O , , : : .., the Society will celebratethe completion of the final phase of a

long-term project to renovate its BoylstonStreet headquarters building, a national historiclandmark. The annual spring reception will be alittle different this year: in addition to our tradi-tional open house in the public areas on the firstand second floors (so recently completed thatthe paint may not be dry), our entire buildingwill be on display. We invite members and gueststo see the MHS “made new”—top-to-bottom,front-to-back—from the cooling fans recentlycraned up to the roof to our new conservationlaboratory in the basement. This will be anopportunity to have a behind-the-scenes tour ofthe Society and see where and how we catalog,edit, preserve, and house the historical treasuresin our care. We have much to show off andmuch to celebrate.

Over the past eight years, working from amaster plan and designs by Tom Hotaling, aprincipal of Ann Beha Architects, the Society hasrenovated or replaced nearly everything, begin-ning with the most pressing problem—a leaky,-year-old roof—and progressing through aseries of phased projects that have allowed theMHS to operate without interruption, althoughoccasionally with more than a little noise anddisruption.

The final phase of construction began lastOctober. It has been the largest and most com-plex of all, tied to the most ambitious schedule.During the course of the current project thelibrary staff moved the bulk of the MHSresearch collection to temporary locations in

previously renovated parts of the building and tooffsite storage. Through careful planning byShawmut Design and Construction (the generalcontractor that has managed all MHS construc-tion projects since ), during the previousphase of work we completed much of the prepa-ration for what is now underway.

The least visible, but among the most impor-tant building improvements was the installationof new insulating walls that allow us, when com-bined with our new heating and air-condition-ing system, to regulate the temperature andhumidity in the library stacks precisely. At thesame time, thanks to a , matching grantfrom the federal Save America’s Treasures Pro-gram that we received in , the Society hasinstalled a new inert, gaseous fire suppressionsystem (Inergen) in stack storage areas.

During the final weeks of the project, as werace towards completion, the contractors arehard at work in the public rooms on the secondfloor of the original building. While planscall for the replacement of “infrastructure”—heating, air-conditioning, and electrical servic-es—most work consists of the restoration of theoriginal historical fabric. There will be impor-tant changes: the director’s former office willbecome a new display gallery and meeting room,and former editorial offices adjoining the DowseLibrary will house a relocated administrativesuite. When the public rooms on the secondfloor reopen on June , there will be new light-ing, new display cases, and redesigned galleryspaces. The contractors will have repaired floors,woodwork, and plaster, as well as the marble andmosaic tile in the main stairway lobbies.

Massachusetts Historical SocietyPeriodical newsletter of the

Number / Summer MHS

1154 BOYLSTON STREET MADE NEW

Miscellany

For the library staff, June will not bethe absolute end of our project; after anafternoon of respite to celebrate, we willreturn to the task of moving the collec-tions back to their permanent homes andinstalling compact storage for our collec-tion of art objects and historical artifacts,but that is only housekeeping writ large.Come to the spring reception to see whatwe have accomplished or, if you cannotwait, contact Director William M. Fowler(wfowler@masshist.org; --) orPeter Drummey, the librarian (pdrum-mey@masshist.org; --), forwhat we hope are the very last “hard hat”tours ever (or at least for this generation).

* * *W ⁄ W ⁄ W

Conference Scheduled for August

Images of women who served in or withthe U.S. military in the last century prolif-erated on the covers of periodicals in thelast year, both locally—the Boston Globe(November , ), Wellesley (Summer), and Simmons Review (Fall-Winter)—and nationally, including theDecember issue of Time. All drawattention to the contributions that Ameri-can women have made during times ofconflict, both in the military and in relat-ed capacities. This August, a two-dayMHS conference will examine this history

in-depth, convening a group of scholarsfrom a range of disciplines to discuss cur-rent research and the future of the field.The proceedings will also include aroundtable event with local women whoserved from the s through to DesertStorm.

“Women/War/Work” will focus specifi-cally on how wartime demands havealtered the lives of American women and,conversely, how the wartime work thatwomen do has influenced the UnitedStates and its military. Topics covered bythe presenters’ papers (see the program,pp. ‒) will take the discussion from theSpanish-American War in through tothe present; they will invoke many vari-eties of work (active service as well as jour-nalism, morale and recreational supportfor male troops, and antiwar organizing,for example) and will address many of thecivil rights struggles of the last century.With many of the foremost authorities inthe field at this conference, we look for-ward to a lively and substantial discussionthat will contribute to ongoing research.

