Unknown Soldiers

French Officer 1895.9.1

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and we hope you will join us at the Museum of Work & Culture at 11:00 am for a ceremony honoring Rhode Island’s veterans. In addition to remarks by RIHS Executive Director, C. Morgan Grefe, Ph.D., the 2^nd R.I. Regiment will honor Marshall Sloat, a late member of the re-enacted Regiment, and the organizer and curator of the military exhibition at the Museum of Work & Culture. Dr. Grefe will make an exciting announcement about the Society’s plans for programming in 2012.

Found, when looking for something else: A French Officer, watercolor on paper given to the RIHS in 1895. Some of the best behind-the-scenes finds are those you’re not expecting, and this officer was one of those exciting moments of discovery. The label on the back says only “Watercolor portrait/Subject unknown/Supposed to be one of the/ French officers engaged/in the American Revolution,” but we know this was given to the RIHS in 1895, by John A. Howland, a long-time and active member of the Society.

Label, back of frame 1895.9.1

French troops arrived in Newport on July 11, 1780 and were quartered there, and in Providence, for nearly a year before they left to begin the long march to join Washington and his troops at Dobb’s Ferry, NY. It is possible that this portrait is of an officer  stationed in Rhode Island, though the details of his coat suggest a date earlier than 1780. Could this be Claude Blanchard, Rochambeau’s supply officer, who found Rhode Island’s farmer’s so slow to make a business deal, and so very fond of hard currency?

Perhaps he was a member of the Regiment of Saintonge, whose second-in-command, the twenty-four-year-old Armand Charles Augustin, kept a diary of his time in Newport that is now in the National Archives in Paris.  Augustin recorded his relief at sighting and on strolling on Conanicut Island.  The French officers in Newport enjoyed dances and teas with the ladies of the town, the troops dug earthworks (redoubts), examples of which can still be found in Tiverton and Jamestown.

It was long ago, and seems far away, but in the proud face of this man who gazes at us across time, we’re closer to the past and to the moment when he came to Rhode Island and helped create the world we live in today.

You can find out more about the French in Newport, and in Rhode Island, in Rhode Island History, Volume 11 No. 3, pp.73-81, among other articles. ~KNH

ON THE SECOND DAY AFTER IRENE — ALL IS WELL (AND DRY) IN THE RIHS LIBRARY

As we enter Hurricane Season in Providence we count ourselves lucky to have seen Hurricane  IRENE pass by without causing much more damage other than trees down and power outages.  A look back in time to September 21, 1938 and we can begin to understand better what few people remember—the destruction and human suffering that came with the Hurricane on that date.

Front page of the Providence Journal Sept. 22, 1938

Our Library Newspaper Collection helps us understand the story of the Great Hurricane of 1938.  The Library is the repository for the Rhode Island Newspaper Project and houses a microfilm collection of almost every Rhode Island newspaper ever published.  To find out what newspaper titles exist for a particular time and place for Rhode Island and beyond search  Library of Congress Chronicling America  Historic American Newspapers.

A glance at the headlines in the Providence Journal  of Tuesday September 20, 1938, the day before the tragedy, shows how unprepared Rhode Island was for the approach of  the storm that was making its way towards Florida before heading up the East Coast.

 “FLORIDA CLEARS DECKS TO FACE HURRICANE WHICH MAY NOT COME, Weather Bureau Reports Severe Storm Sweeping Toward Coast with 75 Mile-an-Hour Winds Has Changed Its Course” –Providence Journal 20 Sept 1938

The next day, September 21, 1938, the front page of the Providence Journal announced what all the readers in the area already knew – nature can be overpowering and human life fragile in the path of a hurricane.

This extra edition of the Providence Journal was printed on the presses of a rival paper, The Woonsocket Call, because of the flooding and power outage in the City of Providence.

To research other monster storms in Rhode Island’s history, The Great Hurricane of 1815,  CAROL 31 August 1954 and BOB 19 August 1991, visit the RIHS Library to find newspapers, photographs, books, oral histories and film on your topic.  The image below is from a book in the Library’s Print Collection titled  The Complete Historical Record of New England’s Stricken Area September 21, 1938  published by The Woonsocket Call (Providence, RI, 1938).

Images from The Woonsocket Call photo essay of 1938

The 1938 photo caption reads as follows: [left] “EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. The storm took heavy toll of shipping as it piled up scores of ships like the Standard Oil Tanker shown here which lies battered and broken on the rocky Rhode Island shores – Providence Journal”  [right] “WARREN, RI. The ship “G. H. Church” snuggled between a gas tank and a telegraph poll. Note warning to boil water before using. –Providence Journal.”

NEXT WEEK  the Collections Blog will have details on Hannah Farber’s upcoming talk about Rhode Island’s maritime insurance industry—  COMMERCE, THE NATION AND THE ATLANTIC: American Marine Insurers in the Napoleonic  Era –  at 6:30 pm on 21 Sept 2011 at the RIHS Library, 121 Hope Street., Providence, RI.

