Special Collections librarians are constantly learning–both from the collections we curate and from each other.  We share our research, knowledge, and best practices through journals and the meetings of professional societies.

In late June, I traveled to Oakland and Berkeley, California to attend the conference of one such professional society, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, better known as RBMS.  The topic of the RBMS 2015 Conference was “Preserve the Humanities! Special Collections as Liberal Arts Laboratory.”  Session topics ranged from incorporating digital humanities, engaged collection development, community archives, and, of course, instruction with Special Collections materials.  You can find a full schedule of the RBMS 2015 Conference program here.

For myself, RBMS 2015 was inspirational.  Ethics, the politics of collection development, innovative practices, instruction, and outreach were all up for discussion during the conference.

Having spent the spring semester immersed in rare book instruction, most (though not all) of the sessions I chose to attend at RBMS 2015 related to instruction and public services.  I took over eighteen pages of notes over the course of 10 sessions (including three plenaries).  My favorite sessions focused on breaking down the barriers that keep students and researchers from visiting Special Collections, and raised the question of how to best provide access to Special Collections materials.  With this in mind, three especially notable sessions were:

Seminar H: Meeting Researchers Where They Are: A User-Driven Manifesto

The presenters of this seminar wrote a “manifesto,” advocating that user needs should drive all aspects of a Special Collections library–from technical services to public services, and then presented on their efforts to do so at their institutions.

Seminar K: Mess is Lore: Navigating the Unwieldy World of Social Media

Panel presenters centered their discussion around the idea of social media as a conversation with users.  Special Collections libraries can use social media to highlight their holdings, but at its best, social media is a conversation.

Papers Panel 10: Special Collections and Credit Courses: Opportunities and Challenges

In designing a for credit class on the history of the book, presenter Anne Bahde approached her class visits to Special Collections as a science teacher would approach a “lab session”–an opportunity for hands on learning.  Scheduling four Special Collections for her semester long class, she further broke down each visit thematically, allowing the students’ knowledge to build with each visit.

This is just a brief sample of some points that stuck with me, a week after I’ve returned to Florida.

For those interested in attending a future RBMS conference: RBMS 2016 is in Coral Gables, Florida.

I look forward to attending again next year!

Do you love woodcuts? We love woodcuts.

We’ll have these and other books on display in the reading room tomorrow (Tuesday) from 10:30 – 1:00 during our Art//Archives open hours.

For several years we have discussed the possibility of an Innovation Hub as a place dedicated to incubating, accelerating, and promoting innovative projects that staff could work on with the public. We envisioned students working with our volunteers to learn about handwritten documents and to try transcribing them for our catalog. We talked about holding scanathons and hackathons with local chapters of coders and hosting Wikipedian meetings throughout the year.

Our Innovation Hub Coordinator, Dina Herbert, on opening day.

The Innovation Hub is open.  Located on the first floor of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., the Hub has two sections: a meeting area, and a citizen scanning room where researchers can scan our records with state-of-the-art equipment at no cost as long as they also contribute a copy of their digital scans for our online catalog.

Staff preparing for first group in the Hub.

The Hub is already buzzing with activity. Our first week, we hosted the Primarily Teaching group of educators, who scanned almost 100 records, equaling 432 pages, on Chinese immigration to be included in our online DocsTeach system, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives, and our Catalog. We have planned transcription parties as well as hosting Wikipedian meetings as well.

Here is our very first scan coming from the Hub: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/20014029 (the Civil War Compiled Military Service Record of William E. Strong, which even has his picture at the end).

Perhaps you would like to transcribe it? It’s easy to log in and start transcribing.

Original record: “Victory Waits On Your Fingers – Keep ‘Em Flying Miss U.S.A.” National Archives Identifier 515979

Over the past six months, I have learned a lot from Dr. Char Miller. I’ve reviewed his research, studied his syllabi, skimmed numerous articles he both wrote and is quoted in, and puzzled over countless photographs and letters. No, he was not ever my professor – although I would have loved to take one of his classes. Instead, my knowledge comes from the records Dr. Miller donated to Trinity University’s Special Collections and Archives a few years ago.  These records include coverage of his time on Trinity’s History and Urban Studies faculty from 1981-2009.

Dr. Char Miller

Mitzi Lipsett and Heinz in Israel

Peter Sobel and Nurse Sinara in Rumania (sic)

Cypress, 1947

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year. Signed on July 26, 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, the ADA was the world’s first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities.

The National Archives holds many records that relate to American citizens with disabilities. In addition to the historic legislation itself, the holdings of our Presidential Libraries contain personal letters and stories that provide insight into disability history.

This Braille letter, for example, was written by a 13 year old boy to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, offering campaign advice in the fall of 1956:

Letter from John Beaulieu to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Braille, National Archives Identifier 594353

As part of the 25^th anniversary commemoration, the National Archives and Presidential Libraries participated in the collaborative #DisabilityStories initiative on Twitter. We were pleased to join the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Kennedy Center’s Office of VSA and Accessibility, and others who took part in this international conversation.

We joined #DisabilityStories on Twitter from @Bush41Library, @FDRLibrary, @OurPresidents, and @USNatArchives. Our archivists were on hand to answer questions from the public about FDR’s personal disability stories, and about George Bush’s involvement in the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The Bush Library also invited Lex Frieden to join them in their Twitter chat session. Frieden is an advocate for people with disabilities who worked closely with President Bush to develop and enact the ADA.  In 2014, Mr. Frieden donated his private collection of artifacts related to the disabilities right movement to the Bush Library.  Frieden answered questions on Twitter alongside the Bush Library, bringing another important voice to #DisabilityStories.

This initiative was designed to spark reflection and connections, encouraging people with disabilities to share their own stories and perspectives. On the day of the chat, more than 8,000 tweets were sent as part of this conversation.

While we shared many documents, photos and stories of disabilities found in our records, we also shared personal stories from our staff, including a wonderful piece by Danica Rice, an archives technician currently working at the National Archives at Seattle.

Disability stories are powerful, and play an important role in telling the story of our American history and culture. We welcome the opportunity to share our information, experiences, and pieces of our history with the world as we celebrate this landmark legislation.

More resources and information can be found on our website.

Discussing “hidden” collections is a popular pastime in archival circles. We all suffer from collections that have simply never been processed or made discoverable enough for our patrons to find them. It becomes even more difficult when archives staff doesn’t even know when collections exist and there is no discovery tool either for them to easily find them.

