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.

Each year, we compile a list of those publications that acknowledge the assistance of Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections.  To this we have added publications that came out in the past year that cite or pertain to our resources.  As always we’re thrilled to be able to assist so many scholars doing such great work!

Abruzzo, Margaret Nicola. Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Buel, Richard, Jr. Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.

Calhoun, Alfred R. The Letters of Alfred R. Calhoun, Mojave Desert, 1867-1868, edited by John N. Marnell. Goffs, CA: Tales of the Mojave Road Pub., 2011.

Carson, Clayborne, and Emma Lapsansky-Werner. The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011.

Crane, Elaine Forman. Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Crichton, Andrew B. Foundational Science and Continued Revelation at Westtown School. Westtown, PA: Andrew B. Crichton, 2011.

Fens-de Zeeuw. Lyda. Lindley Murray (1745–1826), Quaker and Grammarian. Ph.D. diss., Leiden University, 2011.

Figueroa, Carlos. Pragmatic Quakerism in U.S. Imperialism: The Lake Mohonk Conference, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in American Political Thought and Policy Development, 1898-1917. Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 2010.

Gerbner, Katharine. “Antislavery in Print: The Germantown Protest, the ‘Exhortation,’ and the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Debate on Slavery.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 553-575.

Gonzales, Christian Michael. Cultural Colonizers: Persistence and Empire in the Indian Antiremoval Movement, 1815-1859. Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2010.

Guiler, Peter Scott. Quaker Youth Incarcerated: Abandoned Pacifist Doctrines of the Ohio Valley Friends During World War II. Ph.D. diss., University of Akron, 2011.

Harris, Lois V. Maxfield Parrish, Painter of Make-Believe. Gretna: Pelican Publishing, 2011.

Herbert, Amanda E. “Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 73-113.

Huggins, Shannon, Catrett. The Power of Preaching: Female Identity, Legitimacy, and Leadership in American Quakerism, 1700-1776. Ph.D. diss., Auburn University, 2010.

Jones, Marjorie G. “Bowling Along: Early Travel Adventures of Mary Morris Vaux,” Quaker History 100, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 22-39.

Kesselring, Krista J. “Gender, the Hat, and Quaker Universalism in the Wake of the English Revolution.” The Seventeenth Century 26, no. 2 (October 2011): 299-322.

Kimball, Elizabeth. “Commonplace, Quakers, and the Founding of Haverford School” Rhetoric Review 30, no. 4 (2011): 372-388.

Landes, Jordan E. London’s Role in the Creation of a Quaker Transatlantic Community in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2010.

Marshall, Kenneth E. Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011.

Muchnick, Barry Ross. Nature’s Republic: Fresh Air Reform and the Moral Ecology of Citizenship in Turn of the Century America. Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2011.

Onnasch, Ernst-Otto, “Ein neuer Brief Hegels an die Gebrüder Ramann in Erfurt.” Hegel-Studien 46 (2010): 13-20.

Osborne, Mary Pope. Standing in the Light: The Diary of Catherine Carey Logan. New York: Scholastic, 2011.

Polzonetti, Pierpaolo. Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Proud, James, ed. John Woolman and the Affairs of Truth; The Journalist’s Essays, Epistles and Ephemera. San Franciso, CA: Inner Light Books, 2010.

Sassi, Jonathan D. “With a Little Help from the Friends: The Quaker and Tactical Contexts of Anthony Benezet’s Abolitionist Publishing.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 135, no. 1 (January 2011): 33-71.

Schnorbus, Stephanie Dawn. Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Primary Education: American Children’s Textbooks and Schooling, 1700-1810. Ph.D. diss, University of Southern California, 2010.

Smolenski, John. Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Straaijer, Robin. Joseph Priestley, Grammarian, Late Modern English Normativism and Usage in a Sociohistorical Context. Ph.D. diss., University of Leiden, 2011.

Toda, Tetsuko. “Conflicting Views on Foreign Missions: The Mission Board of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends in the 1920s.” Quaker History: The Bulletin of the Friends Historical Association 100, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 17-35.

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

A generale mapp of the Isles of Great Brittaine, 1669

Over at the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science’s PACHSmörgåsbord blog, Haverford Professor Darin Hayton discusses his recent assignment utilizing maps from Special Collections in his course on the Introduction to the History of Science.  Each student picked a pre-1700 map from the collection (some were facsimiles of older maps) and visited several times to study their map.  They were to analyze the map both for what it actually presented as well as by delving into the context of its creation and use.  The end result was a short report on their findings, a Biography of a Map.  Please read on for Darin’s analysis of the assignment:

Biography of a Map—Further Experiments in Pedagogy

Marketing a Colony—William Penn’s Maps of Pennsylvania

Mapping Our Way Forward—More Experiments in Pedagogy

The exhibit “You Are Here: Exploring the Contours of Our Academic Community Through Maps” runs through February 10, 2012. What follows are some of our favorite online mapping sites including a few coming from Haverford. Please use the comment form below to tell us about your favorite mapping sites as well!

