Beacon Street Blog
by Zachary Bodnar, Archivist
This past week, the staff of the CLA read and discussed the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. The book was an excellent read and the discussions thereafter were even better. Loewen’s breakdown of how high school history textbooks routinely and systematically present false, incomplete, or problematic versions of US history is damning and underscores why high schoolers regularly rate history as their least favorite subject. The fault does not lie with educators though. The need to “teach to the test” plays a huge part in the problem, and the outsized influence of certain textbook markets means publishers create textbooks with as little controversy as possible. The results are that teachers must teach the answers that appear in multichoice tests and that the textbooks that contain those answers rarely, if ever, present history as the chaotic mess that it really is. In the end we are left to forget that Woodrow Wilson was a proud racist whose destabilizing interventions in Latin America are still felt today and remember Helen Keller only for the uplifting story of her overcoming her dual disabilities and not for her socialist politics and support for eugenics. History is messy but you would never know from an AP US History course.
One of the things that struck me after reading Lies was the complete absence of primary and secondary sources from history textbooks. Sure, excerpts of primary sources, some comically inserted or distorted, might appear within textbooks, but they are rarely engaged with. The field of history is messy, and that mess all starts with primary sources. The best history assignment I was ever given was during my sophomore year of college in an early-US history course. We were given a packet of primary and early-secondary sources about the Boston Massacre and told “describe what happened during the Boston Massacre.” Of course, if you know anything about the Boston Massacre, you know that basically no sources corroborate one another, so the exercise was to piece together a plausible narrative based on the available sources. The Boston Massacre is a particularly messy example, but this is basically how all history is done. Except you would never know if by reading your history textbook.
In the past, it would never have been particularly feasible though for high schoolers to look at primary sources. Access the primary sources, especially in the yesteryears, was not exactly the most accessible due to problems of geography, money, and repository policies. But the internet has slowly, and steadily, been changing that. Digitization does not only provide access to researchers, but it also provides access to students, and creates opportunities that they might never have had before digitization and new ways of accessing those digital records. And we at the CLA are so proud to be a part of this story of increasing access through digitization. But digitization alone is not enough.
As I have talked in the past, access is more than simply publishing digital content to the web. It is necessary to properly describe digital content and provide both the tools necessary to search for content and find “like” content through linked data. But even that is not necessarily enough. It is important too the present digital content in ways that fit various audiences. For a seasoned researcher, examining digital records found via search results will likely be enough. But if we are to bring the CLA’s digital resources into the classroom, we must also be thinking about how to engage that audience. Complex searches alone are not enough.
Fortunately, there is one clear avenue of access when it comes to the classroom, and that is the teacher. One of the highlights of the CLA’s internal discussion of Lies was an acknowledgement that the CLA needs to be producing more curricula-like content. The excitement and activity surrounding the release of the “Plymouth’s Pilgrims” curriculum was palpable. We want to be doing more of that in the future! We want to create opportunities for students, educators, and interested parties to use our resources for educational purposes. While we alone might not be able to change how history is taught in high school, we do hope to play some part in the changing face of American education by encouraging educators to use our unique collection of digital resources.
While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.
Today’s highlight will be RG5332, the Churchmen’s League records, 1940-1989. This collection found its way to the Congregational Library and Archives through a gift from Andover Newton Theological Seminary in 2017. The collection was processed by one of our archivists in 2018.
The Churchman’s League was an organization created for the purpose of promoting programs of study, research, education, legislation, and action. Their work was dedicated to raising the values of civic righteousness, social justice, moral decent and an overall better life for society. They used meetings, readings, discussions, and more to promote these goals. The organizationformed sometime around 1940 and by the 1960s was often referred to simply as “The League”. In 1963, the Churchman’s League expanded its original structure and opted to become three organizations wrapped into one. These new branches were the Massachusetts Temperance League, Lord’s Day League, and the Churchman’s League for Civic Welfare.
