“I speak softly, but I carry a big stick” joked Chinua Achebe when he began his talk at the Christopher Okigbo International Conference at Harvard in 2007. Indeed he did. His debut novel Things Fall Apart, was “hard-hitting” in bringing home to Western readers the African perspective on the social and political consequences of colonial Read More

Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the most prolific American president, having published over forty books and numerous articles during his life. His very first publication was significantly less august than his later writings: a four-page pamphlet titled The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y., co-written with his friend Hal Minot and published in Read More

Library Lab, a Harvard grant program for funding innovative ideas in libraries, has posted videos about a number of recent projects to YouTube. Three of those projects involve contributions from Houghton staff members: Connecting the Dots is a pilot project using the new archival cataloging standard EAC-CPF to create records for the members of Samuel Read More

On Wednesday April 10th, Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will give the 97th George Parker Winship Lecture. “Forging the Moon: or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo” will discuss a copy of Galileo’s landmark Sidereus Nuncius, claimed to hold Galileo’s hand-drawn images of the moon observed through a Read More

In 1626, Nicholas Ferrar and his extended family withdrew from London to the village of Little Gidding, where they lived in secluded religious devotion. As part of their practices, the women of the family created a harmony of the Gospels, literally cutting and pasting the four texts to produce a single narrative. King Charles I, Read More