Jonathan Sassi 2013 Gest Fellow sits at 18th-century abolitionist Anthony Benezet’s writing desk

Gest Fellow Jonathan D. Sassi is Professor of History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His project is entitled “Toward Gradual Emancipation in New Jersey.”

I am studying the political struggle that eventuated in New Jersey’s gradual emancipation act of 1804. New Jersey was the last state to pass such a law during the period of “the first emancipation” that followed the American Revolution, with Pennsylvania having been the first in 1780. New Jersey’s gradual emancipation statute was the result of a decades-long campaign by antislavery activists, many of whom were Quakers. I have been trying to learn how the eighteenth-century antislavery movement functioned: how it fashioned winning arguments and rebutted the opposition’s; mobilized supporters and built coalitions; went to court and won legislative victories; all with the ultimate goal of uprooting an entrenched institution and liberating people held in bondage.

The Quaker Collection holds a rich variety of primary source materials that illuminate various facets of the struggle against slavery. To cite a few examples, the correspondence of several key individuals along with the records of abolition societies reveal the inner workings of the movement. The minutes of various Quaker meetings also provide insight into the drive to eliminate slavery, both within the Society of Friends and in society at large. Manumission certificates and legal depositions open up fascinating stories about how particular men, women, and children escaped the snares of enslavement. Moreover, I discovered that the Quaker Collection also contains unexpected finds. For example, a wedding certificate or business receipt — documents that on the surface seemingly have nothing to do with the antislavery movement — can lay bare the personal ties that connected several of the major historical actors and bring their eighteenth-century world into focus.

My research will require me to visit a number of other archives in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. The full tapestry of New Jersey’s antislavery campaign will only become visible as I reconnect the scattered strands of evidence. My time at the Quaker Collection has been enormously productive and provided me with an abundance of findings and leads for further investigation. I am grateful to have been awarded a Gest Fellowship and to the library’s expert staff for their manifold assistance.

Gest Fellow Ben Wright is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History at Rice University. His research is on “American Clergy and the Problem of Slavery, 1750-1830: Form the Politics of Conversion to the Conversion to Politics.”

Ben Wright 2012 Gest Fellow

My research explores the connections between religious conversion and antislavery activism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Cutting off at 1830, when antislavery hardened into immediate abolitionism, I argue that the Americans and Britons who attacked slavery in this early period, did so primarily out of broader motives than simply a hatred of human bondage.  The push to convert the colonies, the new American republic, and eventually the world trumped nearly every other ambition for the growing population of evangelical Protestants in the Anglo-Atlantic world.  Quakers, however, offer a powerful counter-example.  My study argues that Quakers demonstrated an unrivaled commitment to antislavery because of their inward quest for communal purity.  It is no coincidence that the Quaker antislavery crusade coincided with what Jack Marietta has called the Quaker Reformation, a mid-eighteenth century renewal movement among Friends to refocus religious life around the principles of modesty, anti-materialism, and communal discipline.

While working in the Quaker Collection, I have investigated the letters, diaries, and other private writings of dozens of Quaker reformers, the minutes of numerous monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings, and the antislavery publications of numerous Quaker societies.  My research has confirmed many of my suspicions, while also revealing several surprising new insights.  The writings of early to mid-eighteenth century Quakers like John Fothergill, George Churchman, John Pemberton and others illustrate my arguments regarding Quaker anxieties by revealing a great preoccupation with internal purity and a fear that moral failures among Friends will lead a winnowing of the faithful.  I was surprised, however, to find seeds of dissention among mid-to-late eighteenth-century Quakers that would later sprout into the antebellum schisms.  I found that reformers were very much aware of these dissentions and used antislavery as a tool to maintain unity.  The private letters of several Quaker reformers reveal their relief at the refreshing unity among Friends in the antislavery cause.  Another surprise came from a close reading of Quaker conversion narratives.  Conversion in the early eighteenth century was a deeply fraught process that often took months if not years, whereas by the end of the century, conversion was a quicker process.  In the early nineteenth century, the language of conversion almost completely drops out of Quaker memorials.