This collection is one worth highlighting because it showcases how an organization dedicated todirect change in society went about learning, spreading, and defending its message. The first series covers the wide topics of interest that the group sought to confront. These topics include blasphemy, alcoholism, court reform, prison reform, divorce, poverty and more. Each one of these topics has a dedicated folder which contains information about the League’s stance, efforts to increase awareness of their stance, and ways to turn the stances into concrete politicalaction. Another area of interest to the league was the status of religiosity, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In this area, the focus is less on action and more on learning and understanding the current realities of religion in the United States.
The next two series deal with the operations of the Churchman’s League from an organizational and financial sense. Beyond basic finances, the collection has contributor lists, the creation of various funds, reports and tracking of office rentals. On the organizational side, the collection has a nearly complete run of meeting minutes and annual reports from the 1950s through the 1980s. While it was not possible to completely ascertain when the League officially disbanded, this collection’s meeting minutes and reports end in 1989.
The last part of the collection worth highlighting focuses on letters, handouts and newsletters which served as the League’s outward attempt to gain support for their positions. This includes letters to state and federal politicians, pamphlets on various League campaigns, and newsletters which describe their activities from 1976-1989.
This collection is one worth highlighting because of the amount of information related to the Churchman’s League and their activities. It also provides a snapshot into how a religious organization thought and tackled a variety of different political issues. The collection will greatly serve future researchers and hopefully sooner rather than later!
The finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!
Some of my favorite bits of typography--which is a thing you get to have opinions on once you’ve spent enough time with the books--are historiated initials. These are the large capital letters that can be found at the beginnings of chapters or other sections of text with an illustrated scene either surrounding or inside of it. These initials are referred to in a variety of ways which can make research more difficult. You may see references to historiated capitals, or floriated capitals/initials (which are letters decorated with drawings of flowers and other botanical imagery, rather than a scene) or illustrated or decorated initials/capitals (which refer to any kind of decoration).
When printed books first appeared in Europe in the 15th century, they looked very much like the manuscripts that were already in circulation from the physical layout of the pages and the book itself to the style and subject matter of decorations. Historiated initials are a continuation of the same artistic tradition as the illuminated initials found in medieval manuscripts. A tremendous amount of variety in subject matter ranging from the serious to the whimsical can be found in these initials, often referencing common medieval subjects. Scenes from the BIble and classical mythology are very common as are depictions of animals and historical figures. You can see a galloping centaur, a sassy dragon, and a man reading to a dog pictured here. You’ll also often find “putti” or artistic depictions of chubby male children common in Renaissance art at various tasks.
The design of historiated letters was its own artform. It’s typical to see differences in style based on region and time period and use these as further clues when learning about how a book was made. Printers typically worked with a limited set of capitals, so this means you’ll often see the same images repeated in a single work and that the images depicted in the letters generally were unrelated to the subject matter of the book they were printed in. There are a few notable exceptions to this like, for example Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. This early medical textbook first published in 1543 features historiated initials designed specifically for its text. Most of them depict putti performing the medical works being described in the text: handling body parts, dissecting animals, and reading from their own medical textbook.
This example puts me in mind of one the mysteries from the Congregational Library’s collection. If you’ve been on a visit or for a tour, I have almost certainly pulled this out to show you:Theophylacti Bulgariae Archiepiscopi Tomus Primus by Joanne Oecolampadio (1524). A very religious book that features multiple historiated letters of a scatalogical nature. This could mean nothing--these sorts of images were very common in the medieval manuscript tradition and other art and this could simply be a coincidence, but I think it has to mean something when your printer uses these so liberally in your very religious book. The printer was Andreas Cratander, known for printing Protestant works. Once research avenues open back up again, I’m hoping to look into some of his other work to get an answer for myself.
by Jules Thomson, Assistant Archivist / NEHH Publication
Improving access to resources is the perennial mission of librarians and archivists, and to that end the Congregational Library & Archives has been working on expanding our finding guide for records relating to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color within our 17th-19th century collections, particularly those digitized as part of New England's Hidden Histories. (The new guide is in review and will be made available shortly). While collating and describing these records, many of them added only recently to NEHH, I've personally gained more insight into the shifting contexts of church attendence by people of color in colonial and antebellum America. In particular, I have been struck by the major social and religious changes pursuant to slavery's abolition in New England after the 1780s, including the splitting off of congregants of color to form their own religious communities in the wake of discrimination and sidelining within majority-white churches.