– KPC

New Policy! Cameras allowed starting July 1 at the RIHS Library!

Credit: BigTallGuy, from Flickr

New Policy! Cameras allowed starting July 1 at the RIHS Library!

The Rhode Island Historical Society has in its mission a kind of paradox. Our responsibilities are twofold: to PRESERVE the Collection, and to provide ACCESS to said incredible Collection.  These two goals sometimes appear to stand in direct opposition to each other, as with our policy that certain  items cannot be photocopied because of their age, fragility, or binding.

However, in the interest of increasing access and ease of research, we are instituting a new policy at the library.  Starting JULY 1st, 2011, we will allow researchers to bring cameras into the library.  Many materials in our collections are too fragile for a photocopying machine but can be photographed without damage.  Researchers will now be allowed, in certain circumstances, to take photographs of our materials with their own cameras to make research copies.

There are some limits, of course. Researchers wishing to use their personal cameras must be current Members of the Rhode Island Historical Society and must purchase a Camera Pass (good for one day). All materials to be photographed must be pre-approved.  And of course, in accordance with copyright law, just like our photocopy policy, photos taken of historical materials are for study purposes only, and may not be published or exhibited in print or online. For that, we have a Rights & Reproductions division. We welcome you to contact us for more details.

Job Well Done

Good students have been getting rewards of one kind or another for a long time, and the companies producing and selling them today can trace their heritage back hundreds of years. One of the simplest forms of telling students they’d done a good job was the “reward of merit,” an ephemeral certificate dating back in America to the eighteenth century.

Here are a few examples of rewards of merit from the RIHS collections.

Rewards of merit with a monetary value, like the one below, were popularized by Joseph Lancaster, an educational innovator of the early nineteenth century. While they obviously weren’t legal tender outside the classroom, they would have been saved and used to purchase other prizes (à la Chuck E. Cheese).*

Some offered visual appeal:

Some were a little more bland**:

The best source for learning more about rewards of merit is a publication by the Ephemera Society of America: Rewards of Merit: Tokens of a Child’s Progress and a Teacher’s Esteem as an Enduring Aspect of American Religious and Secular Education. (Find a copy to borrow or buy.)

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Four Reward of Merit Certificates: RIHS, G1157 Broadsides, 1822

* Patricia Fenn and Alfred Malpa, Rewards of Merit: Tokens of a Child’s Progress and a Teacher’s Esteem as an Enduring Aspect of an American Religious and Secular Education, Charlottesville, VA: Ephemera Society of America. p. 114.

** This particular type of reward of merit is actually harder to find examples of than the more decorative varieties: “On very few occasions did printers use the word ‘Merit’ alone.” Fenn, Rewards of Merit, p. 171.

Instructive Alphabet

Here’s the first post highlighting one of the items we’ll have available at the upcoming RIHS booksale:

The Instructive Alphabet, New York: Samuel S. Wood, Baltimore, 1818.

A small book for teaching children their alphabet, this little book features numerous wood engravings like the ones above. Included at the end is William Cowper’s anti-slavery poem The Negro’s Complaint.

The Elephant

Unfortunately, this post just missed Elephant Appreciation Day, but better late than never.

“The Elephant”* is a broadside advertising the display in Providence of “the most respectable Animal in the World,” a friendly (but paper-of-consequence-stealing) elephant on its way from Philadelphia to celebrate the Harvard Commencement. Displays like this one were certainly nothing new in an Age of Wonder like the late eighteenth-century: Providence residents had been entertained by an automaton the previous November. And many aspects of the November performance are in place here: once again children get half-price on the $.25 admission, and every effort has been made not to offend the “genteel Company”.

A place was apparently “fitted up” for the elephant in a store behind the Coffee House, which was located where the RISD Auditorium now stands. This also happened to be the location of the publishers of the broadside, John Carter and William Wilkinson, and the broadside offers an interesting example of the goings-on of a print shop of the time. A variant of the broadside depicted here also exists**, but in place of the woodcut illustration of the elephant is a line of type decorations, and the text describing the duration of the elephant’s stay (“till the 8th of July only”) reads simply, “where he will remain a few Days only….”

Thanks to a 1951 article by George G. Goodwin, we also know a lot more about the elephant itself: Her name (Old Bet)***, the fact that she was a two-year-old elephant brought from India and that she was the first elephant ever brought to America. We have Nathaniel Hawthorne’s father to thank, in part, for the account of Bet’s journey to America, as he was a passenger on the ship that made the months-long voyage, and he recorded the experience in a journal.

The end of Bet’s story in America is uncertain, but there is the possibility she was shot by a boy (possibly in Rhode Island) and killed. Whatever the case, Bet’s story is parallel in many ways to a much earlier travelling celebrity pachyderm:

 

Like Bet, the rhinoceros that was the basis for Durer’s famous illustration made a lengthy water voyage, in this case travelling from India to Spain in 1515. The rhinoceros became an international sensation, and for those who couldn’t travel to see it in person, Durer’s impressive (if not entirely accurate) woodcut illustration conveyed a sense of its strength and power. (Perhaps our elephant broadside filled a similar purpose in addition to its advertising role.) While on its way to the Pope, the ship carrying the Rhinoceros wrecked, and the rhinoceros was killed. (Listen to the full story in one of the BBC’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects” podcasts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tn9vp .)

