Those who notice initials after a person’s name will be impressed by ones following Theodore William Richards,  class of 1885.  After he received his B.S. from Haverford, he received a B.A. from Harvard in 1886; an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1888; an Sc.D. from Yale in 1905; a Chem.D. from Clark in 1909; a Ph.D. from Prague in 1909; an Sc.D. from Harvard in 1910; an M.D. from Berlin in 1910; a D.Sc. from Cambridge in 1911; a D.Sc. from Oxford in 1911; a D.Sc. from Manchester in 1911; a Ph.D. from Christiania in 1911; an LL.D. from Pittsburgh in 1915; an LL.D. from Pennsylvania in 1920; and, oh yes, an LL.D. from Haverford in 1908.

Since his accomplishments are even longer than his string of degrees, suffice it to say that he was a chemist who received a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1914, becoming the first American to receive that honor.  His research uncovered the atomic weights of twenty-five important elements.

Richards was extremely methodical as a scientist and extremely successful as a teacher, though his student, J. Robert Oppenheimer did not find his teaching methods brilliant and deemed him “afraid of even rudimentary mathematics.”

Richards’ father, William Trost Richards was a well-regarded artist and his mother, Anna Matlack, a Quaker. Richards himself was interested sports, music, literature, and art.  So, now we get to the illustration here depicted.

Barclay Hall on Haverford’s campus was built at the end of the 1870s, and Richards, no doubt, was living in no. 7 in January 1885, though there is no documentation in the college archives to prove this, nor to indicate who was his roommate. What we see in the accompanying watercolor drawing by Richards is a simple desk with books, a tennis racquet and art on the walls, possibly an oriental rug on the floor, no light of any kind. Richards clearly was also a talented artist.

The semester is off to a bang in Special Collections.  Last week, history of science professor Darin Hayton, brought his class on “The Scientific Revolution” to visit and introduced them to a range of primary sources and the types of questions one should ask when confronted with such a text.  Texts discussed during the visit included Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (1543), Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1686), and Ralph Cudworth’s The true intellectual system of the universe (1678).  In an upcoming assignment, students will be asked to select, describe and analyze a text from our collection (or Bryn Mawr’s) that falls between 1500 and 1700, roughly the dates covered in the course.  In preparing for supporting this assignment bibliographers Ann Upton and Margaret Schaus have uncovered a rich trove of scientific literature within our rare book stacks.

Students in professor of art history Carol Solomon’s course on “Art, Politics, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe” have been spending quality time with editions of the works of William Blake.  This week students picked illustrations from such works as The Songs of Innocence and Experience, America, a Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, Vala or The Four Zoas, and The Book of Job, and presented on the works within the political, social and cultural contexts of the period.

Next week we’re expecting a visit by professor Kaye Edwards and her class on “Quaker Social Witness.”  They will be learning about our print, manuscript, and online resources on Quakerism from librarians Diana Peterson, Ann Upton and Anne Moore.  During the semester students will have several assignments that will make use of materials from the Quaker Collection.  Three research papers will include an exploration of a specific Quaker testimony and its relationship to social action; an examination of a historical figure from the Religious Society of Friends; and an analysis of a current Quaker project toward social justice.  Additionally, students in the course will be attending parts of the upcoming conference on Quakers and Slavery, co-hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College and Haverford College.

Lucy Saxon (’06) is pleased to return to the Haverford College Special & Quaker Collections this summer for an internship culminating her library school experience.  She will graduate in August from San Jose State University with a Masters in Library and Information Science.  Lucy was a Comparative Literature Major, and is interested in archives and special collections, language, literature, history, and quakerism.
This summer, she is assisting Digital Collections Librarian David Conners in cleaning up and standardizing records from many databases as they are combined into the new Collections Manager system.  She is thrilled to be working on the Fine Arts Collection, doing cataloging, and helping to make part of the collection available online.  She will also help to write cataloging documentation for future catalogers.  She is delighted to be back in the Special Collections where her undergraduate work inspired her decision to pursue a career in librarianship, and is enjoying another beautiful summer on campus.

The culmination of some lengthy negotiations resulted in what might be considered a coup for Special Collections.  It is the acquisition of an exquisitely-rendered watercolor and gouache sketchbook with annotations created in 1875-76 depicting and describing events and people at the Friends Training Home in Brumana, Lebanon.  Among the depictions is one of Eli Jones sitting next to Maalin Malik. Eli and Sybil Jones who were both Ministers and missionaries in the Society of Friends established a mission, including the Friends Training Home, in Brumana. The home had separate schools for local boys and girls. Other depictions are of Theophilus Waldemeier, a teacher and perhaps director of the school, Im Joseph, the “Bible Woman,” native peoples and the school as location of an ancient site. Brumana is a village in the Metn region of Mt. Lebanon which has at various times been part of Lebanon and Syria.