the lack of local resources, we have had to be resourceful. Fortunately we have some good databases at Salem State, they are bound for repositories in Boston and elsewhere, and we’ve all enjoyed the wonderful Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. site at the Massachusetts Historical Society. But once again, this foraging illustrates how hurtful the withdrawal of the Salem sources in the Phillips Library has been to our local academic and educational community. Supposedly the Library in Rowley will be open next week, and perhaps professional historians will journey up to explore its resources, but I fear it will remain inaccessible to most of my students. The lack of digitization still rankles, especially when compared to the wonderful Dorr site. I promised I wouldn’t post on PEM and the Phillips until we had some course-changing event, but obviously I can’t help myself. Still, enough: let’s move on to more responsible repositories.

Take care if you delve into the MHS’s Dorr database: hours will be devoured. The combination of Dorr’s own annotations and the quality and navigability of the images is addictive. My students are drawn to the news, the opinion, and the “big” topics, but I love the advertisements towards the end of the papers. If I were in their place, I think I’d write my paper on the Salem apothecary Jonathan Waldo, whose conspicuous advertisements crowd out everything for me, even the imminent war.

Waldo 1

Waldo 2 The Essex Gazette of April 18, 1775, via the Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr. at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Jonathan Waldo (1756-1817) was a major Salem apothecary in the later 18th century, at one time in partnership with William Stearns and later on his own. His particular business mandated a large quantity of imports among his stock, as most British patent medicines were just that: British patent medicines. In the next (April 25) edition of the Essex Gazette, Waldo advertised goods imported in the last Ships from London: was that it for his business?

Waldo 8

Apparently not. Nearly all of his account books are in the Phillips Library, of course, but fortunately a classic secondary text, George Griffenhagen’s and James Harvey Young’s Old English Patent Medicines in America (1959) mined them to establish that Waldo’s business survived through the Revolution through a dual strategy of continuing to import apparently-contraband British medicine and concocting his own American substitutions. Waldo’s business endured even as he served as a Major of the Salem Militia during the Revolution and the major administrator of the restoration of the renamed Fort Pickering (previously Fort William) on Winter Island after. His post-revolutionary account book, digitized by Harvard University for its Countway Library of Medicine, confirms his thriving—and diversified—business. Indeed, the Revolution seems to have inspired “innovation” and reaped more profits for Waldo, who notes that the popular British elixir Turlington’s Balsam of Life was very dear even after the war was over, but “his own” recipe was increasingly popular with his customers due to its lower price.

Waldo, Jonathan, 1756-1817. Account book of Jonathan Waldo, 1788-1794 (inclusive). B MS b265.1, Countway Library of Medicine; Waldo managed to import a large supply of the popular Female Pills by Dr. John Hooper from London in 1777–along with a supply of Turlington’s Balsam of Life, Duke Digital Repository, History of Medicine Collections.

6 Comments | tags: American Revolution, Digital Humanities, Digitization, Historical Research, History of Medicine, Massachusetts Historical Society, Phillips Library, Teaching | posted in History, Salem

April 4, 2018

Where’s the Fire (Engine)?

By daseger

Exactly one hundred years ago in Salem, people were flocking to the Essex Institute to see a piece of Salem history that had recently been returned to their fair city: a Georgian fire-fighting engine, by all contemporary accounts the oldest in America. Here we see a complete reversal of the situation we find ourselves in now, with the Essex Institute’s successor, the Peabody Essex Museum, shipping out the city’s material history rather advocating for its return—and showcasing it. The Union hand-tub engine was imported from Great Britain by one of Salem’s first private fire-fighting companies, the Union Fire Club, established in 1748. In the following year the company placed its order for one of Richard Newsham’s recently-patented “water engines for the quenching and extinguishing of fires”, and it arrived in Salem in 1750.

A Newsham Engine of similar vintage @Colonial Williamsburg.