The MHS also wants to use this op-portunity to express its strong interest in collecting personal papers—letters,diaries, photographs—of Massachusettsservicewomen and women who worked inrelated capacities during periods of inter-national conflict. Historians have fre-quently pointed out that the debates wecontinue to have today about women andthe military rarely take into account thevery active roles that American womenhave played in the service, in defense pro-duction, and in political discussion of mil-itary engagement. In order to reconstructthat history, and in order to separate mythfrom reality in its telling, we need to pro-vide researchers with the records that doc-ument those experiences. The Society willserve that mission, with your help. Pleasecontact Curator of Manuscripts BrendaLawson at -- if you would liketo discuss donating relevant papers inyour care.

MHS Miscellany, no. Periodical Newsletter of theMassachusetts Historical Society

Address: Boylston St. Boston MA -- www.masshist.org

Hours:The MHS reading room is open to the

public free of charge, Monday, Tues-day, Wednesday, & Friday, to: , & Thursdays to .

For more information:Please call ahead or check the website

for directions, information aboutcollections, reading room policies, holiday hours, and special events.

Masthead illustration:

“Plan & Elevation of the Tontine Crescent, now erecting in Boston.” From the Massachusetts Magazine, .

The MHS occupied the Tontine Crescent from until .

Above: Demolition underway onthe second floor during February.

All illustrations are from MHScollections unless otherwise noted.

MHS Miscellany 2

You may now register online atwww.masshist.org/events/conferences.cfm

F DThe Miscellany is too short. In a briefnewsletter how can we summarize allthat is going on at the MHS? Wecan’t.

The best way to know more aboutwhat’s going on at the Society is tobecome involved. Attend a lectureand come early so that you can spend a few minuteswith others who share your interest in history. Take partin a seminar or a conference. Yes, these are academicaffairs, with papers and scholarly comments, and theymay not be popular with everyone, but on the otherhand when was the last time you participated in one?Undergraduate years? Graduate school? This is yourchance. We also offer trips to historic places and inviteyou to come along. Finally, you are supporting one ofthe finest research libraries in the world, so why not useit? I invite you to visit our website (www.masshist.org),use the online catalog (ABIGAIL), and then come inand look at the materials of interest to you.

By the way, when you sign in let me know that youare here so that I can say hello.

* * *

A’ W

Teachers throughout the United States now have accessto a splendid project developed by Adams FellowRachel M. Ottman, a fifth-grade teacher at McCarthyMiddle School, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Entitled“Abigail’s War: The American Revolution through theEyes of Abigail Adams,” Ms. Ottman’s project is a -page, primary-source-based activity book for elemen-tary-school-age children. The activity book and adetailed set of teacher lesson plans for its use are avail-able on the MHS website as a downloadable PDF file(www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/education/).

By “putting themselves in Abigail’s shoes,” studentslearn about primary sources and about life in Revolu-tionary-era Massachusetts. In “Abigail’s Economy:Shopping during the American Revolution,” for exam-ple, children learn how to add in pounds, shillings, andpence. They read two letters from Abigail Adams to herhusband, John, one written in April and the other inSeptember , in which she complains about the risein prices. With £ in hand, students then take two“shopping trips” keyed to those dates and the goodsmentioned. Able to purchase fewer goods on the secondtrip, they soon learn firsthand about the difficult con-cepts of inflation and currency devaluation.

In “Everyday Abigail,” children read Abigail’s letters

about the work involved in managing a family in diffi-cult, distant times. Students are encouraged to comparethe chores they and their families routinely performwith those Abigail and her children performed and tothink about washing without machines and cookingwithout stoves. In a wide variety of such stimulatingexercises, Rachel Ottman helps students apply their crit-ical and creative thinking skills to the dynamic materialsof history, a process that helps bring history out of theshadows and into the light of the present.

* * *F G A

MHS F M G

Library Receives Federal GrantsThree federal programs made major grants to the Soci-ety’s library in recent months. Two of the awards willpromote the MHS’s ongoing efforts to care for its col-lections. The third grant will contribute to our initiativeto promote collecting in environmental history at theSociety and elsewhere.

In December, the National Endowment for theHumanities awarded the Society a , challengegrant to establish a new, endowed library staff positionfor a preservation librarian. The NEH requires theMHS to match the grant four to one (or ,,).The new staff member will be responsible for the coor-dination of all MHS preservation activities, includingpaper conservation and repair, microfilming, and digitalpreservation, as well as the administration of the Soci-ety’s newly installed climate control system (see therelated article on building renovations) and the MHSemergency preparedness plan.

