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.

Geoffrey Plank, author of the new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire, will be giving a series of talks in the Philadelphia area in early October.  His complete schedule follows:

October 4, 7:00 p.m., Swarthmore College Science Center 199: “The Other Woolmans: Family Life and the Ideals of an Eighteenth-century Abolitionist”

October 6, 2:00 p.m.,  Mount Holly Friends Meeting, 81 High Street, Mount Holly, New Jersey: “The Other Woolmans” (as above)

October 7, 3:00 p.m., The Barn at the Pendle Hill Conference Center, 338 Plush Mill Road, Wallingford, Pennsylvania: “John Woolman and the Utility or Futility of History”

October 8, 4:30 p.m., Special Collections, Magill Library, Haverford College: “The Other Family Living with the Woolmans: African-Americans and Quakers Living Together, and the Process of Gradual Emancipation”

For more information you may contact Geoff at g.plank@uea.ac.uk

After finishing up with meeting house photographs, postcards, etc., I moved on to glass slides featuring images of Quaker meeting houses. So the problem was, how exactly does one scan glass slides? Well, luckily some of the scanners here in Special Collections are equipped to scan glass slides.  So I put the slide on the scanner, set it to the right setting pressed scan, and hoped for the best.  Unfortunately, the scanner did not recognize that there was anything there to be scanned.  Oops.  So I asked more knowledgeable people than I am, and found that I needed a plastic slide holder to make it work.  The next problem was that there were no slide holders that fit the glass slides with which I was working.  That’s when improvising seemed to be the only option.  I used a guide that fit the scanner I was using, flipped the glass slides vertically (even though the guide was oriented horizontally) and tried scanning again.  The results were not so great (see below).

So, it’s pretty and colorful, but it certainly is not an image of a meeting house.  I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong here, but eventually I was able to get scans like the ones below…

Abington Friends Meeting House, Jenkintown, PA, 1836

Atlantic City Meeting House, Atlantic City, NJ, 1872

Everything went well with the scanning of these 3 in. by 4 in. slides (the smallest of the glass slides in the collection).  New problems arose when it came time to scan the 5 in. by 7 in. slides.  The scanner I used could only scan slides that fit between a 3.25 in.  by 10.5 in. area (a very long and narrow rectangle).  The new slides’ dimensions exceeded this constraint.

So the project hit a brick wall for a time until a scanner with the correct settings and equipment to scan the larger glass slides could be found.  The new scanner was much easier to use because no guide was needed to scan the glass slides.  I used this particular scanner for the larger 6.5 in. by 8.5 in. slides as well.

Merion Friends Meeting House, Merion, PA, 1695, remodeled 1829

Haverford Friends Meeting House, Haverford, PA, 1834, enlarged in 1894

Now all of the glass slides have been scanned and will hopefully be available on Triptych in the near future!

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.

On June 29, 2012, the National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall in Philadelphia opened an exhibition called “To Bigotry No Sanction: George Washington & Religious Freedom.” Included in the exhibition are letters from 1789 between George Washington and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which are part of PYM records here at Haverford.  The exhibit will run through September 30, 2012.

Federal Hall in New York is likely where the meeting took place (image from The New York Public Library)

The letter to President Washington was composed on October 2, 1789 by a group of nineteen Quakers led by George Churchman and approved the next day during the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. The meeting then selected a group of six Friends who “proceeded to New York” and, joined by a delegation from the New York Meeting for Sufferings, the path was cleared “for their personal attendance on the President” during which time “the address was read by one of the number, and [...] they were respectfully received.” Meeting records indicate that the delegation presented a copy of Robert Barclay’s Apology, the famous scholarly defence of Quaker practices, to Washington during the visit. Washington’s response, while critical of Quaker practice in some regards, was generally positive. News of the meeting spread quickly and on November 4, 1789, one Susanna Dillwyn reported in a letter to her father that Washington read his reply himself instead of leaving the task to his secretaries so that “he gains the esteem of everybody—those who agree in few other things all unite in admiring General Washington”(Dillwyn and Emlen family correspondence, Library Company of Philadelphia).