The Union was in service for quite some time as far as I can tell, but by the middle of the nineteenth century both its technology and its company was obsolete: steam and public fire-fighting departments were replacing hand-tubs and clubs. On a ceremonial visit to Philadelphia in the summer of 1866, a few remaining members of the then Union and Naumkeag Fire Club gifted their hosts, the William Penn Hose Company, with the Union. This provoked a “great hue and a cry” at home in Salem, but the old engine was not returned until 1917: and right into the Essex Institute it went. (I am wondering if Salem’s experience of conflagration in 1914 inspired the City of Brotherly Love to return the Union as a sympathetic gesture, but cannot find any confirmation of this theory).

Robert Newall photograph of the William Penn Hose Company in Philadelphia with their steam engines, 1865, The Library Company; Harper’s Weekly photograph of the Union, “the oldest fire-engine in the United States” in 1866; a photograph of the Union in an article announcing its return to Salem in The American City, January 1918.

You can easily discern how important the threat of fire and the organization of fire-fighting was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by browsing through the online catalog of the Phillips Library, where the papers of the Union and Naumkeag Club are held, along with its predecessor club, the Union and Essex, and myriad other fire clubs: the Active, Alert and Amity clubs, Engine #9, the Enterprise Club, the Franklin Hook & Ladder No. 1, the Friend Engine Company, the Old Fire Club, the Social Club, the Reliance Hose Company, and the Relief Fire Club, among others. I do appreciate the PEM’s digitized library catalog, although it does not quite compensate for the lack of digitized items, or their removal from Salem. However, as I have been meeting and talking to people who have much longer associations with the PEM’s predecessors and the Phillips Library than I do, I am increasingly aware that they are missing objects as much as texts, and those objects are difficult to locate, both on the web and in reality. In the company of the “world-class” museums it claims to be, the Peabody Essex does not seem to be committed to comparative open access, to either its texts or its objects. Several years ago, one could search through a “collection gateway” that seemed to yield access to a good part of the PEM collections (it can still be accessed here but appears to be functional only in accessing items from the Native American collection), now we can only see selected “highlights”. Try comparing the collections portals of say, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or even the Worcester Art Museum, with that of the Peabody Essex Museum: and see how little you will yield. I wouldn’t know where to find the Union online: the Phillips Library finding aid description states that both it and an oil painting entitled The Union Hand-Tub by W.B. Eaton are in the PEM collections, but they are both absolutely unattainable in both digital and actual forms: a regression, certainly, from 1918.

The Union and some fire buckets were featured prominently in a 1978 Essex Institute booklet: Museum Collections of the Essex Institute by Huldah Smith Payson, and fortunately for us, one of those very same buckets is one of the PEM’s online highlights of its American art collection.

8 Comments | tags: Digital History, Digital Humanities, Firefighting, material culture, museums, Peabody Essex Museum, Phillips Library | posted in History, Salem

January 2, 2018

Caretaking and Curating

By daseger

As frustrating as this past month has been with the prospect of Salem’s history being extracted by the relocation of the Phillips Library it has also been interesting, as I dove into the depths of its catalog so that I could develop a full appreciation of what we will be losing. I’m not an American historian so it was never an essential repository for me, and the life of this blog roughly corresponds with its closure. When I first moved to Salem I would research house histories and a few other things at the Phillips, but I was never truly aware of how rich and vast its collections were until just this past month: now I am awed. And as I discover and rediscover these holdings, I keep coming up with questions about their utility and accessibility: the slow process of digitization at the PEM remains confounding, but now I’m wondering if there is even an institutional interest in these materials. There is no question in my mind that the PEM is a responsible caretaker of its Phillips collections, but is there, or will there ever be, any enthusiasm for their interpretation? Historical records are not preserved merely for the sake of mothballing: they need to come alive through ongoing interpretation and curation. According to their messaging, the PEM hopes to attract scholars to its “state-of-the-art Collections Center” in Rowley via its digitized catalog, but does it have any interest in curating its own collections? We all thought that the last library exhibition, 2011’s Unbound: Highlights from the Phillips Library at PEM, was meant to tide us over until the reopening of the Phillips in 2013, but perhaps it was indeed the last library exhibition.