The challenge grant is a cornerstone of one of the pri-mary goals of the Society’s future fundraising—thepreservation of its collections through state-of-the-artclimate control, fire suppression, collection mainte-nance, and conservation. The NEH awards challengegrants only after a demanding peer review process. Eval-uators were enthusiastic in their support for the MHS;while they praised the Society as a distinguished reposi-tory, they also recognized its readiness to embark on themost important next step to ensure that its collectionsare available for future generations. The NEH grant is ahigh honor; only three historical societies received chal-lenge grants in this application cycle.

Another federal grantmaker, the Save America’s Trea-sures program, has (as its name implies) the preservationof our national heritage as its primary mission. For thethird time in the program’s brief four-year existence, theSave America’s Treasures program has awarded the Soci-

3 Summer 2004 / 86

ety a grant, an accomplishment unmatched by any othercultural institution. This year’s award will support thepreservation of John Quincy Adams’s diary. Adams’s -volume journal, kept over years (‒), truly isan American treasure. The grant will fund the conserva-tion and repair of the manuscript volumes that remainin their original bindings, as well as the digitizationfrom microfilm of more than , diary pages inAdams’s hand. Conservation Technician OonaBeauchard will clean and repair damaged and fragilediary pages. She will work closely with Karl Eberth, aconservation bookbinder from West Pawlet, Vermont,who will stabilize and restore the original bindings andbuild conservation cases for each volume. Digital Pro-jects Coordinator Nancy Heywood will oversee the dig-ital portion of the grant, which will present page imagesof the diary, searchable by date, at the Society’s website.

Thanks to funding from the National Historical Pub-lications and Records Commission, the funding arm ofthe National Archives, the Society will host an archivesfellow for ‒. The NHPRC Fellowship inAdvanced Archival Administration is designed to give aprofessional archivist with two to five years of experi-ence the opportunity to receive management trainingand mentoring from an experienced archival adminis-trator. The MHS is one of only two institutions in thecountry that will host a fellow in ‒. The fel-low, who will begin the -month project in July, willdevelop a framework for documenting the environmen-tal history of New England and establish an environ-mental records collecting policy for the Society. TheMHS recently established a collecting initiative in envi-ronmental history. Associate Librarian and Curator ofManuscripts Brenda Lawson, who will serve as the proj-ect manager for both the NEH challenge grant and SaveAmerica’s Treasures project, will also supervise theNHPRC fellow.

Endowment Doubles Support for MHS/NEH Long-term Fellowships

An award from the National Endowment for theHumanities will allow the Society to double the numberof long-term fellowships it offers beginning in .The grant—, over three years—will permit theMHS to offer as many as two year-long or four semes-ter-long fellowships each year. A portion of the Endow-ment’s support is in the form of a challenge; the Societymust match , of the NEH’s grant. The MHSmust also raise an additional , to provide its long-term fellows with a subsidy for housing and profession-al expenses.

NEH fellows have contributed to the life of the Soci-

ety since , when historians Ivan Jaksic of the Uni-versity of Notre Dame and Walt Woodward of Dickin-son College each spent four months with us. EllenGruber Garvey of New Jersey City University, an Amer-ican literature scholar, has been in residence at the Soci-ety since last July. Two more MHS/NEH fellows willtake up residence at the Society shortly: Woody Holton,an historian at the University of Richmond, and DavidCiepley, a sociologist and social theorist at WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis, both plan to begin half-yeartenures this summer.

Passionate about their research and active partici-pants in the Society’s academic programs, past and pres-ent MHS/NEH fellows have energized the scholarly lifeat Boylston Street. We are looking forward to evenmore contributions from our fellows when their num-ber increases in .

MHS Awarded NEH Education GrantBy our explanations, interpretations, assumptions wegradually make [the past] seem automatic, natural,inevitable; we remove from it the sense of wonder, theunpredictability, and therefore the freshness that it oughtto have.

—Hugh Trevor-Roper, as quoted by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Individuals and nations are moved to bold and decisiveaction not in the midst of calm but in the heat of strife.The years from to were such a time for theBritish citizens of the American colonies. Through theletters and diaries of contemporary observers and partic-ipants; through the broadsides, pamphlets, and officialdocuments that set out their grievances; and throughnewspaper accounts, maps, portraits, engravings, andimages of artifacts, the Massachusetts Historical Societywill bring those tumultuous times to life for students ofAmerican history thanks to a three-year award from theNational Endowment of the Humanities in its Grantsfor Teaching and Learning Resources and CurriculumDevelopment program.