This is what we found a few months ago when our graduate assistants, when searching for a newspaper issue we supposedly had, found 4 boxes of newspapers no one knew we had down in our sub-basement shelving unit. There were no finding aids or catalog records; just inventories inside the boxes themselves which, as you can imagine, were not all that helpful unless you knew to go looking for the very helpfully named “map case oversize box 1.”

When this unknown cache of newspapers was found, along with a list of newspaper sources dug up from our associate dean’s desk cupboard, we decided digitizing the newspapers as well as creating finding aids and catalog records was a good idea. Not only were these newspaper collections interesting and hitherto unknown to us and our patrons, they fit some digitization goals we had for the summer; mainly, using and training more with our large format overhead camera.

This newly minted collection in the FSU Digital Library actually holds materials of nine different collections, some entirely composed of newspapers and some the newspapers are only a piece to the overall manuscript collection. The newspapers range in dates from the mid-1600s to the early 1920s. Geographically, they span from the British Isles to the east coast of the United States. The collection is particularly strong in antebellum and Civil War era newspapers published in the American south. Enjoy exploring the new digital collection of these previously “hidden” materials!

Today marks the end of my three month research leave from my daily duties in Frost Library. I have spent some of my time away digging through the holdings of other repositories, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, The American Antiquarian Society, the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress, New-York Historical Society, and New York Public Library. There are still many other collections on my list — my goal is to personally inspect as many copies of Samson Occom’s Sermon as I possibly can, a project that will take much longer than three months to complete.

Another chunk of time was spent presenting my work in progress at conferences, most recently at the annual conference of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing in Montreal. Earlier this summer I spoke about Samson Occom at the Digital Antiquarian conference at AAS and at the annual conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. One of the great benefits of these conferences is the opportunity to hear presentations by other scholars followed by long conversations about a wide range of subjects.

Each of these conferences involved different, but overlapping, networks of scholars; each also involved a mix of public performances, casual conversations, old and new friendships, and the sharing of print resources. Samson Occom lived and worked in a similar universe of overlapping and interconnected networks, both professional and personal.

For example, the Archives & Special Collections holds a copy of the first New London, CT edition of Occom’s Sermon:

Samson Occom. A Sermon… (1772)

The first edition was published in New Haven in the first week of November, 1772; the New London edition appeared around November 13. Newspaper advertisements are a key resource for bibliography; they help pinpoint publication dates, but they can also tell us much more.

Here is the ad for the first New Haven edition:

The Connecticut Journal, And The New-Haven Post-Boy. October 30, 1772

The Connecticut Journal was owned and operated by Thomas and Samuel Green, the only printers in New Haven in 1772; it was common practice for printers to include announcements of their other publications in their newspapers. The paper came out every Friday, so “next Monday” means the first edition of the sermon was available on November 2.

Timothy Green ran The New-London Gazette and was the only printer in New London, CT in the early 1770s. The November 13, 1772 issue of his paper included this advertisement:

The New-London Gazette. November 13, 1772.

The first striking detail of this ad is the mention of the addition of “a short Account of the Life of said Moses Paul.” The source of this biographical sketch is a broadside that was published in New Haven on the day of Moses Paul’s execution — a common tradition in England, but less common in the colonies. That broadside is a subject for another day, but it is noteworthy that the text of that broadside is included in almost every edition of the sermon that follows the first New London edition.

The other critical detail in this advertisement is the distribution information — the short list of names following “A few of the above Sermons may be had of…” Anyone familiar with Samson Occom’s life will recognize the name of the Rev. Samuel Buell of East Hampton, Long Island.

Samuel Buell. The Excellence and Importance of the Saving Knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel-Preacher… (1761)

Samuel Buell preached the sermon at Occom’s ordination at East Hampton, NY on August 29, 1759 and was an important figure in Occom’s Christian evangelical network. Occom’s connections to the Native communities of eastern Long Island are also deep – he established a school at Montauk in November 1749 and married a Montaukett woman, Mary Fowler, in 1751. Occom and his family lived at Montauk until 1764 when they moved back to Mohegan. One can imagine the Native public of Montauk eager to read this sermon, especially considering that many of them may have learned to read English from Occom himself.

This item is just one small example of the ways that close attention to the details of printing and publishing history can expose important network connections. This single advertisement provides evidence that Occom’s sermon reached a specific Native Public within weeks of its first publication. What would it have meant to this audience to see Occom’s name on the title page of his own book? How might copies of the sermon circulated among the Indigenous communities of Long Island? How many times was this text read out loud to those who could not read it for themselves or could not afford to purchase a copy of their own?

I found nearly 100 newspaper items related to either Moses Paul’s crime and execution as well as Samson Occom and his sermon. It will take me a while to digest all of it. Stay tuned…

The recorded history of foggy weather in New York City goes back to the Revolutionary War and the Battle of Brooklyn when a fortuitous fog shrouded General George Washington’s retreat to the shore of Manhattan from the Red Coats approaching Brooklyn Heights. In that August of 1776, the fog was an ally, but to seamen navigating New York Harbor in bad weather, hoping to avoid its shoals and reefs, fog can prove treacherous. 

In this episode of New York: A Portrait in Sound, you will hear the voices of lieutenants and engineers employed by the Coast Guard to safeguard New York Harbor, which could mean sleepless nights for them as they guided ships to safety. The episode names some of the lightships and lighthouses then in service when the episode was recorded in 1962, including the Ambrose Lightship, Scotland Lightship, Romer Shoals Lighthouse, West Bank Lighthouse, and Coney Island Lighthouse. The ownership of lighthouses in America has passed hands a number of times in the nearly 300 year history of beacons on US shores. The first lighthouse in the US was built in 1716 in Boston Harbor. In those days, each colonial government determined the need for any lighthouses in their colony. After George Washington’s fortuitous and foggy retreat, he was elected to be the first president of the U.S. in 1789, and that year Congress convened the Lighthouse Establishment, placing all pre-existing and future lighthouses under the control of the central government.  As this episode of Planet Money discusses, lighthouses are a public good. They are a safety measure all sailors need, but that the free market has no impetus to provide because there is no way to make a profit from them. Placing lighthouses in the control of the central government ensured lighthouses would continue to be built and maintained, a costly and difficult job when many beacons are in remote locations and require structural maintenance as well as personnel to light the lamp. 

In fact, much of the shifting history of lighthouses, and lightships, seems rooted in cost. Lightships were used where construction of a lighthouse was not possible. The Lightship Ambrose, mentioned in this episode, graced New York Harbor’s Ambrose Channel in 1823, and several ships served this post under the same name through the late 1960s. By then, control of all lighthouses and lightships had been absorbed by the US Coast Guard, and in 1967 the Lightship Ambrose was replaced with a more cost-effective texas tower. By 1985, the US Coast Guard had decommissioned the last lightship, and even the Ambrose Tower was replaced in the 2000s with a lighted buoy.