Libraries comparable to the Phillips, as well as those with far less resources, have presented wonderful exhibitions over the past few years, both online and in their reading rooms. In lieu of the lists of books which I usually produce at this time of the year, I thought I’d list some library exhibitions from the recent past and present, set forth for the purposes of comparison and perhaps inspiration.

John Carter Brown Library, Global Americana : The Wider Worlds of a Singular Collection (2017). Given the PEM’s global interests and the nature of their collections, a similar exhibition would be easily within reach, really popular, and a great teaching resource. We’re applying for an NEH grant on the trade between Salem and Spain at SSU, so this particular exhibit item, in which a very young nation assesses its trade, caught my eye—but it’s probably the least colorful item in the exhibition.

Secretary of State’s Report on the Cod and Whale Fisheries, 1791, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

American Antiquarian Society, Louis Prang and Chromolithography. Artist, Innovator, and Collaborator (2015). This exhibition–archived online–features several works by Salem-born artist Fidelia Bridges. The PEM has some great lithographic images, including an amazing Prang process proof that was featured in Unbound—it was really the highlight of the highlights.

L. Prang & Co., “Dipper missing,” Louis Prang: Innovator, Collaborator, Educator. American Antiquarian Society.

Harvard University Map Collection, Pusey Library, Look but Don’t Touch : Tactile Illusions in Maps. Everyone loves maps, and the PEM has a great collection, especially of local maps. A chorographical exhibition would be very interesting, but perhaps a bit too local for the cosmopolitan PEM.

“Bird’s-eye View of the Eastern Railroad Line to the White Mountains and Mt. Desert.” Boston: Rand Avery Supply Co., 1890. Harvard University Library.

Delaware Art Museum, The Cover Sells the Book : Transformations in Commercial Book Publishing , 1860 -1920 (2017). A wonderful exhibition of notable bookbindings in the collection of the Museum’s Helen Sloan Farr Library & Archives. Thanks to the Phillips librarians’ tweets, pins, and instagram posts, we know that they preside over a treasure chest of beautiful bookbindings, and could easily mount a similar exhibition (or three or four).

Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives, Delaware Art Museum.

Baker Library, Harvard University Business School, The Art of American Advertising, 1865 -1910 (ongoing). This digital exhibition of American advertising ephemera is an amazing resource that I visit often. Given the Essex Institute’s all-encompassing policy of collecting old bills, letters, and account books, books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, directories, etc…in fact, all articles which now or in the future may throw light on our history, or manners and customs”, there is no shortage of similar materials in the Phillips Library.

Famous (or infamous) “Antikamnia” Skeleton Calendar for 1901, by Louis Crusius, a St. Louis pharmacist and physician. Baker Library, Harvard University.

Merrill & Mackintire Calendar for 1884, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum.

And finally, photography, and a plea. The Phillips collections include the photographs and papers of two local photographers who established national reputations over their careers: Frank Cousins (1851-1925) and Samuel V. Chamberlain (1895-1975). While many of their photographs were published over their lifetimes and after, others remain entombed in the Phillips. Photography lends itself to digital exhibition particularly, so I’m really hoping that the PEM can release some of these images in that (or any!) form, forever.

Samuel V. Chamberlain at work in France and New England, Phillips Library MSS 369, Peabody Essex Museum.

7 Comments | tags: books, Digital Humanities, ephemera, Exhibitions, Local Events, maps, Peabody Essex Museum, Phillips Library, Photography | posted in Current Events, History, Salem

November 21, 2016

Fantastic Beasts (and where to find them)