A prime example of this trend was the formation of the Abyssinian Church and Religious Society in Portland, Maine - the Abyssinian was one of six Black Congregational churches founded prior to the Civil War (along with the Dixwell Avenue Church in New Haven, CT, the Talcott Street Church in Hartford, CT, the African Union Congregational Church in Newport, RI, the Second Church of Pittsfield, MA, and the Black church in Springfield, MA). The Abyssinian Church was organized by disaffected parishioners of the Second Congregational Church in Portland, whose majority-white congregation had relegated Black members to segregated balcony seating as well as general hostility and racial animus.
We know that congregants suffered these inequities because six Black members of the Second Church (Christopher Christian Manuel, Reuben Ruby, Caleb Jonson, Clement Thomson, Job L. Wentworth, and John Siggs) wrote a letter of complaint to the local Eastern Argus newspaper in 1826 in which they described the ill treatment. Two years later in 1828, these six signatories along with sixteen other disaffected members petitioned the State Legislature for permission to incorporate their own religious society. The state granted the request, allowing for the formation of the Abyssinian Religious Society. Other congregants of color from the area soon joined with the new Society, including a delegation from the Fourth Congregational Church in Portland. This merger expanded the organization into the Abyssinian Congregational Church and Society.
Besides being an exemplar of the context in which it was founded, the Abyssinian Church and Society was a historical juggernaut in its own right, acting as a cultural nexus for the Black community in Maine for many decades. It hosted worship and revivals, abolition and temperance meetings, several local societies, and a school for Portland's Black children until integration in 1856. Lectures and concerts were also commonplace, though the church meeting minutes include an amusing prohibition against attending "dancing theaters and sirkices [sic]" - perhaps indicating that such jollity was rife amidst the congregation.
The church hosted some of the foremost abolitionists in the country such as Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison, and was also one of the most northerly stops on the Underground Railroad, assisting refugees' passage into Canada. In the aftermath of the Civil War, famed abolitionist James W. C. Pennington served for three years as pastor of the church.
Local benefactor Reuben Ruby looms large in the history of the Abyssinian. He provided the land upon which the meeting house was to be built, was central to its founding and administration, and facilitated the organization's role in the Underground Railroad. Mr. Ruby worked directly with William Lloyd Garrison, and supported the start of Freedom's Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States. He was well known in Portland, partly because he was owner and operator of two "hack stands", horse-drawn taxi ranks. Ruby's son William played a crucial role in alerting the city to Portland's Great Fire of 1866, and in protecting the meeting house from ruin; he fittingly went on to captain the local fire department in addition to other civic roles.
The Abyssinian Church closed its doors in the early 20th century, partly due to the tragic wreck of the steamship Portland in November of 1898, in which seventeen of the church's male parishioners died. Most of the remaining congregation became members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, now known as the Green Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church. The former meeting house on Newbury Street was subsequently converted to tenement housing and fell into disrepair, but a process of restoration began in the late 1990s, and the building has now been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The Abyssinian Church and Society record books are the only records from a pre-Civil War Black Congregational church which are viewable online. They have been made available in cooperation with our partners at the Maine Historical Society and the Digital Ark Corporation, and with generous support from the Council on Library and Information Resources via their Digitizing Hidden Collections grant.
by Zachary Bodnar, Archivist
Let me present to you a story I am all too familiar with. You take from a box a well-preserved eighteenth-century record book. There is no title written onto the cover and no title page within the volume to describe what the pages within might contain. So, to determine what the record book is about, you begin flipping to random pages, only to realize that the book might as well be written in another language because the handwriting within is nearly indiscernible. Or perhaps it is, essentially, written in another language because, upon further study, you realize that the writer is using a form of shorthand. At that point, what are you to do?
