Who was La Jaguarina?  Born Ella Hattan in 1859 in Zanesville, Ohio she was originally a professional actress that performed with theater greats Edwin Booth and Dion Boucicault.  Oddly enough she also trained in fencing and sword play with Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, a 19th century Danish-American mercenary, duelist,  and fencing and boxing instructor.  Read More

Finding aids for 16 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including Parisian ephemera, Gilbert & Sullivan sheet music, and more.

Congratulations to Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, for winning this year’s National Book Award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The Swerve concerns the rediscovery of the philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), written in the first century BC by Titus Read More

Finding aids for 8 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos and letters of the actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Lady Maud Tree, and letters to Harvard President Joseph Willard from his sons.

[Thanks to Micah Hoggatt, Reference Assistant, for contributing this post.] Once a year at Halloween we surround ourselves with horror and fright for a day. From 1897 to 1962, terror was enjoyed regularly in Montmartre. Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol may have inhabited a former church (retaining the confessional seating and carved, suspended angels), but it Read More