Special Collections is pleased to announce the digitization of the library’s collection of course catalogs. An ongoing project, the digitization of the catalogs from 1835/36–1868/69 and 1970/71-2005/06 is complete and the images are available online through the HOLLIS catalog.
The Law School’s collection of catalogs dates from 1835/1836 – a time when there were only two members of the faculty (Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf) and 52 students. Many of the changes at the school that occurred over the next 170 years are documented in the catalogs. Offering information on faculty, courses, policies, and student lists, the catalogs are a rich source of information for researchers interested in anything from genealogy to the history of Harvard Law School and legal education. In addition, catalogs printed from 1970/1971–2005/06 showcase portraits from the School’s Art Collection on the cover, and many of the catalogs printed between 1878 and 1970 have maps featuring the campus and surrounding areas in Cambridge – a useful tool to follow physical changes to the university and city.
Due to the fact the catalog has gone through three name changes since 1835, the catalogs are accessible through three different HOLLIS records.
A catalogue of the Law School in Harvard University (1835/36–1868/69): HOLLIS 11365376
The Law School of Harvard University (1878/89–1970/71): HOLLIS 374288
Harvard Law School Catalog (1970/71–2005/06): HOLLIS 374287
Beginning in the academic year 2006/2007, the course catalog is only available online through the Law School’s website.
Much credit for this project goes to Senior Serials Cataloger Sandra Hopkins and Special Collections Access Services Coordinator Lesley Schoenfeld who researched the Law School’s holdings and corrected often confusing catalog records. Completed and ongoing imaging services are supplied by the Harvard College Library’s Digital Imaging Group.
Post contributed by:
Edwin Moloy
Curator of Modern Manuscripts & Archives
Identifying nineteenth-century broadside and ballad printers is often difficult, as many signed their work only with their surname and street.
In 1825 London, for instance, there were 20 active printers named Taylor. While cataloging the Special Collections department’s Crime Broadsides we used a few resources to help us sort out these difficulties, including William B. Todd’s “A Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades: London and Vicinity, 1800-1840” and the online database the British Book Trade Index, which lists printers throughout Great Britain from William Caxton, the first English printer, until 1850.
Detail of HOLLIS 8107338
Sometimes, these resources could not answer our questions, as with this broadside, printed by “T. Storer, Fleur-de-lis Court, Fleet-Street, London, [1816].” I suspected that this was printed by Thomas Storer, a journeyman active in London from 1815 to 1817. However, I could not find a record of him at Fleur-de-lis court or on Fleet Street. In fact, he was listed from 1816 to 1817 at 1 Fetter Lane. From early maps of London, I knew that Fetter Lane and Fleet Street converged, but Fleur de lis court was at 9 Fetter Lane, too far from Storer’s listed address to convince me. My usual resources exhausted, I gave Google a try.
Google Books returned the the trial transcript for the 1817 trial of James Watson for his role in the Spa Fields Riots. Thomas Storer was implicated in printing a treasonous tract for Watson. During the trial, there was a lengthy questioning of witness Thomas Preston as to the exact location of Mr. Storer’s house, which perfectly answered my question:
That confirmed that this was my T. Storer of Fetter Lane, and also explained why he stopped printing in 1817 after such a short career.
Post contributed by:
Matthew Reidsma
Curatorial Assistant
For more information see:
- Crime Broadsides Website
- British Book Trade Index
- Trial of James Watson
- Maps of Early Modern London
- Fleet Street and Fetter-Lane today
The Garrison Family is fairly well known in the Boston area, boasting a 19th century abolitionist in William Lloyd Garrison; a literary editor in Wendell Philips Garrison; an esteemed writer in Lloyd McKim Garrison; and a well-respected lawyer in Lloyd Kirkham Garrison.
I am sure the list goes on of the accomplished, and Harvard educated Garrisons who have made great waves, but these four generations are of primary focus in the recently-processed Garrison Family Papers. The collection provides a glimpse into the family life enjoyed by these men, their wives and children.
Being a personal collection, as one might expect, it primarily consists of correspondence between family members. Such as this October 18, 1919 letter from Lloyd Kirkham Garrison to his wife Ellen, in which he describes “the one lovely spot anywhere around Cambridge.”