Original Ambrose Light Station, a Texas Tower built in 1967
(Wikipedia/Wikipedia Commons)

  Buoys don’t require personnel to operate, and eventually light towers and lighthouses didn’t either, with the advent of electricity and, later, automation. In 1886, the Statue of Liberty was used as the first test of an electricity-powered beacon in the US. Even so, a keeper was still needed until automation came a century later. In 1890, the Coney Island Lighthouse, featured in this episode, was built. You can hear the voices of the Schubert family describing their duties. Frank Schubert was a civilian employee of the Coast Guard and took up his post at Coney Island in 1960, remaining there until his death, even after the light was automated in 1989.  Schubert became something of a New York City local legend, as the last civilian lighthouse keeper in the US, at a time when many lighthouses were being deemed “in excess” by the Coast Guard. Advances in navigation technology made many beacons superfluous and the cost of maintaining the structure itself was high, especially as the buildings aged. So the Coast Guard began to auction them off, preferably to a non-profit organization that would maintain the structure and its history. When no non-profit stepped up, a private auction would find a buyer.  The age of beacons is coming to a close, and lighthouses and lightships are becoming the stuff of museums. You can find one Lightship Ambrose at the South Street Seaport Museum. But whether an auctioned lighthouse becomes a museum, a bed and breakfast, or a private summer home, the Coast Guard still checks up on the light every now and then. 

Recently I came across a story about an archives in a box of Corn Flakes. A woman in Tennessee had stored some 400 letters written by former German prisoners-of-war who had lived in camp near the state’s southern border. After the war was over, many of the POWs wrote to the people in the community, often addressing the Americans as family, such as “aunt” or “uncle,” asking for help, and sharing the stories of their lives.

The family donated the letters to Lipscomb University in Nashville, and through a small re-grant from the Tennessee Historical Records Advisory Board made possible through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), they are being transcribed, translated, and made available in digital form online. See the ABC News story here.

Photo courtesy of Kristi Jones/Lipscomb University and ABC news

I am constantly surprised at what turns up from work supported by the National Archives through the NHPRC. Not just the small gems that turn up through the state boards, but large-scale projects as well—from the creation of municipal archives in cities like Boston, Seattle, and San Antonio to the publication of the papers of 16 U.S. Presidents on microfilm, print, and online editions. And it has enabled the National Archives to fund professional development for archives and historical editors and in research and development in electronic records management, Encoded Archival Description, and much more.

In turn, this investment helps historians write new histories—including several Pulitzer Prize books; teachers introduce primary source materials in the classroom; and family historians and local historical societies discover lost treasures.

As Chair of the Commission, I get to see first-hand how this work complements the mission of the National Archives. Through a small, but catalytic, grants program we make access happen and help tell the American story in so many different ways.

Over the past year, we have been engaged in a Strategic Planning process and have developed a preliminary framework of goals for the future. I invite you to take a look at a short presentation on NARA’s YouTube channel. And to read the preliminary framework at our Annotation blog.

Briefly put, the framework looks for the Commission to make access happen; to encourage people to become Citizen Archivists and engage directly in archives; and to enable the National Archives to provide leadership opportunities.

The Plan is open for discussion. We have scheduled webinars, are holding sessions at national conferences, and welcome your input. We’re listening. We want your ideas.

We’ve seen some bad children of history learn lessons through brute force (lighting on fire, sustaining injury from a porcupine, being tossed into a tree by a drunken bull), but today we’re going to see a bad child learning proper behavior in a gentler way– through The Force of Example.

Here’s the (anti-?)hero of today’s tale, a schoolboy named Charles.

The telling illustration above really lays the groundwork: we can see that Charles has a loving mother who wears a ruffly bonnet and guides him toward school with a firm yet gentle hand. We can see the rough floorboards and simple door indicating that these aren’t fancy folks, but they’re not so down and out that Charles would go to school in anything but clean trousers and a wee top hat with a floppy brim. We can see Charles uncertainly pointing at the open door, showing that he’s not entirely thrilled at the prospect of another day of lessons.

Charles begins the trek to school, but as he passes into the woods, he realizes that it’s nice outside– far nicer than it would be inside his classroom. (I realize this same thing whenever I have to spend another perfectly good beach day inside the library.)

Wait a minute! Charles can just stay in the woods, and not go to school at all!

Slumped forlornly on a stump, his sweet realization is suddenly overshadowed by the reality that playing outside by one’s self is kind of boring.

Other, less-bad children are on the way to school, so Charles needs to expand his search for a playmate. He approaches various creatures, including a bee (desperate much?), a dog that looks like a bear, a goldfinch, and a free-ranging horse. Here’s a sloppy montage of those interactions:

Mind you, and I know this is hard to believe– no one wants to play. The bee can’t remain idle because she has to pursue some honey, the dog can’t remain idle because he has to herd some sheep, the bird can’t remain idle because she has to build a soft nest, and the horse can’t remain idle because she has to plough a field (I know we’ve all heard that one before).

Poor Charles is despondent.

Here’s where Charles admirably guides himself to the correct, moral decision, after observing the gainfully-employed examples of various fauna. He wipes away a tear and proclaims, to no one in particular,

Why how foolish it is,
To sit here and cry!
I will hasten to school,
And my tears I will dry;
When I’m there, I’ll be steady,
And try to excel;
For if I take pains,
I may learn to read well;
Then I’ll be attentive,
My book I will mind;
For he who is busy
Is happy, I find.

Hey, thanks, busy animals! Now maybe you can give me a pep talk as I head into my office on this beautiful day.

The Special Collections & Archives Division is excited to welcome Rory Grennan, our new Manuscript & Instruction Archivist.  Rory will manage the manuscript collections and faculty paper holdings of the FSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center and provide archival instruction to University students, scholars, and the general public.  He comes to FSU from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his duties at the University Archives included reference, instruction, appraisal, arrangement, description, digitization, and donor relations.  Rory earned an MLIS from San Jose State University in 2013, and certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists in 2014.  He is active professionally and has presented at meetings of the Society of American Archivists, Midwest Archives Conference, and American Library Association.  In his spare time, Rory enjoys playing bass guitar, performing and listening to a wide variety of music, and managing large personal collections of sound recordings and graphic novels.  Please drop by the Special Collections Research Center and say hello!

