By Peter X. Accardo, Scholarly and Public Programs Librarian Among the texts available through Harvard Library’s online collection Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics is Some Account of What is said of Inoculating or Transplanting the Small Pox (*AC7.M4208.721s), anonymously printed in 1721 and long thought to be written by Puritan minister Cotton Mather Read More

Houghton Library is home to the distinguished collection of George Chaffee (1907-1984), a dancer, balletophile, and collector. Although he specialized in the French Romantic ballet, some delightful bits of his collection available digitally are a series of illustrations showing “kinderballets” staged in Vienna during the early nineteenth century by Friedrich Horschelt (1793-1876). Horschelt was a Read More

Houghton Library has a famously strong collection of richly illustrated medieval manuscripts, many of which can be viewed online here. But, if your eyes grow weary of beautiful illuminations, I invite you to explore our collection of charters relating to the Cistercian abbey of Buckland in Devon, England (MS Lat 10, digitized here). While less Read More

In the preface to his 1887 edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (including his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales), George Birkbeck Hill laments how intervals of time and distance complicated his task of reviving Johnson, England’s greatest eighteenth century man of letters, for a Read More

Feeling disconnected at home? You’re not alone. Diana Churchill is literally beside herself in this zany portrait by Angus McBean from 1940. Angus McBean’s portraits of actors are among the most complete visual records of the British stage from the 1930s through the 1960s. Early in his career, he dabbled in the surreal, producing a Read More