However, being a personal collection, there are also a few pieces of miscellany that don’t quite fit with the rest of the collection. One such piece in the Garrison family’s case is this shipping receipt:
As you can see, it is dated 1766 and bears the signature of John Hancock. While this item certainly caught our attention, we are left wondering how it fell into the hands of the Garrisons. Certainly Hancock was another well-known Bostonian, but his life preceded William Lloyd Garrison, whose parents were not prominent Bostonians, and therefore would not have rubbed shoulders with Hancock. So, the shipping receipt remains both a mystery, and a rare gem in an already fascinating collection.
Post contributed by:
Margaret Peachy
Curatorial Assistant for Manuscripts
... as Harvard President Jared Sparks observed in 1849, the year that Boston Brahmin George Parkman was murdered by Harvard Medical School Professor John Webster. Want to read about Harvard’s most sensational crime and the ensuing trial—one that remains a leading case on the value of circumstantial evidence?
A new e-resource, Making of Modern Law—Trials 1620-1926, contains the full text of more than a dozen contemporary accounts.
Comprising more than 10,000 titles--and almost two million fully searchable pages, Making of Modern Law: Trials contains digital images of books and pamphlets, official and unofficial trial documents and materials, legal transcripts, administrative proceedings, and arbitrations from the early seventeenth century to 1926. Drawn from the law libraries at Harvard and Yale, as well as from the Library of the Bar of the City of New York, the materials include not only published trial transcripts, but also popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder, adultery and other crimes. Almost all of the works reproduced are English language and published in Great Britain or the United States.
When processing print, photograph, and manuscript collections, archivists encounter many challenges, not the least of which are unidentified photographs and illegible handwriting.
When processors in the Art Collection come across an unidentified photograph, we have to use our knowledge of the creator of the collection to guide us to a best-possible guess on identify. Some additional research might be done quickly, but, more often than not, the volume of materials to be processed requires us to list the photograph as “unidentified” and move on, hoping that a clue will present itself as we continue our work.
Sometimes, however, a photograph comes across the table that we just can’t seem to put aside. The following carte-de-visite photograph is being cataloged and digitized as part of a project to make electronically available all the prints and photographs contained in the visual materials collection of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Taken by Boston photographer A. Sonrel, the notation on the back of this card is partially legible. His first name—Charles—and the date—July ’63—are clear. But what in the world is his last name? This is not Justice Holmes’s now-familiar scrawl, and for the life of me, I cannot confirm the sitter’s last name. The dress, posture, and sheer existence of this photograph lead me to believe that this man was a free Black living in Boston. Who was this man to Holmes or the Holmes family? I want to know more. In July 1863, Lieutenant Holmes was convalescing at his Boston home after being shot in the heel during a May 3rd battle in Chancelorsville, Virginia.
Can anyone help identify this man? Titling this photograph “Portrait of an unidentified African American man” is so unsatisfying.
Post contributed by:
Mindy Spitzer Johnston
Curator of Digital and Visual Resources
Burking, fortunately, is a crime that has disappeared, leaving only the word itself to testify to its horror.
Writing in the April 2, 1881 issue of his weekly magazine, All the Year Round, Charles Dickens reminded his readers of its meaning:
“For several years [in the late 1820s] there prevailed what would now be called a “burking scare.” The detection of the Burke and Hare murders*, which were committed merely for the value of the bodies for dissection, and the Italian boy’s murder, frightened people for a while literally out of their wits. Burke added, like Mr. Boycott, a new verb to the English language. In fact, people went about at night in terror of being burked…. Surgeons were accustomed to buy “subjects,” as they were called, from body-snatchers and others, of whom no questions were asked so long as the corpse brought for sale was cold and stiff. But the murderers of the Italian boy were in so great a hurry to grasp their reward, that they offered the body of their victim for sale while it was yet warm.” (p.15)
*William Burke and William Hare were Scottish serial killers who in 1827 and 1828 murdered seventeen people and sold their corpses to the Edinburgh Medical College.
Detail, HOLLIS 002428269
The above illustration depicts Carlo Ferarai, a street urchin who traveled about London displaying trained white mice and a turtle in exchange for coins. On November 4, 1831, he was lured into a boarding house with the promise of a job and murdered by three London burkers, John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May.
Detail, HOLLIS 002943153
The perpetrators were quickly apprehended on suspicions raised by the hasty sale of the fresh body and the discovery that Carlo’s white mice were found in the possession of John Bishop’s children. The next month the men were tried at the Old Bailey, and Bishop and Williams were condemned.