Although ratification of the Constitution would laterlaunch America’s grand and unique experiment withdemocracy, America truly became a nation—ratherthan a cluster of competing colonies with differing ori-gins, goals, and policies—in the years between and. Luckily for historians, the colonists actively docu-mented contemporary concerns and events. The time-line/documentary history we will develop for the WorldWide Web will ground students’ understanding of thefacts relating to the coming of the American Revolu-tion, but it will also do more; through primary, contem-porary accounts, it will bring history from the distantpast into the immediacy of the present. As they enter the

MHS Miscellany 4

private thoughts of a people intent upon their rights butafraid that anarchy lay just on the other side of freedom,students will come to appreciate not only the intricaciesof history but the demands of citizenship.

Our timeline will be no simple chronological listingof events but a multilayered, interactive instrument thatwill help students develop the tools they need to pene-trate the motives and understand the actions of thedetermined individuals who founded their country.Specifically, our website will ) provide an easily under-stood chronology of key events leading up to the war; )present crucial documents relating to those events; )offer contextual materials that comprise a cumulativenarrative of the period; ) include suggestions on howteachers can use the documents to convey the immedia-cy and contingency of historicalevents; and ) reveal that the practiceof history is a series of approxima-tions, as historians compare andcontrast differing documentaryaccounts to arrive at the most accu-rate view of an incident. Scores ofindividuals—from MHS staff mem-bers to teachers who have workedwith us in the past, to scholars whohave embraced our vision—havepromised to help us solve the practi-cal problems that will inevitablyarise as we work toward our goal ofimmersing students in the “stuff ” ofhistory.

The MHS staff will build thewebsite in three phases. In its firstphase, the site will offer an overviewof the pre-Revolutionary period useful for teaching elementaryschoolchildren or for helping olderstudents review the period’s impor-tant events and documents. Takingthe form of a timeline, the basic sitewill be organized by key events(e.g., Stamp Act, Boston Massacre,First Continental Congress, Lexing-ton and Concord). For each event,which will be introduced by a con-textual essay, we will select four tosix crucial documents (manuscriptor printed). For each document, wewill prepare high-quality images ofeach page (some documents will runto many pages), a searchable, print-able transcription, and a biblio-

graphic statement. Additional primary materials willillustrate events as appropriate, biographical sketches ofcentral figures will be woven throughout the units, andsuggestions for further reading will be listed.

In phase two, we will enhance the site by developingfour topical units on the Revolutionary era: ) Its Ideo-logical Dimensions; ) Its Economic Dimensions; ) ItsSocial Dimensions; and ) Petitioning for Rights(including the Declaration of Independence). To help uscreate superior content in each area, we have invitedfour renowned scholars—Bernard Bailyn, David Han-cock, Richard D. Brown, and Pauline Maier—each tolead a five-day seminar/workshop with five teachers, toexplore the assigned topic. Scholars will share theirexpertise with teachers; together, scholars and teachers

will be introduced to the wealth ofprimary materials available at theMHS and elsewhere; they willadvise MHS staff as they selectmaterials for in-depth coverage; andthey will identify the contextualmaterials and analytical tools andstrategies necessary to help studentscritically evaluate documentarymaterials relating to the AmericanRevolution. Each topical unit, aspresented on the website, will modelthe ways in which historians engagewith primary sources.

In the final phase of the project,we will draw from curricula writtenby MHS Teacher Fellows to mountonline lesson plans that will furthermodel the use of documentarymaterials in an educational setting.Throughout project development, ateacher team will advise MHS staff.

The Coming of the AmericanRevolution website will be availableon the Society’s parent site,www.masshist.org. It will be free,accessible on all platforms, andexpandable as new materials becomeavailable after the grant period ends.Links to other MHS onlineresources (such as the Adams andJefferson electronic archives) andother resources on the World WideWeb will further enhance the time-line/documentary history.

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5 Summer 2004 / 86

Detail from “The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston,” engraved by Paul Revere, ca. .

Friday, August 208:30–9:15 Registration

9:30–11:15 Session 1: Demanding WorkMichele Midori Fillion, Producer, “Hurry Up Sister Productions,” New York, N.Y.

“Coolness under Fire: The Women War Correspondents of WWII,” a one-hour made for television documentary,currently in pre-production.

Judith Graham, Independent Scholar, Newton, Mass.“‘Strong Minded Women’: Nora Saltonstall’s Service at the Front in World War I.”

Ann Kelsey, Associate Director, Learning Resource Center, County College of Morris, N.J.“War Zone Diversions: An Overview of Women Volunteers in Civilian Staffed Recreation Programs in Vietnam.”

11:30–1:15 Session 2: Civilian Life in the Bay StateCeleste Benardo, National Park Service, Boston, Mass.