If you’re perchance flipping through issues of The Sphinx (the “Official Organ of the Society of American Magicians”) from 1911 and 1912, you may notice the excellent advertisement pages in the back.

This particular page of advertisements shows magicians’ personal advertisements, of sorts, featuring Dana Walden and Company, G. Wilhelm, “The Man of Mystery, Magic and Illusion”, and Mysterious Dunninger, “The Illusionist with the Somewhat Different Act”.

Here’s a slightly grainy close-up of G. Wilhelm and his ancillary tiny demons:

If you’re like me, you’re wondering what qualifies Mysterious Dunninger’s act as “somewhat different”. I can’t exactly answer that question, but I can tell you that Mysterious Dunninger was the early stage name of one of America’s greatest mentalists, Joseph Dunninger.

Fun facts about Joseph Dunninger:

-as a child, he met Buffalo Bill Cody
-beginning in 1913, he performed regularly at Manhattan’s Eden Musee wax museum
-he collected books, and supposedly had over 30,000 volumes
-he was friends with Houdini, and together they worked to debunk fake spiritual mediums
-he was the first person to offer live mind reading on the radio

Wikipedia has a list of books and articles penned by this famous mentalist, and his daughter wrote a biography called “Daddy Was a Mind Reader“.

“The time has come” the walrus said “to wrap this thing up; you’re not even a student anymore.” Well…it was something like that. I wasn’t really listening.

Special Collections’ new summer exhibit, Iterations, features pochoir-printed plates from our extensive art and architecture collection. Pochoir is a many-layered stenciling process that produces extremely vivid and dimensional prints; it was particularly popular in late 19th and early 20th century Paris, and was used for fashion plates, interior design illustrations, architectural prints, and pattern and motif books like the ones featured in our exhibition.

Pattern books were intended for use by artists and designers as inspiration for wallpaper, textiles, and other decor. In that spirit, we invited local artists to view the pattern books and to use them as inspiration for a new piece created just for this exhibit. Participating artists include Chelsea Gunn, Taylor Polites, Caitlin Cali, Rebecca Volynsky, Lois Harada, Hope Anderson, Beth Brandon, Xander Marro, and Elizabeth Novak.

The exhibit is currently on view in the cases in the Rhode Island Room (on the first floor of the library). In August, the exhibit will expand to include two additional cases on the library’s third floor.

Stop by to check it out any time during the library’s open hours, and/or come to the Meet the Artists reception on July 15th, where you can talk to our creative collaborators, eat some snacks, and get a guided tour of the exhibit.

Last week, on July 2nd, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 celebrated its 51st anniversary. Originally pioneered by President John F. Kennedy and called for just a year earlier on June 11, 1963 in his Civil Rights Address, delivered from the oval office. In the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination in late November of 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson put his full support behind the passing of the act as not only the needed legislation that it was but also as a eulogy to President Kennedy. President Johnson was aware that the Civil Rights Bill would face resistance in the solidly Democratic South, however, there was one Democrat in the State of Florida with a long history of supporting progressive legislation; Claude Pepper.

Early in his career while a member of the Florida House of Representatives in 1929, Pepper alone, voted against a Florida State Legislature resolution condemning First Lady Lou Henry Hoover’s White House invitation for tea to Mrs. DePriest, the wife of the first black congressman since Reconstruction. 35 years later, Claude would again take a stand that many in his state deemed unpopular, and given that his constituency was well aware of his record, the old statesman was inundated with mail correspondence urging him both toward and away from a vote for the Civil Rights Bill.

These letter excerpts, both for and against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are great examples of the political currents that flowed through the country during the 1960’s as the initial large scale push for Civil Rights in the United States was reaching its height. The correspondence below is dated mostly from February of 1964, when the voting for the act took place.

A firm believer in voting with one’s conscience, Pepper knew that the choice was clear. When the final votes were tallied, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 received zero votes from members from the Deep South and very few from those states on the periphery. The only vote in favor of final passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from Florida was by Claude Pepper. The following year saw the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and ‘yes’ votes from six of Pepper’s colleagues who had voted ‘no’ the previous year. Pepper realized the significance of extending civil rights to all Americans, and consistently supported such legislation throughout his years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

For researchers interested in taking a closer look at Claude Pepper and his record on Civil Rights in the United States, please visit the Claude Pepper Library and Museum, Monday through Friday 9AM-5PM.

Look, I found the least-subtly-titled children’s book of all time:

It’s Little Nancy, or, the Punishment of Greediness: A Moral Tale. It was published around 1810 by Morgan & Yeager, the fine Philadelphians who also brought you Little Sophy, or, the Punishment of Idleness and Disobedience (not joking).

When we first meet little Nancy, she’s at home, and she’s just received a delightful invitation.

Little Nancy one day
Was invited to play,
And with her young friends to make merry;
In a garden so fine,
Where fruit, cakes, and sweet wine,
Were provided to make them all cheery.

When the letter was brought
She was pleased at the thought,
And a dozen times over ’twas read;
On each word did she dwell,
Till by heart she could tell
The whole letter, ‘ere she went to bed.

Extreme slant rhyme of “merry” and “cheery” aside, I’d say this sounds like a typical little girl who is very, very excited to go to a party with her friends.

The next morning, before little Nancy leaves for the party, her mother reminds her not to eat greedily, “as she much wish’d to break her of this”. Nancy tries to bear this advice in mind, but then she gets to the party, where she runs around with her friends and proceeds to see this:

What warm-blooded human could possibly resist that basket of fruit, those extremely tiny plates, that enticing egg cup, or that round thing on the end that might be a pie?

Not Nancy, unfortunately. She eats as much as she can. In fact, she keeps eating until her friends drag her away, whereupon she slumps in a glade, overcome by her spate of gluttony.

Gosh. Now that’s a little girl overcome by “the pain that intemperance brings”, if ever I’ve seen one.

Nancy’s not fit to play tag in the forest any more, so she’s taken home and put to bed.

Now being unable
To return to the table,
Yet anxiously wishing to stay;
She was sent home to bed
Crying out, (though half dead)
“I will never again disobey!”

We’re not really told how little Nancy makes the transition from “stomach ache” to “half dead”, so we’ll have to take Morgan and Yeager’s word for it. Luckily, she seems to have a good adult by her side, ready to help her don her bonnet and remove her long socks, especially as she seems to have learned her lesson entirely through a single treatment of aversive therapy. And you, young readers– you don’t even have to eat a whole bunch of pie off of extremely tiny plates to learn this lesson! You can just read Nancy’s tale and take heed.

