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

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

Why read your own copy of Charlotte Brönte’s novel Jane Eyre when you could read Emily Dickinson’s copy? Can you find the two passages the poet marked in pencil? (Hint: the marks are in the margin on page 418 and the passages are devastating.) Houghton Library is in fact home to 30 volumes known to Read More

By Adrienne Chaparro, Scholarly and Public Programs Assistant The Harvard College Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (URAF) and Houghton Library are pleased to announce that Madeleine Klebanoff-O’Brien, Class of ’22, is the winner of the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) Fellowship. Houghton offers fellowships through SHARP, a program that supports arts and Read More

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