It will take more time to integrate these findings within my larger analysis, yet I am grateful to say that the remarkably helpful staff and impressive holdings of the Quaker Collection have given me a treasure trove of evidence to inform my project.

Welcome class of 2016, and all others who may stumble upon this post! My name is Karl Moll, and I am a rising Junior who works as the Archivist’s Assistant in the Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections in the Library, which houses the College Archives (and a great place to look for a job once you get to campus!). I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what incoming freshman at Haverford were experiencing 100 years ago when they came to campus. Now, the ‘Ford has undergone a lot of changes in the last century: for starters, we are no longer an all-male school, the class size was about 1/10th the size it is now (167 students at the school, 48 of them freshman), the Morris Infirmary was still under construction, and the college was officially Quaker.

When freshmen entered the college, they were given a handbook:

This book was designed to introduce the new students to the customs of the college, and was funded by the Y.M.C.A. (which was still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association). The main goal in publishing the guide was to “call…attention to an organized effort for the development of Christian character amongst us”. Though, since this is Haverford, the organization “lays no emphasis on creeds or dogmas, and in no way tries to exert sectarian influence”. To me this sounds reminiscent of the second part of the oft-quoted segment of the 1888 Commencement Speech by President Isaac Sharpless:

Every time I read this, I get chills

It seems to fit into the tradition of being one’s own person.

One of the more interesting sections of any of the class handbooks from years past are the Rules for Freshman. Unfortunately, 1912-1913 seems to have been a reasonable year, and there are only “Points for Freshman”. Most of these are still pretty sound advice, though many are outdated:

Some useful information for incoming freshman, plus advice

In other years, there are rules banning freshmen wearing mustaches and carrying canes. Freshmen were also required to move out of paths to make way for upperclassmen, and not lighting an upperclassmen’s cigarette could lead to a fine. Maybe this year the Officer of Hazing (yes, that was an actual title) decided to take it easy. The sophomores were traditionally in charge of Hazing (or teaching the school’s customs). To see some funny rules from earlier years check here or here (feel free to browse around the site that the link brings you to, these are the digitized images from Haverford Special Collections and the Archives of the College!).

One of my favorite parts of historical Haverfordiana are the songs that freshman were expected to learn and sing at sporting events (failure to learn the songs resulted in punishments which ranged from midnight head shavings to monetary fines to being thrown in the duckpond). The major sporting events on campus were soccer and football (“Undefeated Since 1972″), but many of the songs could be sung during alumni events, or seniors could just make the underclassmen sing in the dining hall if they felt like it:

Various publications on campus and College Songs

I wish we still had songs like these...

More Songs!

The rest of the handbook provided the new student with reference material to all the resources on campus. These range from train schedules, telephone and telegraph services, the various clubs on campus, student publications, secret societies, and more…

Customs and the “Honor System”:

College Customs and the Honor System

The Honor Code of today seems very similar to the Honor System of old, but at the same time very different. And while we still have a “Customs” period for Freshman like in the post above, it is far removed from what these old newspapers show us:

So a lot has changed over the years, but there is still that Haverfordian feel through it all

If you have any questions about this, or other aspects of Haverford History, feel free to shoot me an email at kmoll@haverford.edu, or email Haverford Special Collections (hc-special@haverford.edu) where you can get some more expert advice. If I were writing “Points for Freshman” for the incoming class of 2016, one that I would stress would be to stop in and visit Special Collections in the back of the Library. The collection is really one of the gems of the college. You can find the historical materials for the club you get involved in, genealogical records of famous Quakers, old sports photos, anti-slavery materials, maps,  yearbooks from years past, rare books (Copernicus, Darwin, Shakespeare… no big deal), records for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and much more.

As part of a series of posts by our student employees, Karl Moll ’14 talks about what he’s been working on in Special Collections this summer:

One of the bigger projects that I’ve been working on this summer has been to create a template which allows users to input archival information from a finding aid into Excel and then it converts it into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivists’ Toolkit.

If you don’t understand what the above section means, that’s all right. It took me a little bit to get it all, and I’m going to walk you through it now.