Topic: Women workers in the Charlestown Navy Yard.

Kimberley Phillips, Associate Professor of History and American Studies, the College of William and MaryTopic: Black women and the USO, including the Boston USO fight against segregation during World War II.

Virginia Hurley, Massachusetts Chapter of the Gold Star Wives of America, Cambridge, Mass.Topic: History of the Massachusetts chapter of the Gold Star Wives of America, including the economic impact ofgovernment policy on World War II widows.

3:00–5:00 Roundtable: Women Who ServedJoanne Keenan, served with WAVES during World War IINancy Mayo-Smith, went overseas with Red Cross during World War IISusan O’Neill, served in VietnamGlynis Phillips, served during Desert StormMary Quinn, served in Korea and VietnamAnn Wood-Kelly, flew transport for British Air Transport Authority during World War II

5:30–6:30 Keynote Jacki Lyden, Senior Correspondent, National Public Radio“Iraq from the Inside Out” A Lowell Institute lecture, free to the public.

7:00 Reception

WOMEN�WAR �WORK

AmericanWomen

the U.S. Military

in the 20th centur

&

These proceedings made possible with generous funding from the John H. and H. Naomi Tomfohrde Foundation, the LowellInstitute, Amalie M. Kass, Deborah Bogin Cohen, and Carol Bain.

Saturday, August 21

8:30–10:15 Session 3: Fighting the Good Fight: Race, Segregation, and Defense, 1898 to 1945David Lewis-Coleman, Frederick Douglass Institute for African American Studies, University of Rochester

“Victory Men and Women: Gender and the Struggle for Racial Equality in Detroit’s Wartime Auto Industry.”

Brenda L. Moore, Associate Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Buffalo“Minority Women in the Military during World War II: The Cases of African American and Nisei Wacs”

Charles McGraw, doctoral candidate in History, University of Connecticut“The ‘Old Colored Aunty’ and the ‘Up-to-Date Trained Nurse’: The Racial Coding of Women’s Work during the War of1898.”

10:30–12:15 Session 4: Framing Narratives of War and WorkFrances Early, Professor of History, Mt. St. Vincent University

“Reframing the War Narrative: The Voice of Women of Canada and the Opposition to the Vietnam War.”

Susan Grayzel, Associate Professor of History, University of Mississippi“Morale as Women’s Work: Mrs. Miniver and the Popular Representation of the Second World War.”

Margaret Higonnet, Professor of English, University of Connecticut“Snapshots of World War I: The Labor of Finding a Place for Women Who Volunteered to Serve Overseas.”

2:00–3:30 Session 5: Race, Sexuality, and RespectabilityElizabeth Hillman, Assistant Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law at Camden

Topic: The historical context of the women-in-combat debate, WWII to the present, emphasizing the divide betweenfemale officers and enlisted troops.

Katharine H. S. Moon, Associate Professor of Political Science, Wellesley CollegeTopic: Female sex workers in the brothels around U.S. bases in Korea and the impact of that interaction on Koreannationalism and on the women’s lives.

Register online at www.masshist.org/events/conferences.cfm or use the form below.

ry

August 20 & 21, 2004The Massachusetts Historical Society Boston, Mass.

Name ________________________________________ Affiliation ______________________________________Address ________________________________________ E-mail _______________________________________Address ________________________________________ Phone _______________________________________

Please register me for Women/War/Work at � $70 for full registration� $40 for student registration� $35 for both days: I am

I am a veteran � or K-12 teacher � and would like to attend � Friday’s session only (no charge)� both days for $35

The papers under discussion at this conference will be available at the Society’s website a month before the conference. If you needpapers mailed to you, the registration rate will be $120 for full registration and $80 for students.For further information, please contact Ondine Le Blanc at 617-646-0524 or oleblanc@masshist.org.

J A in the N

The May publication of volume of the Papers ofJohn Adams provides those interested in John Adamsand the diplomatic history of the Unit-ed States with an arresting account ofa seminal event. On April , , theNetherlands recognized the UnitedStates as independent and JohnAdams as its minister at The Hague.For Adams the Dutch decision was“the most Signal Epocha, in the His-tory of a Century,” a triumph that he achieved at considerable personalsacrifice.

Adams achieved his success against great odds and inthe face of serious criticism of his methods. The Frenchforeign ministry and Congress’s newly appointed secre-tary for foreign affairs, Robert R. Livingston, wouldhave preferred he follow a more traditional and patientcourse. But Adams vigorously defended his seeminglyunorthodox methods, describing himself and otherAmerican diplomats in Europe “as a kind of Militia”that some held in contempt, but that “wise Men know .. . sometimes gain Victories over regular Troops, even bydeparting from the Rules.”