Washington from around the time the meeting occurred (image from Bryn Mawr College Collections).

The meeting with Washington followed the English Quaker tradition of making similar presentations upon the coronation of a new monarch. However, this letter had particular significance given Washington’s rocky history with the Friends. Washington’s first encounter with Quakers occurred as a young officer in Virginia when he faced the problem of what to do with six Friends who were among his conscripted men but refused to fight, work, or do anything to support the army. Though he treated them leniently, Washington resented the Quakers’ refusal to help with common defense. Washington’s distrust continued during the Revolution, as he believed the Quakers’ refusal to fight with the colonists stemmed from political sympathy for the British, and consequently he refused Quaker relief parties passage through colonist lines on a number of occasions. Still, Washington treated Friends with respect including entertaining a group of Quaker ladies, who had come to petition for the release of seventeen Quaker leaders, over dinner.

Washington became more friendly to the Quakers after coming to understand that the Friends’ pacifism stemmed from religious feelings not political leanings. Indeed one of his most trusted generals was the former Quaker Nathanael Greene. Given this history, the most explosive statement in the Friends’ letter is “As we desire to be filled with fervent charity for those who differ from us in faith and practice [...] we can take no part in carrying on war on any occasion, or under any power.” The duality of Washington’s feelings on this issue and for the Quakers in general comes through in his response, as he says of the Quakers that “except their declining to share with others the burthen of the common defence, there is no denomination among us, who are more exemplary and useful citizens.”  Washington believed that religion was valuable because it supported good citizenship, so, while Washington respected their freedom of belief, he rebuked Quaker practice for making for less useful citizens. Still, given their history of persecution, receiving Washington’s respect for their beliefs and the freedom of conscience must have been a remarkable moment for Quakers.

Anyone curious about these materials can contact Thomas Littrell (tlittrel@haverford.edu) for more information.

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

Camera stand and lighting with an Ethiopic Old Testament

This past week we were visited by two scholars from the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project. Made up of scholars from around the world, THEOT’s director Steve Delamarter and his assistant Jeremy Brown, both from George Fox University, spent a day examining and digitizing our Ethiopic manuscripts from the J. Rendel Harris Collection.

Steve Delamarter examines a small Ethiopic codex

The goal of the THEOT project is to reconstruct the textual history of the Ethiopic Old Testament by sampling passages from each book of the bible from a couple dozen important manuscripts from around the world. While one particular manuscript at Haverford was of great interest to the project team, they were kind enough to digitize all six of our Ethiopic texts.

Steve and Jeremy began their day by setting up their digitization equipment in the library’s group study room.  They came loaded down with laptops, cameras, camera stands and tripods, and got to work imaging the manuscripts and creating quire maps of the page signatures.  Taking the better part of the day to get through all six manuscripts, they imaged the works from cover to cover (including, of course, the covers), shot additional close-ups of important details, and analyzed the foliation of each manuscript by creating “quire maps.” The resulting digital files, such as these images of a prayers and hymns manuscript (RH 23a), will be a great boon to our faculty and students, as well as to scholars from afar.

Steve Delamarter examines a 14th-century Samaratin Pentateuch

At the end of the day while the images were being processed on their computers we were able to show them a few other gems from the J. Rendel Harris Collection, including a rare 14th-century Samaritan Pentateuch.  We’re grateful to Steve and Jeremy for making time in their schedule to visit and work with our manuscripts.  This type of cooperative work in collections digitization is a win-win for all involved!

SLIM JIM OR THE INDIAN MAID'S LAST ARROW

The cover says it all !! … Starbeam, an Indian princess, dies in her effort to revenge herself against her jilted lover !! … Murders abound among thieves, ranchers, scalawags and scouts !! … Lurid descriptions portray cunning, crafty and devious characters of the western mountains and plains !! … These exaggerated elements describe this story and all others within the genre of Dime Novels.