EAD is subset of XML which is a programming language which is pretty similar to HTML, without most of the style commands. XML is really useful in creating hierarchies of information, which is why EAD (Encoded Archival Description) is based on this format. EAD is a standard used by many archives and special collections across the country to make finding materials easier across collections. For more on the history of EAD, look here. For more on standards in general, I may write another blog post about the development of ANSI standards. But more on that later.

For this project, I’m working on a brilliant template by Matt Herbison which properly formats the information that is inputted into a spreadsheet into a valid EAD program so that it can be uploaded into Archivist’s Toolkit. It is a really wonderful template that makes converting a finding aid into AT so much easier than writing the code by hand, or even entering it directly into AT. However, to be super useful to us here, I’ve been trying to make some modifications to it.

The first thing I did was get rid of a lot of the fields that we wouldn’t be using for our finding aids. After a lot of consultation with John and Diana, we determined that all we really needed were Level, Title, and the newly added Call Number or Shelf Location. More on the Call Number in a bit. The template went from looking like this:

To this:

This new version is a lot more streamlined for what we need it to do, since that’s all the information that we are really interested in anyways. Since there wasn’t already a field for Call Number, I had to create one. This part of the project ended up taking some time getting familiar with XML and EAD.

I really wanted there to be a way to put the call number with each individual item in the Finding Aid. The way I first tried was just to concatenate the Title cell in Excel with a Call Number cell, so that it would look like “Karl’s Papers, 2010-2012. Call Number: R1 SA B3″ but this lacked a symmetry when it actually created the finding aid, since not all the titles are the same length. I was looking through the AT window…

…when I noticed that there was this field:

Now, a Component Unique Identifier sounds a lot like a Call Number to me, so I then began an Internet quest to learn more about XML and EAD to see what tags corresponded to this entry field (I knew that there HAD to be something, since AT fields correspond to the EAD standard). After a couple of days of teaching myself about XML, I realized that the tag <unitid> </unitid> would be my best bet.

Now, the template works by concatenating cells in the spreadsheet so that the code is automatically produced. In the back-end of the program, it looks like this:

Notice that some of the columns have fixed values such as “<c0″ and “><did><unittitle>”. These are here to create certain constants for a valid program, and it ends up producing code like this:

I changed some of the fixed cells so that they would populate the Component Unique Identifier field in Archivists Toolkit using the <unitid> tag so that it produced code like this (the differences are pretty subtle):

So after I made those changes, Archivists Toolkit was able to accept it as a valid program to be uploaded, with a call number for every field and then produce a Finding Aid like this:

The Call Number is on the left side preceding the Title. I’ve been working on various ways of making the Call Number more readable, but haven’t uploaded it to AT yet.

My next blog post on the templates will be on my ongoing struggles to deal with nesting issues to provide the user with one extra level of hierarchy!!! Stay tuned!

–Karl Moll ’14

A tribute to Librarian, Esther Ralph (1918-2011), by Margaret Schaus, Lead Research and Instruction Librarian at Haverford College:

Esther Ralph, long-time librarian at Haverford College, passed away October 21. Esther worked at Magill Library from 1941 through 1984. She began as an assistant cataloger while still enrolled in Drexel University’s Library School. She later worked in the Bindery, managed circulation, became head of cataloging, and Associate Librarian. She oversaw the building and the collection move during the massive addition made in 1964-1967 and introduced computerized cataloging to the library. Her notes in books bear witness to her care and appreciation of research materials both for scholarship and for the college’s history.

In her 40-year career at Haverford, Esther witnessed many changes to the Library’s building, collections, and services. When she arrived, she and other staff returned books to the stacks using a dumb waiter operated by rope and pulley. She saw U. S. Army units exercise on the College fields during World War II; she heard Eleanor Roosevelt speak to students and faculty in the College chapel. In 1941 the Library held around 150, 000 volumes. When Esther retired the Library had doubled its floor space and tripled its collection size.

In 2008 in honor of her service, her family dedicated a bench and garden area on the north side of Magill Library outside Special Collections. It is a fitting memorial near the library, offering students a place to read or talk between classes.