The publication of this and the previous volume, inwhich Adams is working toward the success he engi-neered in , has led to an interesting new relationshipbetween the MHS and the John Adams Institute inAmsterdam. Primarily a Dutch-American culturalexchange organization, the Institute has designated as the year of John Adams. Programs beginning asearly as September will consider the history ofDutch-American relations with emphasis on JohnAdams as the United States’s first minister to theNetherlands. Likewise, volume of Adams Family Cor-respondence, scheduled for publication, containsinformation about a one-month trip from England tothe Netherlands the Adamses took in August . Abi-gail’s long letters to her family containing her impres-sions of Holland and the Dutch people are of greatinterest to the staff at the Institute.

Monique Knappen, director of the John Adams Insti-tute, and Buford Alexander, chairman of the JohnAdams Year program, visited the MHS for two days inFebruary to meet the Adams Papers staff and completeresearch in preparation for their celebration of JohnAdams and Dutch-American cooperation. In March,Jim Taylor of the Adams Papers returned the visit anddiscussed plans for the Adams staff ’s participation in asession on John and Abigail Adams in the Netherlands.

John Adams, who worked tirelessly to create a politicaland economic alliance, would be immensely pleased tosee his name associated with this cultural and intellectu-al exchange.

O N C

Records Come to MHSGreat things often grow from small beginnings. InMarch, Christ Church in the City of Boston, known tohistory and present-day Bostonians as “Old NorthChurch,” deposited its voluminous records at the His-torical Society. The collection begins modestly in 1722when Anglicans in Boston invited Rev. Timothy Cutler,the former rector or president of Yale College, to takethe pulpit of a new church here (the future Old North),and continues until the s.

While the bulk of the Old North records came fromthe Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, which trans-ferred them from its Tremont Street headquarters inBoston, where they had resided since the s, othermaterials came directly from storage rooms in thechurch. The Rev. Stephen Ayres, vicar of Old North,contacted the Society last year because he was concernedabout the condition and security of items remaining inhis care, including important early documents such asthe manuscript invitation to Cutler and Paul Revere’soriginal bell-ringing contract. Curator of ManuscriptsBrenda Lawson worked with Rev. Ayres and DiocesanArchivist Sandra Sudak to bring collections together atthe Society.

The Old North Church is, of course, best known forits role in Paul Revere’s famous ride. On the evening ofApril , , acting according to a pre-arranged plan,the church’s sexton, Robert Newman, hung two lanternsin the steeple. The lamps signaled Revere that Britishregulars were crossing the Charles River to Cambridgeto proceed to Lexington, a movement that precipitatedthe “shot heard ’round the world” the next morning andthe onset of the Revolutionary War. At the Historical

MHS Miscellany 8

John Adams’s draft of the Treaty of Amity, commerce and navigation, October , . Adams Family Papers.

Society, the church records join Paul Revere’s family andbusiness papers, including his own personal accounts ofthe events of April .

The early history (and the first records) of Old North,however, predate this seminal event by more than years. The Church of England had organized its firstcongregation in Puritan Boston in , and King’sChapel, the first Anglican Church building in Boston,was finished several years later. By , the small wood-en structure in the heart of the town was inadequate forthe size of its congregation, and the Anglicans solicitedsubscriptions to pay for a new house of worship in thenorth end of the town.

The choice of Rev. Timothy Cutler as minister wascontroversial. Cutler had been ordained a Congrega-tional minister, but he had left his pulpit in Stratford,Connecticut, in to become rector of Yale. Less thanthree years later in the Yale Corporation “excused”him from his duties because of his apostate Anglicanbeliefs. Before he could take up his duties in Boston,Cutler traveled to England in to take holy orders inthe Church of England. At the same time, the Societyfor the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Partslicensed him to undertake mission work in America.Cutler held the first service at Christ Church onDecember , .

The Old North is the oldest church building standingin Boston, designed in the style of English architectChristopher Wren. The Rev. Samuel Myles, the rector ofKing’s Chapel, laid the cornerstone on April , ,and reportedly proclaimed, “May the Gates of Hellnever prevail against It.” The church bells, the first inAmerica, were fashioned by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester,England, in , and installed in . The church

records contain documents related to the constructionof the building and several communications from Rud-hall. A letter that Rudhall wrote in Gloucester on Janu-ary , , gives the full particulars of expenses forfashioning a peal of eight bells and a peal of six bells,although he added “a Peal of Bells is better for theTower than six, because they’l have a more equal Bearingin every part of it.”

