When I tell people that I bring students into the archive for hands-on work with centuries-old books, they frequently inquire how young adults respond. I tell them simply that students love the entire experience. The ubiquity of inexpensive modern editions … Continue reading
Meredith Neuman
In fall of 2012, I experimented with my standard American poetry class, adding a component in which students would learn to do formal analysis of poetry primarily though performing poetry out loud. For about half of the semester we recited … Continue reading
Last year the Introduction to Archival Research Seminar made quite a hit with our first ever Rare Books Open House, where students each presented material from the Jonas Clark collection in the Goddard Library Special Collections. You can read more … Continue reading
I’ve posted before about last fall’s LibriVox project, in which students in my poetry class recorded an audiobook of Herman Melville’s Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces. Today is the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, so it seems timely to offer … Continue reading
Description: “Voracious Auditor,” Grieving Sermon, 9 pages. Joshua Moodey (minister) on Jer 5:3-4 Source: [Anonymous,“Voracious auditor”]. Sermons: manuscript, 1689. MS Am 974. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Status: Primary transcription complete. Needs review. . Click here to view side-by-side transcription: Side-by-side … Continue reading
No, I can’t read it either. This is a page from Henry Wolcott’s shorthand sermon notebook at the Connecticut Historical Society. Thanks to the amazing work of Douglas H. Shepard, we have a full transcription of the sermon notes he … Continue reading
Harvard college student John Chickering did not only keep meticulous notes on individual sermons; he also kept a detailed index of his own notebook. Chickering mastered not only structural and aural auditing but also content auditing, as just a glance … Continue reading
John Chickering kept this meticulous notebook while a student at Harvard College. His training meant that he could paid attention both to structure and to content. Chickering goes beyond most notetakers, however, for the sheer precision of his notes. (We … Continue reading
When I sent the my book off for publication, there was some uncertainty about who exactly this notetaker was. The catalog record at the American Antiquarian Society reads “[Pinch/Pyncheon?, John]. sermon notes; possibly those of John Pinch (1625-??).” Only after … Continue reading
This is not the cover but the outermost remaining page of John Pynchon’s sermon notebook. If it looks familiar, that might be because this is the image that ended up on my book cover. (The cover gets many compliments, by … Continue reading