If you are me, you pass that volume off to one of the CLA’s transcriptionists but for most people, without years of experience reading old manuscripts, eighteenth-century handwriting can be an insurmountable obstacle for understanding the object. I still struggle reading old manuscript materials and I now do have years handling and reading this type of material. Some of it is just a matter of distance; I will forever struggle with most s’s looking like f’s. But the fact is that poor handwriting is just as endemic to the eighteenth-century as it is today, and with cursive, where numerous letters are distinguished only by the location of a tail or the number of strokes, any poor handwriting can quickly turn an item into a comprehension nightmare.
It was for this exact reason that, within NEHH, the CLA set aside money to hire transcriptionists. Transcription, within the library and archives context, is the process of accurately representing text found on paper into a machine-readable format, such as a Microsoft Word document. By this process, we can provide access to the widest audience and elucidate texts which might otherwise see use only by those experienced in reading old manuscripts. And by ensuring that transcription is in a machine-readable format, not only can we transmit the transcription to the widest possible audience, we ensure that databases and computer system can read and interpret that transcription.
Transcription though can take many forms, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The style of transcription the CLA currently produces is highly accurate to the original in formatting and spelling. This means that every spelling error put onto paper is also reflected in the transcripts the CLA produces. This type of transcription, which is akin to creating a typed surrogate of the original, may be especially helpful to researchers whose careful study may hinge on a single misspelling. But equally valid is corrective transcription which takes the original and “fixes” it for a modern audience, erasing spelling mistakes, clearing up shorthand, cleaning up symbols, and changing those fancy s’s into our modern s. This approach may not be originalist in the strictest sense, but for an audience who simply wishes to read the meaning of the original, this approach may be best.
Transcription is a powerful tool for access, and as time goes on, there are ever more and more tools at our disposal that we hope to employ at the CLA. AI transcription technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which can automatically transcribe print, such as that found in books, and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) can do a lot to provide more transcription, even if both are prone to mistakes. And we also hope to provide an ability to search within our transcriptions, a feature the NEHH viewer cannot yet accomplish, but which may finally be accomplished at the end of the CLA’s search for a DAMS. Transcription is important to the CLA. At the heart of our mission is access and transcription provides significant access to all our users. And we are so very excited to show you how that will be accomplished in the months, and years, to come.
by Sara Trotta, Librarian
For many people, history seems to come to us pre-packaged: in textbooks, or Ken Burns documentaries, or brick-like presidential biographies written by Ron Chernow. But this belies all the work that goes into the creation of history--the tracking down of sources, the sense-making and interpretation, the creation of a cohesive narrative, and the time spent assembling the necessary background knowledge that makes all of this possible. Diving into primary sources like the ones in our collection can be intimidating. It can be hard to know where to start and harder still to be sure you aren’t missing some necessary context.
Political cartoons in particular have a wealth of information and provide an entertaining window into common political and social discourse, but can be difficult to interpret without a lot of background information. Not dissimilar from modern internet memes that are constantly in conversation with one another and dependent on niche cultural references. If you missed the joke in the first round, trying to decipher it centuries later seems nigh impossible. They may have visual references that would be very meaningful to contemporary audiences but which are opaque today. For example, 18th century political cartoons often feature images of dogs urinating on things--sometimes the meaning is easily discerned, as when the dog is peeing on a tea caddy in a Revolutionary War-era cartoon, but it can also be a more general symbol of disorder. There are many cartoons where the conflicts are so specific or the references so obscure that they are nearly impenetrable for modern audiences. This type of allusive commentary can make for difficult analysis and require a depth of contextual knowledge to really make sense of them.