11 months, 3400 items, 7 blogs and 27 tweets later the Wellcome Trust funded project to catalogue and conserve the records of the Royal Scottish National Hospital comes to an end next week.

The collection provides a comprehensive record of the management and operation of the hospital from 1862 to its closure in 2002. But perhaps the most significant part of the collection is the admission applications.

The first application, 1865

Over 3,000 in total, these contain detailed information about the child’s condition, and are often accompanied by family correspondence, an assessment of the child’s abilities, and medical evaluations.

The applications create a research resource for a number of purposes: details of father’s occupation and income for the social historian; information on disability and the causes of death for the medical historian; and the opportunity to cross refer to other sources of data such as census records.

A lot of the applications include detailed case studies with temperature charts, records of physical and mental health and diagrams of the severity and frequency of seizures. Taken in conjunction with other parts of the collection, such as the administration and correspondence files, they present a comprehensive picture of treatment, research and social attitudes. Only used in depth by one academic researcher so far, they are a resource waiting to be exploited.

No final blog is complete without the obligatory before and after photographs of just what a difference funding like that provided by the Wellcome Trust can do.

The collection arrived in these boxes in 2012

The catalogued collection in the Archives Store 2015

And as for my favourite items…I do like the drawings of santa that the children were asked to do as part of their assessment. Below is my favourite one from 1929.

Santa as drawn by 6 year old Albert in 1930

This will be the last blog by the Project Archivist but by no means the last on the collection. Also, not only will there be an article on the hospital in the August edition of History Scotland but an exhibition in the display wall at Archives and Special Collections, University of Stirling Library from 6th August for two months.

Alison Scott, Project Archivist

First: today (right now!), from 10:30 – 1:00, we’re having our regular open hours in Special Collections. This week we’re featuring books on the topic of fruit, in honor of the raspberries and mulberries that are currently attracting huge numbers of birds to my backyard, much to the detriment of the car parked in the driveway.

Above left are some plums from George Brookshaw’s 1817 Groups of Fruit, Accurately Drawn and Coloured After Nature, with Full Directions for the Young Artist: Designed as a Companion to the Treatises on Flowers and Birds. Above right you can see a frankly terrifying “Banana Trumpeter” from the 1935 children’s book Tommy Apple and His Adventures in Banana-Land.

Second: as a follow-up to our post a couple of weeks ago on the flames of intemperance, I received an email from someone who may or may not have been my mother with a link to this excellent article on the spontaneous human combustion scene in Dickens’s Bleak House, as well as the corresponding 19th century furor over the fact that Dickens was purportedly fueling “a world of spontaneous combustion truthers”.

Here’s Bleak House illustrator Hablot Knight Browne’s rendering of the gruesome scene:

The June 25^th meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board was an opportunity for the PIDB members to meet with stakeholders who share a commitment to bringing about transformation to the security classification system. In particular, this meeting was an opportunity for the PIDB to continue advocating for the increased use of new and existing technologies to improve declassification.

The PIDB members recommended in our 2012 Report to the President on Transforming the Security Classification System improving technology investments overall and piloting the use of technological solutions to advance automation and advanced analytics to assist declassifiers in making review decisions. Following the inclusion of these recommendations in the President’s Second Open Government Action Plan (NAP), the PIDB is now focusing its work on studying the current state of technological investments in declassification across government.

In this effort, the PIDB announced at the public meeting the creation of its Declassification Technology Working Group. Chaired by former PIDB member Admiral William Studeman (ret.), this newly established working group consists of agency technologists who will work together for the first time to identify areas of concern and find and advance solutions to the challenges specifically facing declassification.

The public meeting was also an opportunity to showcase many of the achievements and plans underway concerning technology commitments found in the NAP. We were fortunate to have Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Alexander Macgillivray, give remarks about the President’s desire for more technology and expertise in government as a vehicle for the Administration’s commitment to open government. Using the launch of healthcare.gov as an example, he stressed the need for information technology expertise in implementing policy. He outlined three areas of focus for the Administration: improving policy implementation, bringing more technology understanding into government and using technology to change the engagement between citizens and the government. His remarks also included examples of specific initiatives being driven at the White House to advance these areas: engaging agency Chief Information Officers through the Office of the CIO of the United States to solve cross-government technology challenges, raising the standard of technology products and services within government through the work of the U.S. Digital Service and improving government processes by reaching out to citizens in industry, academia and the nonprofit section through the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. We wish, once again, to thank him for joining us and participating in our discussion.

We also wish to thank Dr. Cheryl Martin for presenting the results of the pilot projects conducted at the Center for Content Understanding at the Applied Research Laboratories that examined the ability to achieve machine-assisted sensitive content identification in classified records. Dr. Martin and her team of scientists and engineers conducted these pilots on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Archives. Notably, the pilot achieved dramatically accurate identification of classified information in email records created during the Reagan Administration, which has significant promise of being able to assist equity identification of content containing agency-owned classified information. The PIDB has been a proponent of the CCU’s work in this area for some time. It continues to believe these pilot projects need to advance and expand into new areas of research and that positive outcomes derived from these pilots need to be implemented into current practices at agencies once proven. Dr. Martin’s briefing is available online here and her slide presentation is available for viewing here.

We wish to thank the Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, and his staff for hosting the meeting at the National Archives and Records Administration. We also thank the Archivist for discussing in his remarks the many ways he is committed to leading the National Archives in terms of technology. His desire to improve access to government information and his support of our efforts to encourage the government in this area are critical to the long-term preservation of our nation’s records.

Moreover, this meeting was an opportunity to recognize the changing membership of the PIDB and to welcome publicly the two newest members of the PIDB, Laura DeBonis and Solomon Watson. Each gave introductory remarks and each received a signed commission certificate from the President in honor of their respective appointments.

Since the last public meeting, three PIDB members concluded their third and final terms as members: Martin Faga, David Skaggs and Adm. William Studeman (ret.). With the assistance of the Archivist, the PIDB members presented Mr. Faga, Mr. Skaggs and Adm. Studeman each with a reproduction of the “Seven Samples of Secret Ink” report. The report is dated October 30, 1917 and it was classified “Confidential” for many years. It details descriptions of various “secret writing” techniques. In April 19, 2011, the CIA declassified this information and made it public. This report was thought to be the oldest classified record held by the government as it was created in 1917. The members hoped these reproductions would serve as reminders of their time as members of the PIDB and that they would convey thanks and appreciation for their dedicated service.

