Bøger udgivet af Massachusetts Historical Society

Making available what is perhaps the longest-running diary in existence, Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, 1838-1855 offers what arguably is the most complete account we have of a nineteenth-century American woman's life. Dall (1822-1912), a participant in the transcendentalist, abolitionist, women's rights, and social science movements, filled her journals with intelligent reflections and keen analysis of her world. This, the first of three volumes, begins with her adolescence at Beacon Hill. The journals will address a wide range of topics covering some three-quarters of a century, including family and social rituals and interactions; the routines of woman's work; illnesses, both physical and mental, and their treatment; examples of cross-class and cross-race relations; and the larger world of business, politics, literature, reform, war, religion, and science. In detailing Dall's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development, the journals also convey a compelling personal story.

Accomplished inventor, visionary photographer, philanthropist, and successful businessman, Francis Blake (1850 1913) changed not only the way Americans communicated in the nineteenth century but also quite literally how they saw themselves. His major inventions, the telephone transmitter and innovations in high-speed photography, and his Weston, Massachusetts estate Keewaydin epitomized how a gifted individual of modest circumstances could create and re-create himself during America s Gilded Age.The Blake telephone transmitter became the world standard, and anyone who spoke into Alexander Graham Bell's device in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century also encountered Blake s name, emblazoned on his transmitter. In addition, he invested an enormous amount of his energy, talent, and wealth in his home, originally designed by Charles Follen McKim, and its elaborate grounds. This self-contained compound, which included homes for his in-laws and his children and a complete water system, reflected Blake's passion for precision, beauty, and order. It became his major preoccupation, a place where he could exercise unchallenged mastery.Unfortunately, the fabulous Keewaydin estate did not endure, but thankfully Blake's photographic images remain. Blake's experimental camera work placed him in the forefront of the photographic world in the 1880s. His high-speed photographs remain unsurpassed for their clarity, crispness, and composition, and are as fresh today as when he first snapped them over a hundred years ago. Although little-known today, Blake helped revolutionize photography and transformed the role of the photograph in American society, marking him as a significant figure at the dawn of the twentieth century. His story is a compelling and fascinating chronicle of unbounded energy, independence, and genius.

This collection of essays studies the role of a single state in the transformation of American life following the Revolutionary War. As the citizens of the state worked to establish their new Commonwealth and determine its relationship to a federal government also in its infancy, they were forced to confront challenging problems both within Massachusetts and outside it. Religious differences fractured the Standing Order, separating Unitarians and Congregationalists from each other at the same time that pressures from Episcopalians, Baptists, and others urged an end to the religious establishment. Poverty posed problems for Massachusetts at large, and particularly for Boston, at the same time that public officeholders struggled to create new governmental institutions both for the Commonwealth and for its capital. Massachusetts merchants had to develop new, independent patterns of trade in response to American withdrawal from the British Empire. Diplomats had to find a place for the Commonwealth in the world order. And federal officeholders from Massachusetts needed to address the most divisive of domestic issues, slavery. The essays in this collection reveal how Massachusetts coped with these unexpected problems of independence.

Former Massachusetts Historical Society director Louis Leonard Tucker's Clio's Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society offers not only a useful biographical sketch of Belknap, but also a close examination of his values as a historian and an in-depth treatment of the beginnings of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Belknap's preeminent role in the establishment of the Society in 1791 (as the first historical society in the Americas).

This fully illustrated catalog, published in 1991 to accompany the Massachusetts Historical Society's 200th-anniversary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides the reader with an engaging view of the books, manuscripts, artwork, and historical artifacts collected by the Society over two hundred years. Filled with color plates, black-and-white illustrations, detailed item descriptions, and entertaining anecdotal information, the catalog brings many of the most vital events in American and Massachusetts history to life through the examination of material artifacts. The book includes more than 160 of the most historically significant objects in the Society's collection--from paintings, prints, and engravings to unusual objects such as tea collected from the Boston Tea Party, a bureau whose drawers supposedly housed a witch during the Salem witch trials, and photographs of soldiers from the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the most important African American regiment raised in the North during the Civil War.

This volume broadens the scope of Boston business history by including essays on subjects such as 18th-century women shopkeepers and African American businessmen in the antebellum period along with writings focused on more traditional topics such as the China trade and the New England textile industry.

A collection that looks at Puritan culture on both sides of the Atlantic, covering conversion among Puritans and Amerindians, sects and the evolution of Puritanism, and the meanings of religious polemic.

The fourth volume of this series encompasses Robert Treat Paine's time as Massachusetts attorney general. Paine, best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, spent the remainder of his public career in state service. The documents in this volume highlight the quest for order in a nation gripped by violence and upheaval.

"Fashioning the New England Family", an initiative encompassing a fall 2018 exhibition and this companion volume, reconnects the textiles with the associated stories carried in the family papers. Generously illustrated, this book creates a lasting overview of the exhibition but also delves into specific topics.

Ellen Wayles Coolidge arrived in London in June 1838 at the advent of Queen Victoria's reign. During her nine-month stay, Coolidge kept a diary. London's docks, theaters, parks, public buildings, and museums all come under Coolidge's astute gaze as she and her husband, Joseph Coolidge Jr., travel the city and gradually gain entry into some of the most coveted drawing rooms of the time.

Presents a selected edition of documents primarily from the Robert Treat Paine collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Covering his public and private lives, the Papers draw together correspondence to and from Paine beginning with his days at Harvard.

One of US history's most eminent figures, Thomas Jefferson is as elusive as he is revered. The Private Jefferson opens a window onto the third president's inner life by exploring the single largest cache of Thomas Jefferson's private papers, held at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

One of US history's most eminent figures, Thomas Jefferson is as elusive as he is revered. The Private Jefferson opens a window onto the third president's inner life by exploring the single largest cache of Thomas Jefferson's private papers, held at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

When John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, emigrated from Stuart England to America, he and the colonists who accompanied him carried much of their culture with them. This title includes the essays that assert a unity to the transatlantic and Puritan, Anglo-American sphere, integrating the English and colonial stories.

Comprising 20 essays, this collections offers recent writing on the Transcendentalists, the New England religious reformers and intellectuals who challenged both spiritual and secular orthodoxies between the 1830s and 1850s. The essays address the movement from many directions.

This second volume of selections from Caroline Healey Dall's diary extends her story into the crucial period of her central role in the American women's movement and her position as a founder of the American Social Science Association. These entries convey the Civil War, the tragedy of Lincoln's assassination, and other national events from the viewpoint of a strongly partisan New Englander.

Using the author's background information, this book places the protagonist in front of life's various pitfalls with the object of providing those stepping out into the world with the tools they need to handle themselves in the face of adversity.

Illustrates and explains prime examples of rings, bracelets, brooches, and other pieces of mourning jewellery from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuriesThese elegant and evocative objects are presented in context, including written explanations of the history, use, and meaning of the jewellery, as well as related pieces of material culture, such as broadsides, photographs, portraits, and trade cards.