We have a good example of this in our collection in the cover illustration pictured above. Who is that man? Why is he in a baking pan? And what’s a dough-face anyway? By sheer luck, I got the joke. I was very fortunate to have an excellent High School history (Hello, Mr. Wagner!) whose lively lectures and passion for the subject matter still stick with me today. Once we got to the Civil War, we talked a lot about the “doughfaced wusses” and in particular, the biggest dough-faced wuss of them all, President James Buchanan. Originally, the term “Doughface” referred to someone, usually a politician who had no strong principles of their own, who was pliable and moldable like dough. Over time the term came to refer specifically to Northern politicians who capitulated to the demands of Southern slave-holding senators. In fact, the origin of this phrase may have actually been “doe-faced” referring to the cowardice displayed by these wishy-washy men which was misheard and written down incorrectly. Though the pamphlet itself would probably provide some context, understanding what the pamphlet was about at a glance would be very difficult. The contextual information needed to understand material like this can come from a variety of places and take years to build up--there are new discoveries to be made and nuances to be uncovered all the time, even for experienced researchers.
The Congregational Library welcomes researchers at all skill levels, and we have multiple tools available to provide scaffolding for people exploring primary resources for the first time. Staff are on hand to explain things like how to safely handle historical documents and provide physical assistance like book cradles or weights if necessary. We can also tell you what information you’re likely to find in what sorts of records. The collection at the library also has a wealth of secondary sources specifically intended to help support primary source research in the collection. Part of the process of describing items and collections is researching their historical context. Archivists add historical notes and other information to finding aids for thise reason. Staff are knowledgeable and keen to offer their expertise and if we don’t know the answer to your question, we’ll find someone who does.
by William McCarthy, Processing and Reference Archivist
While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.
Today’s highlight will be MS0061, the Conscientious Objectors World War II papers, 1940-1946. The collection was first processed in 1991 and additional changes were made in 2018.
The collection highlights those individuals who objected to participation in World War II. The first series is entirely dedicated to the application forms, titled “Registration of Members of Congregational and Christian Churches Who are Conscientious Objectors to Military Service”. The forms provide a snapshot into why people would not be willing to engage in military service in their own words. One example to highlight is the application of Siegmar Blamberg Jr. His form makes clear he thinks “...service would make it impossible for me to follow the dictates of my conscience in the matter of discharging my obligations to God and to my fellowmen and to myself”. These powerful words represent just one of over 100 different applications. Blamberg did not provide a lengthy explanation, but the collection includes some applications where the individual added letters giving deeper explanations into their decision to be conscientious objectors.
Our collection does not only focus on the applications but includes a large amount of administrative and financial paperwork. These items are associated with two former chairmen of the Congregational Christian Committee on Conscientious Objectors, Dr. Albert W. Palmer and Rev. Alfred Schmalz. These sections include efforts to raise money for the cause, lists of people living in the service camps, day-to-day administrative work, letters received that are against the cause, and various other correspondences.
The final series highlights various publications related to the conscientious objectors. One example is “The Church and Returning Conscientious Objectors” by Roy A. Burkhart. As the title suggests, it explores the issues of the returning objectors and what the church can do to support them. As a lesser known part of World War II history, all these publications are worth reading and exploring. This whole collection deserves more use and recognition and hopefully that starts to happen in the near future!
The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!
By Zachary Bodnar, Archivist
Now that the staff of the Congregational Library & Archives are back in our offices, or in my case temporarily holed up in the executive director’s office with it’s beautiful view of Beacon Street (oh woe is me), we have been able to resume our acquisitions workflows and accept new donations of archival and library materials. Collecting, to preserve and make accessible, is a key component of our mission. Indeed, a significant portion of our time during the pandemic has been to work on developing and refining a comprehensive collection policy for the CLA. And to return to this key component of our work once again after the long pause due to COVID has been a balm to my archivist soul.