Finally, we would like to thank you, the public, for attending this meeting and for remaining engaged on this very important topic. The members of the PIDB take our responsibility of representing the public very seriously as we complete their work and respond to the requests made by the President. We understand we would be unable to effect meaningful change without public participation and a willing spirit from the agencies to work collaboratively for the greater good of the people. We look forward to continuing the conversation on all issues concerning the transformation of the security classification system, including advancing technological solutions in support of declassification, and assisting the President in meeting his Open Government commitments.

A recording of the public meeting will be available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ApwyaB4ldQ (PIDB meeting transcript 06.25.2015)

Special Collections & Archives will be closed today, July 3rd in observance of Independence Day. We will resume normal operating hours on Monday, July 6th.

All of us here wish you a safe and happy holiday!

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.

This summer in the Library, we have four excellent Digital Humanities interns conducting research in the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Collection.  Working with these interns has been a great excuse for me to delve a bit more into this collection and fall in love with the artwork of Orra White Hitchcock, perhaps the Pioneer Valley’s earliest female botanical and scientific illustrator.

Orra White Hitchcock drawing of cedar sprig

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College

Orra White, born March 8, 1796 in South Amherst, began teaching mathematics, astronomy, botany, and the decorative arts to young girls at the Deerfield Academy when she was only 17 years old.

While teaching at Deerfield Academy Orra met Edward Hitchcock, a local naturalist, and with Orra lending her hand to watercolor illustrations for an herbarium, the two began what would become a lifetime collaboration of joining science and art.

In 1821, Orra White married Edward Hitchcock who would become the third President of Amherst College and appointed state geologist of Massachusetts.  Orra lent her skill in scientific drawing to the publications of Edward’s geological findings, with many of her illustrations appearing in Hitchcock’s 1833 Report on the Geology of Massachusetts and the 1841 Final Report.

Orra White Hitchcock print of rocking stone, Fall River

Edward Hitchcock held the position of professor of Chemistry and Natural History at Amherst College from 1825-1845.  During this time, Orra painted over 60 large format charts on linen depicting geological formations and prehistoric skeletons for Hitchcock’s classroom lectures.  These charts allow us a look at of how science was taught at Amherst in the mid 19th Century, as well as a glimpse of the geological landscape of the Pioneer Valley during her time as an artist.

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.

These charts are held in the Archives, where we hold the largest collection of Orra White Hitchcock’s artwork.  Orra’s classroom charts have been digitized and made freely accessible through the Amherst College Digital Collections.

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.

Classroom chart on linen drawn by Orra White Hitchcock, Amherst College.

This post is of special interest to the mapping community and may be too technical for some researchers.

We digitize all of our images—photographs, maps and text—as TIFF master files, which are processed through our digital preservation system and preserved in our secure digital storage. We have been making all our digitized images available to researchers in our online search in JPG format. It allows us to make high-resolution files available in a fairly small size so they can be opened and viewed quickly. The quality is good enough for most uses.

Clicking on this map image will bring up the high-resolution JPG version, which can then be downloaded. Note the usual descriptive metadata below the image.

The mapping community has told us that JPG files are not good enough for their use. TIF or PNG formats give the best results when manipulating files in mapping software. The original scanned files, without any compression artifacts, would be the most useful.

To support the use and re-use of these valuable resources by everyone, we’re making losslessly compressed versions of the original TIFFs of our scanned maps available for download. We’ve added a link to the TIFF of a map to our online search as part of the descriptive record for that map.

Scroll down the description to find the link to the TIFF on the City’s FTP site.

So that you can verify that the file downloaded correctly and completely, we’ve included the full file size and the MD5 checksum.

We’d like to thank City Information Technology, whose recent upgrade of the City’s FTP site made it possible for us to make the files available this way.

“They Who Wait” is the story of Robert, a French prisoner of war in a camp “somewhere in Germany.” He tells his listeners—in a distinctly American accent—about the starvation rations and horribly cramped cabins he endured. The play was one episode of “This is Our Enemy,” a weekly series of anti-Nazi, anti-Japanese radio dramas produced by the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1942 and 1943.

Last May, Radiolab ran a story about the American prisoner-of-war camps in World War II. Though they’re a somewhat forgotten chapter of U.S. history, these camps were scattered all over the United States.

The Germans held there were still prisoners, but they lived well. They got ham, and musical instruments, and pottery classes.

According to Radiolab’s reporting, the residents of cities like Aliceville, Alabama (home of Camp Aliceville) initially seemed pretty comfortable with their German prisoners. The camps represented American compliance with the Geneva conventions—the idea was to treat these POWs as they would like American soldiers to be treated.

Except then, Americans started hearing the OWI-type stories about the prisoner of war camps in Germany. The Radiolab piece mentions these kinds of broadcasts, and the role that they played building American resentment against their German POWs.

“They Who Wait” is particularly interesting because it focuses on German disregard for international mandates. The thickly accented Corporal Gefeiterhinteruber weasels his way out of every convention, forcing men sick with rheumatism to work and pressuring non-commissioned officers into labor camps with threats and other tricks. The radio play ends on a somewhat happy note. Robert, along with one hundred and fifty other French POWs, is sent back to France. Robert insists, though, that they are only freed because they are simply too sick or starved to continue working.

So if a big part of the motivation for providing pottery and ham to German POWs was the idea that the Germans would be giving pottery and bratwurst to the American ones, then it’s no wonder that these less-than-favorable broadcasts struck a nerve.

Today’s Bad Child of History is, in my estimation, not bad so much as annoying. His name is Jack, and he comes from Charles Bennett’s 1863 book Little Breeches.

Unlike other bad children, who crash about with no regard for the mess they leave behind, or for the stress they cause to undeserving nurses and kind butchers, Jack is a bit of a hand-wringer.

Here one can see Jack in his perpetual state, namely: positively beside himself with terror. In true 19th-century style, he wanders about the countryside completely unsupervised, leading to a series of terrifying encounters with scary animals, after each of which he wails for his father.

A “genteel Wasp” inquires about the time (which would, truthfully, give me a fright, as well); an upright cat in a jacket with some sort of lumpy club asks “civilly” for directions; a Francophone gander wearing a Chemex as a hat says nothing at all; and yet each time, Jack shouts for assistance.

Why is he crying for his father? Well, “when anybody said anything to him, he was afraid lest they should hurt him; so he would call out ‘Father!’ as loud as he could, although his father might not be near at the time, and if he were would only be very angry with him for being so silly.”

As if this isn’t scary enough, Jack also encounters a spider who needs help finding a fly, an oversized frog in pants (alarming enough to cause Jack to fall into the pond), and a bull who is inexplicably wearing leather breeches, smoking a pipe, and enjoying a mug of beer.