Learn more about Esther’s career and experiences at Haverford from her oral interview: hdl.handle.net/10066/1636

–Margaret Schaus

2011 Gest Fellow Matthew Reilly posts on the University of Texas Viz. blog about the anti-Quakeriana materials he encountered at Haverford this past summer. An excerpt and link to the full post follows:

Over the past summer, I spent a month as a Gest Fellow at Haverford College’s Quaker & Special Collections, where I was researching an eighteenth-century female preacher. The most entertaining and unexpected find over that month pertained to an image archive classified as “Anti-Quakeriana.” One of the more interesting aspects of Quaker history (in my opinion) is their retention of documents released by rivals and detractors. Hence the origin of the classification, “Anti-Quakeriana.” As a result of such practices, scholars and historians now have an archive rich in cultural contexts and historical negotiations that mark the transitions from a seventeenth-century “schism” to an eighteenth-century “sect.” Below, I briefly discuss a series of paintings and engravings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female ministers.

Continue reading on Matthew’s blog at Viz.

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows.  Susan Hanket Brandt is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Temple University.  Her dissertation is entitled “Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners:  Gender and Healing Authority in the Mid-Atlantic Region, 1740-1830.”

2011 Gest Fellow Susan Hanket Brandt

My dissertation complicates the current declension model that narrates women healers’ prominence in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their subsequent loss of authority in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries due to the rise of enlightened science, male-authored medical texts, man-midwifery, and clinical-anatomical education in the increasingly numerous medical schools.  Instead, I argue that some women found new sources of healing authority in female education, manuscript authorship, the culture of sensibility, access to print media, and the antiauthoritarianism of dissenting religious groups like the Society of Friends.  The dearth of female practitioners’ medical recipe books and papers has contributed to their misleading invisibility. A goal of my dissertation is to uncover women healers’ hidden practices and their vital role in the American healthcare marketplace.

The Gest Fellowship allowed me to analyze the recipe book, garden book, diaries, business papers, and thousands of family letters penned by healer Margaret Hill Morris (1737-1816) and her family. The letters are a particularly rich source, as they chronicle Morris’ day-to-day healing practice as it changed over the course of her adult life, from a benevolent ministry to a profitable medical/apothecary business. Morris’ writings demonstrate how she constructed her healing authority as she participated in therapeutic social networks, examined medical books, and cared for extended family members and patients in her community. Morris’ profound Quaker beliefs were a source of spiritual comfort for patients and family members as they faced frequent illnesses and the deaths of loved ones. The letters chart an Atlantic exchange of healing information and medicinal plants between Quakers in Philadelphia, Madeira, and the British Isles.  In addition, the papers of traveling ministers Rebecca Jones and Mary Swet include medicinal recipes, raising the question of healing practice as part of their transatlantic ministry.

The Special Collections staff’s assistance was invaluable in my research. Professors Emma Jones Lapsansky and Susan Mosher Stuard also offered helpful suggestions. My Gest Fellowship research will help me to analyze the scope of Quaker women’s healing practices and authority in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Delaware Valley.

–Susan Hanket Brandt

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows.  Matthew Reilly ’06  is a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Texas, Austin.  His research is on “The Literary Life of May Drummond, Female Preacher.”

2011 Gest Fellow Matthew Reilly '06

My research in Haverford’s Special Collections focused on an eighteenth-century female preacher, whose conversion to (and later expulsion from) the Society of Friends caused a sensation among both Quakers and non-Quakers. Although May Drummond has fallen out of the purview of scholarship on eighteenth-century British history, she achieved a remarkable degree of celebrity and infamy during her lifetime. Her passionate and eloquent oratory drew crowds en masse, and London periodicals often published her whereabouts along with invitations goading eminent clergymen to public disputation. As a result, she earned a private audience with Queen Caroline and sympathetic citations from some of the pre-eminent authors of her day. Not only was Drummond noteworthy for her spoken ministry, but also for her status as a literary heroine and a cultural icon.

Drummond’s broad-based popularity distinguishes her from a Quaker establishment that was increasingly formalizing norms of doctrinal stability and communal exclusivity. Her touring presence foreshadowed the revivals that would soon sweep Britain, Ireland, and America, but she actually drew inspiration from late seventeenth-century Quakers, who had adopted tactics of combining scriptural precedents with more eclectic, interfaith, and cosmopolitan appeals. In her mission as a public Friend and an occasional combatant against England’s religious elite, Drummond stands apart from the sort of sentimental heroine that pervades the literature of mid-eighteenth century Britain. Her sermons were printed, and she indirectly moved others to write about her exploits. The height of Drummond’s literary fame, I argue, is in her role as the protagonist (if not the author) of a pseudonymous castaway tale by Unca Eliza Winkfield, entitled The Female American.