Originally created for the reading pleasure of Civil War soldiers and typically 100 conveniently pocket-sized pages, dime novels primarily depict frontier and western stories. Those of the original “pulp fiction” genre were made of cheap wood pulp paper and flimsy comic book-like covers and were aimed at a less literate audience than other novels of the time. They were popular through the end of the 19th century until the advent of the motion picture industry when it became cheaper and easier to watch stories in the theater. No new pulp fiction was published after 1920. Dime novels are interesting because they demonstrate the common tastes, values and stereotypes of their time and allow for the study of mass society. They are thoroughly American and, as such, counter the traditions of European literature.

Magill Library acquired a complete set of Beadle’s Frontier Series of novels in honor of Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner who retired in December 2011. Lapsansky-Werner, Professor of History and Curator of the Quaker Collection, taught many classes on the development of the American West, and the acquisition will continue to support this curricular direction, as well as others. There are 100 novels in the series and a complete set is extraordinarily rare, especially in such fine condition as this acquisition. Cataloged in Tripod and residing in the Rare Book Collection, any of these dime novels are available for study to students, faculty and scholars. A full list of titles is available.

Ann Upton

She was born into the “weighty” Quaker Elkinton family of Philadelphia. Her parents, Howard (Haverford, class of 1914) and Katharine Wistar Elkinton, both descendants of notable Quaker families, were among the first to work for the newly-formed American Friends Service Committee as relief workers in France during World War I, then again in Germany during World War II, he as director of their Berlin office, while she enabled over 1,000 professional Jewish women to emigrate to Australia. They witnessed Kristallnacht and wrote letters describing it. That’s just going back one generation from the vibrant Theodora Elkinton Waring, who was born in 1927 to Howard and Katharine. She lived a comfortable life in the bosom of her loving family, attending Germantown Friends School, making friends, but when her father was sent to Germany, she and her brother, Peter, were sent to a Quaker school in Holland for the duration. After their return to America, “Dody” went back to Germantown Friends, then to Smith for two years. In the meantime, she met and married Thomas Waring after his two-year duty as a conscientious objector, 1944-46.

As a couple, they went to do relief work in Finland for refugees in Karelia in 1947. After returning to America, with a family now consisting of five children, having always been solicitous of her husband’s career needs, Dody finally went back to school, finishing her undergraduate degree, then a master of divinity from Harvard, and finally a doctorate from Boston University School of Theology in the 1980s. This education prepared her to serve as a chaplain at the New England Baptist Hospital and later at the Danbury State Hospital. Although her family life changed, she is today still surrounded by loving family and friends.

About five years ago, Rev. Elkinton Waring began sorting through a box of WWI letters from her mother, and since 2010, she says she became totally preoccupied with her family papers. Primarily, these are from her grandmother, Katharine Evans Mason, her mother, Katharine Wistar Mason Elkinton and her mother-in-law, Grace Warner Waring. The large topics are the relief work in France and later in Berlin in which her parents were engaged, and her husband, Tom Waring’s correspondence as a conscientious objector.

Theodora Elkinton Waring and her family papers. Courtesy of Jim Roese, photographer

We were contacted in November 2011 about the potential of receiving these family treasures. Dody had by that time processed them in their entirety, including genealogical charts, photographs, documents of all sorts, and, of course, the letters. Dody came down from Massachusetts this past weekend with her granddaughter, Sarah Waring (Haverford 2001) in a mini-van packed with the 13 cartons of her treasures which were received in Special Collections. In the afternoon, there was a celebratory event with some of Dody’s family in attendance as well some staff of the college. On the following day, we were privileged to conduct an oral history interview with Rev. Elkinton Waring, which will soon be available from our website. All in all, an extraordinary weekend tied to a treasure trove collection of Elkinton and Waring family papers, which have such great potential for future scholarly use.