Seeing Jack’s state of abject terror, the bull wisely offers him some of the beer (for what negates fear like a mug of ale that probably just had bull lips on it?). Of course, in response, Jack (you guessed it) cries “Father!”

If this is truly to be the story of a Bad Child of History, of course, something ill must befall Jack such that he learns his lesson.

“Very well,” said the Bull, looking after him. “I tell you what it is: if you come crying ‘Father’ to me any more, I think I know where you’ll go to.”

And the next morning the silly boy did meet the Bull again; again the Bull offered him some beer; the boy cried “Father!” and the Bull, who always kept his word, ran after him. Where do you think he went to?

Why, up into the withered tree, for that was where the old Bull tossed him, and there he is now for all I know.

Modern translation: don’t have a childhood anxiety disorder, or a drunken bull could toss you into a withered tree.

This week’s wild-eyed magician, “Hammo the Great”, is featured on the cover of the August 1941 issue of Genii.

(It’s a little hard to see, but that’s definitely glitter lettering spelling out “Hammo”.)

If this magician’s mug looks familiar, it’s because Max Terhune, the man behind Hammo, wore several other (literal) hats: he played Lullaby Joslin (great name!) in the B-movie Western series The Three Mesquiteers, he was a well-known stage ventriloquist (and his dummy, Elmer, roamed the range alongside Terhune in the Mesquiteers), and, in his earlier days, he traveled widely as a competitive whistler and animal imitator.

The editor of Genii colorfully describes Terhune’s “sublime prestidigitatorial skill”, as well as his “careless dress [and] high-heeled boots”. Said editor also notes that it’s “a fact” that Max Terhune has no enemies.

Max Terhune: what a guy!

This week, for Art//Archives Visual Research Hours, we’ll be featuring periodicals from the year 1939, with a focus on style and fashion.

1939 brought the start of the Second World War, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and the publication of The Grapes of Wrath.

It was a year when stylish transportation looked like this:

When wool jackets were cool and Dobermans looked almost exactly like they do today:

When women dressed impeccably, for television or for the (table) tennis court:

And when the “it girls” in Paris were, apparently, pursuing this new aesthetic:

Come peruse 1939 issues of Newsweek, Vogue, The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and other magazines tomorrow (Tuesday, 6/29) between 10:30 and 1:00!

What do you do when you want to evaluate if an article is a reliable, credible source of information? Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, my favorite wellspring of writing advice, counsels that “responsible, credible authors will cite their sources so that you can check the accuracy of and support for what they’ve written.” Sensible advice, in my opinion.

Bearing that in mind, let’s take a look at this July 1812 issue of The Emporium of Arts and Sciences (vol. 1, no. 3), which features some of the most fantastically impeccable science I have ever encountered in my short but highly scientific life.

The name sounds pretty legit, no? It even says “sciences” in the title!

How reliable is the author? Does he cite his sources so that we can examine the support for what he’s written?

Ooo, yes, plenty of (poorly photographed) footnotes, and some of them are even in French! This author does his homework, and he’s bilingual, to boot. I’m leaning towards deeming this a trustworthy source for information about…

“Combustion of the Human Body, produced by the long and immoderate use of Spirituous Liquors”.

Hang on, what? Drinking too much can make your body catch on fire? I’d consider that “destitute of probability”, as author Pierre-Aime Lair notes that some readers, myself apparently included, may be apt to consider. He promptly addresses our collective doubts:

Is it more surprising to experience such incineration than to void saccharine urine, or to see the bones softened to such a degree as to be reduced to the state of a jelly? The effects of this combustion are certainly not more wonderful than those of the bones softened, or of the diabetes mellitus.

Point taken– the human body can be strange and marvelous. I still want more proof, though.

In physics, facts being always preferable to reasoning, I shall here collect those which appear to me to bear the impression of truth; and, lest I should alter the sense, I shall quote them such as they are given in the works from which I have extracted them.

Oh good, facts! The author’s “facts” are henceforth presented in nine thoroughly footnoted pages of wildly gruesome recollections wherein women, in their drunkenness, were reduced to piles of ash, often with a few extremities preserved in near-perfect condition. It’s an awful lot to take in, and I’ll spare you the bulk of it, lest you be haunted by nightmares like the ones I’m sure to have tonight. Highlights include a woman whose maid found her as “a heap of ashes, in which could be distinguished the legs and arms untouched”, a room full of “a moist kind of soot” which was “conveyed to a neighbouring kitchen… a piece of bread in the cupboard was covered with it, and no dog would touch it”, a woman whose trunk had “the appearance of a log of wood”, and an ash pile next to an extremely small hearth with a “right foot… found entire, and scorched at its upper junction”.

So, that’s terrifying. For readers who are, no doubt, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of this horrific evidence, the author sums up commonalities in a handy list:

1. The persons who experienced the effects of this combustion had for a long time made an immoderate use of spirituous liquors.
2. The combustion took place only in women.
3. These women were far advanced in life.
4. Their bodies did not take fire spontaneously, but were burnt by accident.
5. The extremities, such as the feet and the hands, were generally spared by the fire.
6. Water sometimes, instead of extinguishing the flames which proceeded from parts on fire, gave them more activity.
7. The fire did very little damage, and often even spared the combustible objects which were in contact with the human body at the moment when it was burning.
8. The combustion of these bodies left as a residuum fat foetid ashes, with an unctuous, stinking, and very penetrating soot.

All of my modern, feminist sensibilities are offended by the idea that this fate only befalls older women. Why do women have to bear the brunt of the ill effects of heavy drinking? How on earth do fiery accidents distinguish between male and female bodies in the first place? How does one become so deeply imbued with liquor that one’s body is essentially a figgy pudding?

Not to fear, Pierre-Aime Lair can explain.

The female body is generally more delicate than that of the other sex. The system of their solids is more relaxed; their fibres are more fragile and of a weaker structure, and therefore their texture more easily hurt. Their mode of life also contributes to increase the weakness of their organization. Women, abandoned in general to a sedentary life, charged with the care of the internal domestic economy, and often shut up in close apartments, where they are condemned to spend whole days without taking any exercise, are more subject than men to become corpulent. The texture of the soft parts in female bodies being more spongy, absorption ought to be freer; and as their whole bodies imbibe spirituous liquors with more ease, they ought to experience more readily the impression of fire.

Um. Women have weak fibers and are spongy. But why older women, specifically?

Dancing and walking, which form salutary recreation for young persons, are at a certain age interdicted as much by nature as by prejudice. It needs therefore excite no astonishment that old women, who are in general more corpulent and more addicted to drinking, and who are often motionless like inanimate masses, during the moment of intoxication, should experience the effects of combustion.