Shipwrecks, gunshots and a host of other maladies have been the unfortunate side-effect of human interaction with astonishing  and impressive members of the animal world. Among many such cases is the story of the elephant whose difficulties were “heightened by the great quantity of ale the spectators continually gave it”:****

UPDATE: We should have mentioned this great documentary film project to tell “the story of what happens when elephants and Rhode Islanders meet”.

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* Broadsides, 1797. Alden #1532.

 

** Alden #1531.

*** Although the broadside refers to the elephant as male.

**** “An Antiquary of the Last Century,” Littell’s Living Age, 6th ser., vol. 2 (14 April 1894): 94-106.

Bookplates

In addition to collections of materials like books, manuscripts and images, the Historical Society has a wide range of ephemeral items, including bookplates like the ones below:

Bookplates range in size from modest indications of ownership to full-page exclamations (usually of the owner’s vanity). An example like the one above offers a visual demonstration of a portion of the book’s history as it passed from one owner to the next.

Mr. Nightingale’s warning is a much kinder version of the medieval book curse, many of which include punishments like snake-bite, palsy, bookworm-entrail-gnawing, and the flames of hell.

Here are two examples of more recent bookplates. Many of the modern bookplates in our collections came from the Providence Lithograph Company Records.

For your bookplate fix, visit the Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie blog.

The Third Dimension

The visual splendor of James Cameron’s Avatar might seem to occupy the cutting edge of entertainment, but in fact 3D has a long history.  And on June 19th, you can get a taste of the early days of that history at an exciting event: The Third Dimension: Rhode Island in 3-D.

From 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the Aldrich House at 110 Benevolent Street, you can view stereoview images of Rhode Island—from black-and-white images taken in the 1890s to dramatic views of the 1955 Blackstone River flood—as few ever have the chance to see them: on the big screen in all their glory (3D glasses provided). Narration of the events will be provided by local historian Ned Connors.

Not only is this a chance to see a rare visual performance, it’s also a chance to help the Historical Society preserve Rhode Island’s heritage. All proceeds from the event will support our Graphics Inventory Project, an ongoing effort to catalog materials like photographs and stereoviews and make them available for use.  You can find out more about the project at its new blog.

Tickets are $75 and seating is limited. To reserve your seat please contact Natasha Brooks at the RIHS Library, by phone (401) 273-8107 x12, by email programs@rihs.org, or in person at the RIHS Library at 121 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906.

You can get a sense of the stereoview effect with these Animated Stereoviews of Old Japan.

RIHS Graphics Blog!

For even more information about the Historical Society’s collections (the graphics collection in particular), visit the latest RIHS blog, the Graphics Collection Survey Project.

Graphics Project Archivist Jim DaMico will be documenting the process of cataloging and rehousing the Historical Society’s extensive graphics collections, and highlighting some of the more interesting items he encounters in the course of his work. The first post investigates engraving plates.

Grog O’ Clock (Martin Page, part I)

Faced with a diary or a memoir or a collection of someone’s correspondence, it’s a natural impulse to try to recreate an image of what that person might have been like. In some cases—and Martin Page is one of those cases—the picture that emerges is surprisingly colorful and complex.

Born in 1772, Page spent nearly half a century at sea, rising from cabin boy to captain. So it’s not surprising that his “cyphering book”* would include maps and charts like this one:

This particular map likely depicts the islands off the coast of Gotheburg, Sweden, an area also featured in other manuscript maps in the collection,** and it features details like a very nice ship:

and Monopoly-style houses at the base of what looks like a cell-phone tower:

A lesson on right triangles offers another opportunity for Page’s artistic skills to shine. The assignment involves finding the height of a steeple:

Strictly speaking, of course, most of the illustration is unnecessary; all that Page really needed was a vertical line to represent a steeple. But that’s not nearly as much fun as sketching out an entire steeple and it’s bell, tower and flag, and once it’s gone that far, he might as well put the rest of the building in too. The level of detail extends even to the clock and its inscription:

Before there was “Beer O’Clock“, there was Grog Time.

(In the next post we’ll leave Page’s artistic abilities to focus on his literary merit…)

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* “Cyphering book” of Martin Page, 1805-15, in the Martin Page Papers, MSS 599, Box 1, Folder 15, Rhode Island Historical Society. www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss599.htm

A ciphering book operated as a notebook in which to work out problems and also save formulas and examples for the future, as suggested in Samuel Read Hall’s Lectures on School-Keeping, published not long after this cipher book was used.

** In many of the maps (located in folder 13), Page has pasted in printed illustrations of ships, presumably cut from books.