By daseger

When I need to find fantastic beasts I know precisely where to go: straight to Conrad Gessner’s five-volume Historiae animalium (1551-1558) or to its English variant, Edward Topsell’s History of Four –Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658), both of which are illustrated extensively and digitized. Why do I need fantastic beasts? Principally for teaching purposes: there’s nothing better to illustrate the sense of the wonder of discovery in the early modern era along with a fledgling (in Topsell’s case very fledgling) scientific empiricism. Both authors describe what they have seen or heard about these beasts, and that is the difference between the early modern approach and the modern one: hearing about things seems to be just as valid as seeing them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently a unicorn can be just as real as a rhinoceros, as neither had actually been seen. What I generally do with the images and descriptions of these texts is examine very real, even mundane animals side by side with more exotic, fantastic ones, and compare the details of their descriptions: a more scientific empiricism is evident in descriptions of dogs, horses and sheep, while the much shorter chapters on camels and lions and tigers–and their more mysterious but fellow four-footed beasts–rely on ancient “authorities” and “sundry learned” authors. We do not see the hearsay purged from natural history texts until the later seventeenth and eighteenth century, and thereafter fantastic beasts roam into the realm of the imagination.

You can see how dependent Topsell (bottom) was on Gessner (top) in their comparative illustrations of camels, along with many of the other beasts–both common and exotic–featured in both books. Gesner’s peacock is particularly beautiful, and he also includes a North American turkey.

Beavers are very interesting to both Gessner and Topsell, as the European beaver had become very scarce, if not extinct, in the region and its American counterparts were the source of both valuable fur and a musk-like substance called castoreum, which is secreted by both male and female beavers every spring. Gessner and Topsell both feature rather ferocious beavers, and the latter added an alternate view exposing the supposed source of castoreum.

Now for some truly fantastic beasts: the unicorns of Gessner and Topsell, a satyr from Gessner, along with some sea monsters and a seven-headed hydra.

Topsell’s Baboon looks rather wondrous/monstrous, but his manticore, a composite beast of ancient Persian origin, and the legendary lamia, a vampire-like siren, represent a more threatening form of hybrid monster. Here be dragons and sea serpents too, as well as beast from the New World (where wonders abound) called the Su, all part of God’s plan.

Illustrations from Conrad Gessner’s Historiae animalium (1551-1558) and Edward Topsell’s History of Four –Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658), National Library of Medicine and University of Houston.

3 Comments | tags: Animals, Animals in Art, books, Digital Humanities, Illustrations, Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Teaching | posted in History, Nature

November 3, 2016

That’s the Ticket

By daseger

Well now we are in this rather ominous week between Halloween and the Election. How t0 deal with it? By retreating into the past, of course! I’ve been curious about the mechanics of elections for a while, actually, and decided to indulge my curiosity by browsing through some local digitized collections of electoral ephemera. The large collection of nineteenth-century election ballots at the American Antiquarian Society is particularly engrossing: so many stories and ideas and trends are encapsulated on these little scraps of paper. For a non-Americanist such a myself, it took quite a bit of background work just to identify the myriad political parties as well as the issues that were driving their formation, and I also came to realize that the transitions from written to printed party tickets, and from party tickets to official ballots, were very momentous, almost on a par with the evolution of voting via machine or electronically. Who knew that the Australian ballot was a secret ballot, first adopted in the United States in Massachusetts as late as 1888? Certainly not me. Here’s a small sample of a great collection, beginning with a very early printed ballot which features Salem’w own Timothy Pickering and also illustrates the electoral college very clearly.

Freedom is expressed in both words and images on nineteenth-century Massachusetts election tickets, often and in various ways: the “Free Bridge and Equal Rights” ballots from the 1820s which refer to the proposed Warren bridge over the Charles River, linking Charlestown and Boston, a liberty pole, the “Free Soil” party that split off from the Whigs over the issue of slavery, the linkage of nearly every candidate “and liberty”. The first two tickets below are also illustrations of the hybrid print-script tickets produced before printed “party tickets” became the norm after 1840 or so.

And after the Civil War: color, more elaborate typography and imagery, and a spectrum of emergent political affiliations, including various Labor and Greenback parties, Prohibition, Liberal, Independent, Citizens’, Peoples’ parties and both regular and varietal Republicans and Democrats. The party ticket evolved into such an familiar form that it would even be mocked through caricature. And then it became much the official ballot, much more private, and consequently much less interesting.