Older women are “spongy”, AND they’re “motionless like inanimate masses”?! They’re more likely to be drunk, and therefore more likely to light on fire while going about their daily business? This is amazing! This is impeccably scientific! Surely our female readers are now convinced not to imbibe in excess.

Does that mean that nothing bad ever happens to men who drink? Not the case, according to dear old Pierre-Aime. It’s just that men don’t burn in place, leaving behind forlorn hands and feet, but rather tend towards having flames shoot out of their bodies.

Sturmius says, that in the northern countries flames often burst from the stomach of persons in a state of intoxication. Three noblemen of Courland having laid a bet which of them could drink most spirits, two of them died in consequence of suffocation by the flames which issued with great violence from their stomachs. We are told by Thomas Bartholin, on the authority of Vorstius, that a soldier, who had drunk two glasses of spirits, died after an eruption of flames from his mouth.

There are the facts, folks. I’ll let them speak for themselves.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani at a 1994 news conference at City Hall.

(Susan Watts/Daily News Archive/Getty)

In 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wanted to allow five failing schools to be taken over by the for-profit management company Edison Schools. But New York state’s charter school law required a vote by the parents. WNYC’s Beth Fertig covered the controversy and won a du Pont-Columbia Award for digging into the bitter political campaign.

The jurors noted, “Fertig lets all of the constituencies speak for themselves as she reports on the interplay of teachers, minority parents, school officials and Edison’s public relations campaign. She explains why the vote was doomed to fail, despite the best intentions of everyone involved.”

Her four reports are here:

The Edison Lobby – February 3, 2001

Charter Schools – March 13, 2001

Discussion on Edison Schools with Morning Edition Host at WNYC – March 27, 2001

Interview with Schools Chancellor Levy – April 3, 2001

67 years ago today, Senator Claude Pepper and many of his colleagues in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate along with members of the press and other dignitaries, made their way to Warm Springs, Georgia for the dedication of the Little White House on June 25, 1947.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt built the Little White House in 1932 while still serving as governor of New York, prior to being inaugurated as president in 1933. As a young man, FDR first came to Warm Springs in 1924 hoping to find a cure for the infantile paralysis (later known as polio) that had struck him in 1921. Swimming in the 88-degree, buoyant spring waters did not bring him the miracle cure he sought, but it did bring improvement. During FDR’s presidency and the Great Depression, he developed many New Deal Programs based upon his experiences in this small town. A steadfast proponent of the New Deal and other FDR policies such as the Wage and Hour Bill, Social Security and Lend Lease, Claude was devoted to his commander in chief. When the opportunity to attend the dedication of the now historic site in Warm Springs presented itself, Pepper did not miss the chance. The trip allowed for the attendees to experience a part of the Presidents life that was not widely known to the American public. In an excerpt from a letter to his family written on June 26^th 1947, the Senator from Florida wrote of the impactful experience:

“This was one of the most wonderful trips I have ever made. I have never been, you know, to Warm Springs before. About 160 or 170 people went down on a special train. Upon arrival at Warm Springs we were driven to the Warm Springs Foundation area and shown through the Little White House, where the President died, and about the grounds.

Several of us made a trip through many of the wards seeing the patients, talking to the doctors and nurses and seeing the braces which they manufacture for the use of the patients. We also saw the new pool now in the medical area and a few of us went down to see the original pool where the President first began to bathe and where he himself continued to swim until the end.

I wish every citizen could go through this Foundation, not only for the inspiration they would derive from the presence of President Roosevelt that is still felt there but to see the most cheerful, bravest group of people they can see anywhere.”

To learn more about Senator Pepper’s time in office or about our related political collections, please visit the Claude Pepper Library website at: https://www.lib.fsu.edu/pepper-library or come in and visit us from Monday through Friday 9am-5pm!

Many of the volumes in our Edith Wetmore Collection of Children’s Books contain descriptions of the frightening things that can befall children who choose to travel great distances alone: being kidnapped, having to become chimney sweeps, getting lost in dense forests once the sun sets, being conscripted as sailors. It’s a scary world out there.

Today we explore the lessons in Little Truths Better Than Great Fables, a teeny-tiny book published in 1800. Most of the book is in a question and answer format (“What are acorns?” “The seeds of the oak; and one acorn brings a young tree, which, in a number of years, is cut down and squared for use.”), with explanations of the natural world, customs of rural American life, and gentle admonishments not to eat unripe fruit or strike at bees.

The frontispiece of the book belies its soft tone, for one flips open the paper cover to reveal this alarming scene:

What, pray tell, is happening to this poor fellow?

As the caption kind of (not really) explains, he presumably got on a horse without a parent’s knowledge, leading to the horse springing, carousel-style, over a raging waterfall, while said bad child was flung many feet into the air, and consequently left dangling precariously over an aqueduct. Terrible!

I had to examine the text carefully before I found this:

Yet, I fear, my little Charles would not be long content with so steady a horse as the plowboy rides; he rode his wooded horse at home so fast as to throw both down, broke the horse’s head, and made his own nose bleed.

When Charles insists that he would hold on tight, even when astride a spirited horse, his parent reminds him of the story of Lambert’s Leap, wherein:

Cuthbert Lambert, of Newcastle upon Tyne, who was riding full speed over Sandiford stone bridge, and endeavoring to turn his horse round, the beast leaped over the battlements; the horse was killed by the fall, being twenty feet to the bed of the water, but the man was providentially caught in the boughs of an ash, where he hung by his hands, til relieved by some passengers coming that way. I hope, therefore, my children will be careful never to get on a horse without my knowledge.

Ooooh, okay. The engraving shows an irresponsible adult of history, and the caption is a warning for would-be careless child equestrians.

Unfamiliar with Cuthbert Lambert’s story, I dug about on the internet until I found a page from John Sykes’ impressively-titled Local records; or, Historical register of remarkable events which have occurred in Northumberland and Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, with biographical notices of deceased persons of talent, eccentricity, and longevity. Sykes’ meticulous register notes that Lambert’s ill-fated leap took place on September 20th, 1759, although, according to Sykes, Lambert actually remained seated on the horse during the entire descent, and an ash branch broke their fall. (The popular misconception that Lambert was stuck in a tree came from a Mr. Pollard’s 1786 print of the affair.)

Sykes also describes how, upon landing, Lambert’s mare “stretched itself out and died almost immediately; being a great favourite, its skin was preserved in the family.”

Um. Therefore, don’t ride a horse without permission. Got it?