Detail, HOLLIS 002938163
References to the circumstantial evidence provided by the white mice quickly entered legal literature (William Wills, An Essay on the Rationale of Circumstantial Evidence [1838]), and the case itself became a staple of popular culture. The major incentive for burking was removed the following year with the passage of Anatomy Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. IV c. 75), which allowed the legal transfer of cadavers for medical education and research.
The case of the Italian boy is extensively documented in a new digital collection just released by the Library. Titled “Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library,” the collection contains images of more than five hundred broadsides published between 1707 to 1891 and includes accounts of executions for such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason.
For more information on the case of the Italian boy:
Transcript of the trial at the Old Bailey.
Circumstantial evidence of the white mice: Wills, William. An essay on the rationale of circumstantial evidence : illustrated by numerous cases. London, 1838.
Post contributed by:
David Warrington
Head, Special Collections
While processing a bequest, Special Collections staff came across a first edition secondary school textbook written by Joseph Story, the first Dane Professor of Law at Harvard.
Entitled
The Constitutional Class Book: Being a brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, the book is inscribed, “To Jane Sumner, a present from the author.” The book has Jane’s autograph in both the front and back, with a few annotations throughout.
Title page and front paste-down:
Jane Sumner’s autograph from the back paste-down:
Jane was the younger sister of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. The Story and Sumner families were close friends. Jane’s father, Charles Pinckney, had known Joseph Story at Harvard. Born in 1820, Jane died in 1837 following a two-year battle with typhoid fever. Her father wrote that “she was well informed for one of her years.” Encouraged by her brother, Charles, she studied Latin and French.
Growing up in the Sumner family influenced Jane’s thoughts on slavery. In the book, Story explains that in calculating population for representation in the House of Representatives, “three fifths of the [state’s] slaves are added to the number of free persons.” Under this Jane wrote, “Are the free colored persons reckoned as free white persons?”
Story had avoided race, referring instead to “slaves” and “free persons,” but the fourteen-year-old Sumner, familiar with the growing abolitionist movement, knew there was more to the issue.
For more information see:
Post contributed by:
Matthew Reidsma
Curatorial Assistant
Tomorrow, December 14, marks the debut of 852: RARE a monthly post highlighting treasures, rarities, oddities, and often-unknown items found in the holdings of the Library’s Special Collections Department.
The name 852: RARE pays homage to the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) holdings field designation for items in the rare book collection. In addition to rare books, Special Collections encompasses modern manuscripts, prints, photographs, objects, and The Red Set—a collection of Law School faculty, organizational, and student publications.
The Library of Congress and UNESCO recently announced their agreement to move forward with the creation of a World Digital Library.
The World Digital Library, modeled after the Library of Congress’s American Memory project, “will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.” See the LOC press release for more information. See the New York Times (registration required) for recent news coverage.
Craving some rare book perusal, and can’t get to the Root Room? At the online Rare Book Room, rare book fans are invited to read the text and view digitized images of 400 rare books by authors ranging from Aesop to (Edward) Young, and including Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455 and the first printing of the Bill of Rights.
Of course, if it’s rare legal materials you’re after, don’t forget about the Library’s own digital collections.
An announcement from the HLS Library’s Special Collections department:
A new digital collection, Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914
The Harvard University Libraries have launched a new digital collection, Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914. Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library’s extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet presents images of the texts of over 420 separately published trial narratives printed in the United States or the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1914. Especially valuable as sources for the study of the history of women, the cases involve not only trials for divorce, domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, and the custody of children but also those for murder and rape. Featured are trials concerning the wealthy and the renowned, such as Caroline, Queen Consort of George IV; Oscar Wilde; and Harry Thaw, who murdered the architect Stanford White in a fit of jealous rage. The larger part of the collection, however, consists of the stories of ordinary men and women thrust into the public eye when their marriages and love affairs went wrong, or their relationships did not conform to social standards.
The collection may be viewed at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:sscarlet
For more digital collections at Harvard, see http://digitalcollections.harvard.edu
The Paul Freund exhibit – Balancing the Truth: Paul Freund, 1908-1992 - previously scheduled to end on February 28, will remain on view in the Caspersen Room until March 16.