The Old North records provide a complete docu-mentary history of the church and contain all of theearly volumes of proprietors’, treasurers’, wardens’, andvestry records, as well as pew and tomb records. Parishregisters contain lists of baptisms, marriages, and buri-als, fertile ground for family historians. Finally, the col-lection also contains artifacts, including a musket morethan seven feet in length reportedly used at the Battle ofLexington, as well as Bibles and other printed churchmaterials. The famous “Vinegar Bible,” so-namedbecause one page of the text reads “Parable of the Vine-gar” instead of “Parable of the Vineyard,” was, untilrecently, on display at the back of the church gift shop.George II sent it to the colonies in ; it is one of onlyeight known surviving copies. At the Society, the recordsof Old North Church join those of colonial Boston’sother two Anglican churches, King’s Chapel (whichbecame Unitarian in ) and Trinity Church.

* * *

B S

The same good ideas often come to more than one per-son. So it was with the plan to prepare biographicalsketches of early graduates of Harvard College. Todaywe ordinarily identify this idea with John Langdon Sib-

ley (‒), the librarian of the college, whostarted to work on our series Sibley’s Harvard Grad-uates in the late s, and with his successor, Clif-ford K. Shipton (‒), who produced volumes in the more than four decades he devotedto the project. So who, then, was WilliamCogswell?

While working in our collections on an entry forvolume of Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, the classesof ‒, a member of our staff came across aremarkable document. The papers of HuntingtonPorter, A.B. , contain a printed circular thatCogswell signed in , nearly years beforeSibley undertook his research. “I have obtainedbrief biographical notices of all the Graduates atHarvard University, down to the year , beingin number ,” Cogswell wrote, “and a few oth-ers since that time. Some of these memoirs havebeen published in the American Quarterly Register.

9 Summer 2004 / 86

Account of the laying of the cornerstone of Christ Church, April , .

In subsequent volumes of this work, other notices ofGraduates will appear.” The circular went on to solicitbiographical information on the college’s more recentalumni. The questions that the author posed had a dis-tinctly modern ring. He asked about date and place ofbirth, ancestry, marriages, children, education beforeand after college, occupations, public offices, publica-tions, and other distinctions. Had Cogswell anticipatedmore than decades of hard work from Sibley to thepresent?

William B. Sprague’s Annals of the American Pulpitprovided information on Cogswell, and an examinationof Widener Library’s set of the American Quarterly Reg-ister added reassurance that he had not completed Sibleybefore Sibley. Cogswell (‒), a Dartmouth grad-uate and a member of the MHS from to , wasthe secretary and director of the American EducationSociety, an association for subsidizing the college careersof pious young men intended for the ministry. In thiscapacity, he was also the editor of the American Quar-terly Register, his organization’s periodical.

The AES was one of a number of institutions thatmodern scholars identify with the Benevolent Empire,an informal collaboration prior to the Civil War of vol-untary organizations dedicated to promoting evangeli-cal Christianity and moral reform, but the Society’speriodical was atypical. Such associations as the Ameri-can Bible Society and the American Board of Commis-sioners for Foreign Missions ordinarily filled theirpublications with accounts of revivals and sentimentalstories of deathbed conversions, but not the AES. InCogswell’s hands, the American Quarterly Register wasfilled with facts. There were reports on the origins ofmedical societies and historical societies (including theMHS) as well as schools of all kinds. There were lists ofpublic servants, members of voluntary organizations,and college graduates. And there were brief biogra-phies—not only of Harvard graduates but also of col-lege presidents, public officeholders, and other publicfigures.

To the relief of the members of our staff working onSibley’s Harvard Graduates, Cogswell did not preemptour work by publishing thousands of sketches of the col-lege’s alumni. Ten- to fifteen-page biographies of suchfigures as Samuel Sewall, Benjamin Colman, and CalebStrong were models for their time, however, elegant andinformative sketches of prominent—and inevitablypious—alumni of the school. Other contributionsrevealed the considerable breadth of Cogswell’s research.One entry provided brief biographies of dozens of loyal-ist who attended the college. Another tallied Harvardmen who lived at least to the age of .

In , after a dozen exhausting years at the AES,Cogswell resigned his position in favor of a more relax-ing prospect, a professorship at Dartmouth. Two yearslater, at the conclusion of volume , the organizationdetermined to end the American Quarterly Register. Pub-lishing the journal required too much time and energy.If Cogswell ever intended to issue a comprehensive runof biographical sketches of Harvard graduates, he fellshort of this objective, although another series of articlesprovided thumbnail biographies of many early classes ofDartmouth men.

