By Vicki Denby, Manuscript End Processor, Technical Services Department, Houghton Library This past spring, Houghton Library Technical Services had the superluminous pleasure of working with Zoe Padilla, a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS). This is the seventh consecutive year we been able to hire a paid intern from CRLS to learn about Read More
Collections in Focus
An “Old Prayer Book”, Yet Not “a ‘dull’ one”: The Liber ordinarius of Nivelles
By Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Department of Art & Architecture, Harvard University Edmund Bishop, the famous historian of Catholic liturgy, once posed the question: “Is the subject ‘An Old Prayer Book’ a ‘dull’ one?” Tongue-in-cheek, he replied that he would prefer the dullest form possible, namely, a tabulation of its contents, adding that “any subject Read More
Longfellow Rides Again
By Vicki Denby, Houghton Library Technical Services A Houghton Library manuscript, on loan as part of the exhibition Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere, will once again be on public view when the Concord Museum reopens on August 6, 2020.
Houghton From Home: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Candle-lightin’ Time
Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most celebrated American poets of the late 19th century. Dunbar was raised in Dayton, Ohio by formerly enslaved parents who were emancipated after the Civil War. He began writing poetry at the age of six and published his first poem at 16. Though he died young, Dunbar published Read More
How Sergeant William Harvey Carney Rescued the Old Flag in the Assault on Fort Wagner in the American Civil War
By Peter X. Accardo, Scholarly and Public Programs Librarian Born into slavery in 1840, William Harvey Carney and his family left Virginia sometime in the 1850s before settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an active hub on the Underground Railroad and the same town where Frederick Douglass had brought his own family in 1838 at the Read More