While working with Haverford’s extensive collections of Quaker documents, I charted Drummond’s social networks and rivalries, tracked controversies following in the wake of her travels, and recorded the reception of her life and ideas. Although Drummond’s certificate to preach was revoked just prior to her expected departure for America, the library’s holdings of Philadelphia journals and letters of emigrated British Friends show the blight of subsequent generations, which were unfriendly to her legacy. The expertise of Haverford’s librarians and specialists helped me re-frame my research on Drummond in relation to a transatlantic Quaker community in transition during the years prior to the American Revolution. I look forward to writing “The Literary Life of May Drummond” alongside my dissertation, “False Learning: Alexander Pope and the Afterlive(s) of Scriblerian Satire,” as a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

–Matthew Reilly ’06

From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows. Aaron Jerviss is a Ph.D. candidate in History at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  His research is on “Testimony through Sufferings: The Civil War in Pacifist Memory, 1865-1914.”

2011 Gest Fellow Aaron Jerviss

My dissertation focuses on how Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren (the three “historic peace churches”) remembered their Civil War experiences throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For me, the great research question has been: How does a group document the role it played during a war when its members refused to fight or contribute directly to the military effort? I argue that these religious bodies did so by seeking to redefine the concepts of “suffering” and “heroism” in distinctly non-militaristic terms.

During my months’ stay as a Gest fellow, I have primarily been diving into Haverford’s rich collection of Quaker serials. Two topics have jumped out at me after reviewing these periodicals. First, I am interested in how Quakers explicitly linked the perceived social, economic and moral evils of the last three decades of the nineteenth century back to the Civil War. National “sins” as diverse as increased intemperance, the “militarization” of school textbooks, and the corporate corruption of the Gilded Age all found their roots in the great American internal conflict, according to Quaker authors and thinkers. Second, I am fascinated by the way peace churches memorialized Abraham Lincoln. The Quakers contributed to the construction of an image of Lincoln as “Pacifist Friend,” even though he took unprecedented actions in the areas of conscription and military mobilization.

My time spent at Haverford Quaker and Special Collections has been highly profitable. The wealth of source material and the helpful suggestions of the knowledgeable staff have given my dissertation structure and opened up exiting new fields of inquiry. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to spend part of my summer as a Gest fellow and would strongly encourage anyone interested in researching Quaker-related topics to come investigate the extensive holdings at Haverford.

–Aaron Jerviss

So I have been working on cataloging the books in the Rufus Jones Study in the Philips Wing,  and I have been discovering some really interesting material. And I’m not just talking about the wide variety of fascinating books in there, but all the things I’ve been finding INSIDE the books!!!!

(I thought this was really cool!)

One of the first items I found was bookmark from circa 1915, which is promoting an insurance policy that covers injuries to one’s servants, along with damages caused by civil insurrection, subterranean fires, and riots and strikes.

(Ain’t that the darndest thing?)

Another item I found should be of great interest to those who have recently completed applying to colleges: it is an old letter of recommendation/transcript from the Principal of the Friends School to “The President of Yale” (clearly this was a lot more informal process back in the day!):

(“This is to certify that Frank P. Pickley[?], has graduated at this school in the present class. That he is in our judgement reasonably well prepared on the following studies for your Freshman Class at Yale College….[list of classes taken]“.)

(“…He has completed these reasonably well. His moral character is very good. He has been with us several years, Augustine Jones, Principal of Friends School, June 28, 1888″)

So there you have it. A letter of recommendation from 1888, and a currently politically incorrect insurance policy. I’ve really enjoyed going through this library and finding these gems. It makes me feel like a treasure hunter, but the value is that it is so interesting!

In the coming weeks, I will post some more of my discoveries! In the meantime, my email is kmoll@haverford.edu.