Perhaps Cogswell’s exhaustion preserved an opportu-nity for Sibley, Shipton, and their modern successors. Inany case, work continues on this jewel in the Society’scrown. At the end of , volume , the most recent,provided information on the classes of through; we anticipate that volume will appear in or . Our staff is also working industriously on Colo-nial Collegians, a CD-ROM with entries on every iden-tifiable American college student in the classes through, the last to graduate before the start of the Revolu-tion. That title should appear in .

* * *

MHS F A

Now Available Online

January marked an important milestone at the Society.Our library has taken another step in the transitionfrom describing its collections through card catalogsand typescript inventories to employing searchable find-ing aids (narrative guides to manuscript and photographcollections) linked to ABIGAIL, the MHS online cata-log. In January, the Society launched a new section of itswebsite, www.masshist.org/findingaids/. The new sec-tion enables researchers to view and search more than online finding aids. The encoded guides are the result ofalmost three years of work by Manuscript ProcessorMichael Rush and other members of the library staff toimplement Encoded Archival Description (EAD).

EAD is a markup language, similar to HTML, thelanguage used to create web pages. Archivists createdand maintain this international standard for the purposeof encoding descriptions of archival collections in a reg-ular fashion. EAD makes it possible to deliver findingaids over the Internet, for researchers to search them,and for archivists and librarians to share them in unioncatalogs.

The Society’s online finding aids are available eithervia links from collection records in ABIGAIL, the MHS

MHS Miscellany 10

continued on page 12

massachusetts historical society· notices · summer 2004 ·

Congratulations are in order for Leo Beranek, who received the National Medal of Sci-ence in a White House ceremony on November . Dr. Beranek, a vice president of theSociety from to , is a pioneer in the science of acoustics and a founder of thefirm Bolt Beranek and Newman. Pres. George W. Bush, in recognizing Dr. Beranek’s dis-tinguished career, cited him “For his leadership, dedication and contributions to the artand science of acoustics; for co-founding one of the world’s foremost acoustical researchand consulting firms; and for sustained contributions to scientific societies and civicorganizations.”

Thanks to the generosity of its loyal readers, The New England Quarter-ly is launching the Herbert Ross Brown Prize in New England LiteraryHistory. Professor Brown, the late, longtime editor of NEQ (‒),taught English at Bowdoin College and was author of The SentimentalNovel in America, ‒.Details about the prize will be forthcoming as soon as a committee ofjudges has developed criteria for evaluation. Continue to check NEQ’swebsite, www.newenglandquarterly.org, for updates about the prize andto order your subscription.

Ben Mutschler, assistant professor of history at Oregon State University, will be the featured scholar onThursday, June , at : when the Boston Area Early American History Seminar convenes for its onlysummer session this year. Professor Mutschler is writing a book on health in early America from which he isdrawing his seminar paper: “Invalid Women and the Problem of Refinement in Turn-of-the-Century NewEngland.” Prof. Mark A. Peterson of the University of Iowa will offer the comment.

The Boston Area Early American History Seminar devotes each session to a pre-circulated paper. The essay-ist and commentator each make brief remarks, following which questions and comments from the flooroccupy the rest of the meeting. For information on securing a copy of the paper for the session, contact SethM. Vose at svose@masshist.org or --.

“The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated in King Street, Boston,” engraved by Paul Revere, ca. .

online catalog, or from a search interface and a browse listaccessible at www.masshist.org/findingaids/. Users canperform a keyword search of all the available finding aids,or they can restrict their search either to manuscript or tophotograph collection guides. Search results display thetitle and an abstract of the collection. When viewing anindividual finding aid, users can navigate the guide usinga table of contents and can search within a single guide aswell.

The library staff already had encoded manuscriptand photograph collection guides when the online find-ing aids interface became available in January. They haveadded more than 30 online guides since, and the work ofencoding new and existing guides continues. Approxi-mately 400 existing finding aids will eventually be avail-able online, while staff members regularly add newfinding aids as they process recently acquired or previous-ly undescribed collections.

M H S Boylston St.Boston MA

Nonprofit Org.U.S. POSTAGE PAIDBoston, Mass.Permit No. 53

Too much paper?Now you can access the MHS Miscellanyonline through the Society’s website,www.masshist.org. If you would like to viewthe newsletter online rather than receiving amailing of the paper copy, contact the mem-bership services office at jscal@masshist.org.Please provide your full name, e-mailaddress, and postal mailing address so thatwe can update your record. Then, each timea new issue of the Miscellany becomes avail-able, an e-mail notice will arrive with theappropriate URL for accessing the PDF ver-sion at the website.

See you online.