My recent work with the Digital Asset Management System selection project has recently gotten me thinking about how we work with potential donors of archival materials though. We have a comprehensive collection policy that ensures the full preservation of a person, church, or organization’s memory. However, the way we have presented this list of material types has been format agnostic. For example, when communicating with organizations, we would make clear that we will take “Building records: such as blueprints, pew plans and pew deeds, assessors records, and records related to construction/renovation” without reference to the physical medium that these records appear on.
For most of the above listed record types, the first thing that comes to mind is likely something physical. Perhaps you imagine a record book containing meeting minutes related to the maintenance of the building or a large blueprint documenting the construction of a new addition. But the fact is that all these records can just as easily be digital and stored on a computer's hard drive!
Most records that are produced today by individuals or organizations are born-digital, meaning they were created in a digital format. As an extreme illustration of this fact, in 2013 the US Government Printing Office estimated that 97% of federal records produced were born digital (Jacobs, James A, 2014). Even organizations and persons who have been slower to adopt digital technologies are seeing larger percentages of their annual records become born-digital. Photographs from the annual BBQ taken on a cell phone, emails between committee members, the meeting minutes recorded in notepad, the PowerPoint presentation from the last board meeting, and the word document produced during the creation of this blog post are all examples of born-digital records. As an ever-increasing percentage of records are produced digitally, archivists must grapple with how to collect these records, as they are just as crucial to the preservation of memory as that physical record book from 1874.
For now, there are two immediate steps, and the CLA has already begun to do both. First happens at the point of contact with potential donors. Recently rewritten procedures ensure that when talking to donors, we more actively inquire and seek out born-digital materials. We want to ensure that no part of a church’s memory is lost because it was stored on a hard drive instead of in a file cabinet. And second, the CLA is pursuing a Digital Asset Management System which will allow for the CLA to provide unparalleled access to the born-digital materials we have. The collection of born-digital materials means nothing if we cannot also make the materials accessible to our users, and the DAMS will do exactly that.
For better and worse, the future of archives is inextricably linked to the digital realm. We cannot say we collect, preserve, and make accessible the memories of Congregationalism if we do not collect, preserve, and make accessible digital records. Fortunately, the CLA is ready for this next step, and already working to make the incoming deluge of digital materials accessible for everyone, online and on location.
by Sara Trotta, Librarian
Most of you have been sternly warned off leaving traces behind in your library books--writing, highlighting, dog-earring pages, all strictly verboten. And while I certainly stand behind this advice when it comes to your public library’s copy of Where the Crawdads Sing or in the instance I once read about where some helpful patron had underlined the name of the killer in nearly every mystery novel the library owned, this sort of paratextual material provides a wealth of information to library staff and future researchers interested in learning more about our the items in our collection and the lives they lived before they arrived on our shelves.
This post was inspired by a rather alarming inscription I found scrawled on the front cover of a pamphlet (see above). It reads: Do not under any circumstances let this get out of our hands. This is like catnip to someone like me who got into this field primarily so I could use my research skills to solve historical mysteries. The story here is almost certainly more mundane than what the inscription would indicate. The pamphlet is an otherwise unremarkable history of the American Missionary Association with no other markings inside it--no snarky commentary, no deep secrets, not arcane knowledge, alas. It’s unclear when this inscription was added--whether it was at the CLA or in the possession of the institution that donated it. My best guess is that other copies of this pamphlet or similar pamphlets had a habit of ‘walking off’ or getting lost and they were becoming hard to replace. Think of it as a precursor to the public library’s tattletape or a milder version of a Medieval book curse.
I was also reminded of another pamphlet I stumbled across with a similarly memorable inscription. It was an Anti-Masonic almanac from 1832 and someone had ominously written “Secrets written in blood should be revealed. A tree that bears such fruits should be hewn down” in ink around the edges of the cover. This book is definitely haunted. The quote comes from President John Quincy Adams--and what a quote!--referencing the disappearance and alleged murder of former Mason William Morgan who threatened to publish a book revealing the secrets of his former lodge. This event sparked a wave of Anti-Masonic sentiment across America which you can see reflected in the other Anti-Masonic materials in the library’s collection.