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

Among the thirty-nine South Asian and Chinese sculptures that were donated to Haverford in March 2011 by Herta Grove, a friend of the college, is a white marble statue of Buddha.
There is relatively little history known about this 16″ carving, which may have come from Thailand or Burma, and the date of its creation is unknown. Several dabs of color on the marble indicate it may once have been painted. Lacking any solid data, we can focus on Buddha himself and the various ways in which he has been depicted, as well as on the style of this particular Buddha. Sakyamuni Buddha, who lived for approximately eighty years in what is today northern India and southern Nepal sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, was the most recent of a series of buddhas who have appeared in the past and will appear again in the future, but he was the Buddha for the current period. Over time, Buddhism spread to Japan and China and many countries of South and East Asia.
Buddha is generally represented seated, standing or reclining. The pose and hand-gesture, known as mudra, is meaningful and specific to a region, so, for example, the Vajra mudra where the right hand is above the left which holds the fifth finger of the right hand is popular in Japan and Korea, but rarely in India. In the marble statue under examination, the pose is known as the earth to witness mudra, the left hand crossing the torso, while the right gracefully descends toward earth, symbolizes the Buddha summoning the earth goddess, Sthavara, to bear witness to his worthiness of attaining enlightenment. Other physical aspects in this representation are elongated earlobes denoting exceptional perception, and a protuberance on the top of the head denoting superb mental acuity.
Please visit Special Collections www.haverford.edu/library/special/index.php where the collection is currently housed.

Recently asked to be a “guest blogger” on the PACSCL/CLIR Hidden Collections Blog, I thought it would be worth repeating my post here, encouraging our Haverford readers to follow the PACSCL/CLIR Blog, too.

Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections was one of the first institutions to be treated to the excellent work of Holly, Courtney and the fabulous student processors (hi, Forrest and Leslie!) hired for the Hidden Collections project. As a semi-official Guinea Pig, we really benefited from the extra time and attention given us by the PACSCL processing team. All involved did first-rate work and brought some much needed order to 10 of the high-research-value collections in our backlog. Participating in the project also jumpstarted our adoption of Archivists Toolkit to process new collections, has inspired us to find additional ways to open our holdings to researchers, and has provided our staff with ample opportunities to debate the pros and cons of minimal processing!

Today, we now record all accessions and process all new collections in Archivists Toolkit. For accessions we record all gifts no matter the format (manuscripts, archives, books, photography and fine art) and any purchases that are not reflected in the acquisitions module of our ILS (such as manuscripts and photography). Eventually we hope to include retrospective accessions in AT too. In addition to the original 10 finding aids produced by PACSCL, we have completed 19 more in AT, all of which now reside on the PACSCL EAD Repository hosted at Penn, in addition to our local web server.

Our instance of Archivists Toolkit is installed on a Tri-College server located at Bryn Mawr College and serves the needs of four individual repositories across the consortia: Bryn Mawr Special Collections, Haverford Quaker & Special Collections, Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, and the Peace Collection at Swarthmore College. Accessions and Resource (or collection) records for our four repositories are partitioned within AT. However, we do share the tables for Subjects and People, which is very useful when the topics of our collections overlap, which they frequently do.

In addition to moving ahead on creating new finding aids in AT, we have spent the past year making our legacy finding aids more accessible. Previous efforts at moving our finding aids into the 20th century had produced only a handful of fully searchable guides online and a mish-mash of Word files, PDFs, XML files, Excel files, ASCII text files, and Filemaker Pro databases living on a single staff computer, inaccessible to our researchers without the direct intervention of staff. A decision to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” finally freed us from our paralysis and has produced extraordinary results.

When the PACSCL crew left us in 2009 we had—in addition to their 10 finding aids created in AT—approximately 45 other finding aids online. By agreeing that it was better to supply our researchers with something “quick and dirty” than nothing at all and through the dedication of our students and staff, we turned all of the other finding aid formats into PDFs and mounted them on our web server. These are listed on two web pages in both Collection Name and Collection Number order and the complete lot of nearly 250 finding aids is searchable using a Google Custom Search. The results lists are not always pretty and neither are some of the finding aids, but for the first time the majority of our materials are discoverable online and our researchers seem pleased with the access.

As the work of the PACSCL team has discerned over the course of the grant, there are those collections which work well with minimal processing and there are those that do not. Historically, we have never given the same level of attention to each of our collections. Personal and family papers have often received more detailed processing than business papers and archival records. While we have not adopted an MPLP approach at Haverford, we are interested in discerning ways of saving time and money while still providing rich access to our researchers and offering fulfilling and educational opportunities to our student employees and interns. In the coming months we hope to try our hand at an “iterative” approach at enhancing collections by revisiting selected series within some of the collections processed to a minimal level under the PACSCL project. And we aim to improve the remainder of our online finding aids bit by bit.

As one of the first institutions to dive into the PACSCL Hidden Collections project, we are pleased to see it wrapping up and hope that the other institutions who have participated have been as pleased and inspired as we have.