Election tickets from 1800, 1829, 1848, n.d., n.d., 1870, 1876, 1883, n.d, and n.d., all Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society and available here.

5 Comments | tags: American Antiquarian Society, Digital Humanities, Election Day, ephemera, Federalists, Graphic Design, Timothy Pickering | posted in Current Events, Design, Salem

September 19, 2016

A Weekend Photographer

By daseger

I discovered a digitized collection of over 2,000 photographic negatives by amateur photographer Robert L. Bracklow (1849-1919) at the New York Historical Society this past weekend and became lost in another world for several hours–hours which I probably could have used more productively, but I do not regret their “loss”. Bracklow’s photographs are primarily, though not entirely, of New York City and its vicinity in the 1890s and early twentieth century, and show a city in transition in which multi-story buildings were going up alongside wooden “garrets” and cows are still grazing by the side of the road. He captured all the monuments, and people visiting them on the weekends, like himself: his primary occupation was that of a stationer, and he went roving about on the weekends after he had closed his shop doors. Besides monuments, he loved churches, milestones, bridges, and people: though Bracklow is often compared to Alfred Stieglitz, my own (parochial) frame of reference is of course Salem’s Frank Cousins, who was clearly more transfixed by architecture than society. Not so Bracklow, who seems quite as determined to show the mix of people as of buildings in his time. Though Bracklow lived and shot primarily in New York, I found quite a few Massachusetts photographs in this digitized collection: lots of Great Barrington and Marblehead, several of Nantucket, Medford, and Salem. The New York Historical Society digital achive of his photographs is absolutely wonderful because you can zoom and see: a lone lady bicyclist pedaling over the Parker River Bridge in Newbury, Massachusetts, the parcels of a Marblehead housewife walking home from her shopping, crumbs on the shirt of a child at a tea party in Bensonhurst in 1898.

Photographs by Robert L. Bracklow from the collection of the New York Historical Society: blowing up a balloon for the Harlem River boat race, 1900; Bruno’s Garret in Greenwich Village, entrance to Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn; a crowd greeting Kaiser Wilhelm’s yacht in New York, 1902; an afternoon tea party in Bensonhurst; milestones to New York and Boston; North Shore Massachusetts door; Leslie’s Retreat Monument in its original location on North Street in Salem, the Red Lion Inn (?), Stockbridge, Parker River Bridge, Newbury, Gregory and Darling Streets, Marblehead. All from the Robert L. Bracklow Collection at the New York Historical Society.

4 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, Digital Humanities, museums, New England, New York City, Photography, Robert L. Bracklow | posted in Architecture, Culture, History

July 6, 2016

Everything for the Garden (Historian)

By daseger

I had a lot to do yesterday (including gardening) but still managed to devote quite a bit of time to the digital collections of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden–a very enticing resource that represents only a fraction of the larger Library’s vast holdings, encompassing over 555,000 volumes in its General Research Collection, along with botanical art and manuscripts. I confined myself to only one category of the digitized materials–nursery and seed catalogs–and still managed to kill some serious time; I can only imagine the hours that would be lost to old journal articles, collector’s notebooks, and “Great Flower Books”! There were quite a few Massachusetts growers represented among the nursery catalogs, which dated primarily from the 1890s through the 1920s, including Salem’s very prominent horticulturalist and landscape architect Harlan P. Kelsey and the “Seed King” of Marblehead, James J.H. Gregory. (Both men were very energetic civic activists as well as horticultural entrepreneurs–I plan to focus on their comparative paths a bit later on, when I have more time). These catalogs are such great sources for the history of horticulture, garden design, “homemaking”, as well as advertising and marketing: they just suck you (me) right in–their nostalgic aesthetic appeal is quite powerful too. Here are a few of my favorite covers, but you can access the entire texts online via the Mertz Digital Collections.

Everything for the garden and “Dreamwo[r]ld” indeed: American nursery catalogs from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Digitized Collections at the New York Botanical Garden.

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