In 1849, a mob of white supremacists eager to seize anti-slavery mailings attacked the US Post Office in Pendleton, South Carolina. They burned leaflets and letters in a bonfire on the village green to make clear their stance against incendiary ideas. This essay explores the context of these events by considering an initial spate of mailings that…[Read more]

In a hapless attempt to explain how a man living on unemployment who reportedly has no cell
phone, computer or clue could have received a clear majority win in the race for the Democratic
Party’s U.S. Senate nomination, Democratic state Sen. Robert Ford opined that perhaps a
disproportionate number of the black electorate voted for Alvin G…[Read more]

This GIF chronicles the movements of a runaway slave New England through the publication of his first memoir. He was forced to resettle and wander through Connecticut and Rhode Island because of poverty and security. He is most associated with Litchfield, CT and New Haven CT where he spent the most time and which figure most prominently in his…[Read more]

Both the friends and enemies of Brander Matthews attested to his sociability. Clayton Hamilton wrote in 1929 that Matthews had a “genius in the gentle art of friendship.” (86). Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, observed that “Matthews knew everybody and everybody knew him” and Mark Twain even jokingly inscribed one of his…[Read more]

SHORT-TERM
library fellowships are quite likely the single most common kind of national research grant given out to scholars in the humanities. The Massachusetts
Historical Society alone gives out twenty short-term library fellowships. Almost every major private university and scholarly library (including the Huntington, Newberry, Yale’s B…[Read more]

This is a digital exhibit about the life and work of Samuel Williams, a man who survived slavery in Charleston South Carolina and lived to write his memoir Before the War and After the Union, under “Sam Aleckson.” This exhibit and article is the first time his true name has been revealed .

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’ work with The Horizon, an early African American Magazine.

This article discusses the nature of interlibrary loan systems in the United States and how it differs from systems in Ireland.

In the summer of 1864, fourteen-year-old Jacob Stroyer was sent to work in Fort Sumter. He did not go willingly. Stroyer was a slave owned by the wealthy Mrs. Matthew R. Singleton and was sent from the large Kensington plantation outside Columbia, SC to labor for the Confederate cause. The Confederate Corps of Engineers called upon slave owners to…[Read more]

Arrested for treason against the British Crown and deported to the penal colonies of Australia, the Irish revolutionary John Boyle O’Reilly managed to escape to the United States and within a few years became one of Boston’s most prominent political and literary figures, one of the best known Irish immigrants in the United States and one of the…[Read more]

In his eighteenth-century Memoirs, criminal Stephen Burroughs tells of his campaign to establish a library in Bridgehampton, New York. When the town elders discover the plan, they insist upon reviewing Burroughs’s choices. Undercurrents of other debates spill over into what would otherwise merely be some quibbling over book selections. In a series…[Read more]

Slaves were allowed three day’s holiday at Christmas time, and so it was over Christmas that John Andrew Jackson decided to escape.

The first day I devoted to bidding a sad, though silent farewell to my people; for I did not even dare to tell my father or mother that I was going, lest for joy they should tell some one else. Early next…[Read more]