Much of the material at the CLA--and our oldest material in particular has come to us secondhand. Marginalia, Ex Librii and other paratextual evidence give us unique insight into the context in which the materials in our collections were received, made use of, and created. Special Collections librarians--people who work primarily with rare books and archives--are particularly concerned with provenance. This term refers to information about the origins, custody or ownership history of a collection, manuscript or book. For books, this can give us information about the sort of people who owned different types of books--their age, gender, and socioeconomic status. When a previous owner is an author in their own right we might be able to speculate about what books may have influenced their work, allowing for the fact that just because you own a book doesn’t mean you’ve actually read it (as my ever-growing To-Be-Read pile can attest). Many books bear the marks of their previous owners in the form of an Ex Libris which might take the form of the owner’s signature (e.g. SO-AND-SO, her book), or an artistically designed bookplate the owner has used for their entire library. One fantastic example in our collection comes from a book by S. H. De Kroyft, “the blind authoress”, which bears her bookplate in Boston Linetype, a system of writing designed for the vision-impaired and an early precursor to braille.
Other books give us unique insight to how previous owners reacted to their reading through marginalia--notes written in the margins or endleaves of books--or other means. My favorite example of this in our collection is a copy of The Theological Works of Thomas Paine previously owned by someone who absolutely hated Thomas Paine. Prior to encountering this book, I had no idea how divisive Paine had become in America after the Revolution. The owner of this book has left insults (“aka the devil” written underneath Paine’s frontispiece) and pointed commentary throughout the book. There is a wealth of information to be gleaned there about public reactions to Paine’s work, information that may not be available elsewhere if the owner kept his opinions between himself and the pages of this book.
If there’s one thing I hope readers will take away from this post, it’s that books are objects intended for use: go ahead and leave your mark and for the sake of the nosy librarians of the future, make sure you don’t leave out the good stuff.
by William McCarthy, Processing and Reference Archivist
While the staff of the CLA have been working from home, we have continued to remain engaged with our collections even while separated from them. These posts will highlight some of our less well-known collections. Please note that the collections highlighted are not available online unless otherwise noted.
Today’s highlight will be MS0914, the Loy and Edna Long missionary papers, 1929-1968. In 2010, staff members working on an inventory project came across this unprocessed, previously unknown collection. It was immediately accessioned and processed into the collection we have today.
The focus of the collection is on the Long’s three separate trips to India which took place between 1931-1946 and 1949-1956. Much of their time in India was spent working in Ahmednagar. Loy was a social and industrial welfare worker and organized the Probation and After-Care Association. (1) Scattered through the collection are news bulletins called “The Long’s Broadcast” which goes into detail about the work they were doing and events they saw in Ahmednagar. As an example, the January 1938 edition discusses the work of Mahatma Gandhi, Loy’s work starting the City Games Association, his work with their charity organization, and the local neighborhood house they manage.
In the same broadcast, Edna Long describes the origins of her work with sisal fibre and ropemaking. Edna, on a trip to the market, finds a large set of sisal fibres for sale in Ahmednagar and purchases them. She then worked with women in the community to help modernize the process of using the sisal fibre to make rope. She says that “We experimented together, sharing ideas, and in less than a month we discovered how to clean, dye, drain, spin and weave this hemp...within a remarkably short time these women were making beautiful, saleable articles, including purses, belts, luncheon sets, serviette rings, sandals and brushes.” The rest of the report chronicles how the work evolved from the initial 1938 broadcast into a consistent part of the Long’s lives. The information in these records should be explored as this is only the surface of what is available!
The legacy finding aid for this collection can be found HERE. If you have any interest in viewing this collection once the library reopens, or you have any other CLA related questions, do not hesitate to reach out to us at ref@14beacon.org. Stay safe and have a great day!
1. United Church of Christ's Whole Earth Newsletter, Spring 1979, p 14-15