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The Papers of Robert Treat Paine is a selected edition of documents primarily from the Robert Treat Paine collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Covering his public and private lives, the published Papers draws together correspondence to and from Paine beginning with his days at Harvard. The five-volume edition includes all of his correspondence with family, friends, clients, and fellow lawyers. Selected pieces also provide examples of his allegorical writings, his sermons, and his Harvard undergraduate club writings.

Comprising twenty essays by leading scholars, this insightful collection provides the best recent writing on the Transcendentalists, the New England religious reformers and intellectuals who challenged both spiritual and secular orthodoxies between the 1830s and the 1850s. The volume addresses Transcendentalism from many directions, illuminating the movement more clearly than ever before. The contributions consider aspects of the relationship between the Transcendentalists and their intellectual and social world, assess the movement's cultural legacy, and place Transcendentalism in the context of historical and literary scholarship, past and present.

When John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, emigrated from Stuart England to America, he and the colonists who accompanied him carried much of their culture with them. Written by leading English and American scholars, the essays in ""The World of John Winthrop: England and New England, 1588-1649"" vigorously assert a new unity to the transatlantic and Puritan, Anglo-American sphere, integrating the English and colonial stories from a refreshingly single perspective.

In Death Lamented: The Tradition of Anglo-American Mourning Jewelry illustrates and explains prime examples of rings, bracelets, brooches, and other pieces of mourning jewellery from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Like the exhibition at the Massachusetts Historical Society, this volume showcases the materials in the Society’s collection and that of Sarah Nehama, a jeweller and private collector who co-curated the event at the MHS. These elegant and evocative objects are presented in context, including written explanations of the history, use, and meaning of the jewellery, as well as related pieces of material culture, such as broadsides, photographs, portraits, and trade cards. The jewellery included illustrates some of the most exemplary types, from early gold bands with death’s head iconography to jewelled brooches and intricately woven hairwork pieces of the Civil War ra.Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This second volume of selections from Caroline Healey Dall’s diary extends her story into the crucial period of her central role in the American women’s movement and her position as a founder of the American Social Science Association. These entries convey the Civil War, the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination, and other national events from the viewpoint of a strongly partisan New Englander. Dall’s text also reveals her personal experience as a single mother who emerges from the shock of her husband’s departure to form a new identity as writer, lecturer, and reformer. An eloquent woman of sharp intelligence, positioned at the centre of New England cultural and political events, Dall provides us with an extraordinary perspective on the era in which she—this ""strangely gifted"" but flawed and emotionally vulnerable woman—lived.Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

For centuries Boston has been one of the most important furniture-making centres in America. Soon after the town’s founding in 1630, Boston’s joiners and turners were the first craftsmen to make furniture in British North America, and the city’s cabinetmakers contributed to the art and craft of furniture making throughout the elegant colonial and federal periods. Its factories and designers have also been a source of fine furniture, creating major pieces in the various revival styles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Massachusetts Historical Society, The Cabinetmaker and the Carver showcases rare and exemplary pieces from private collections, illustrating three centuries of Boston history through carefully selected examples of furniture that represent the trajectory of this great tradition. Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In August 1918 a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, then in the devastating grips of the First World War. Working at a canteen at a railroad junction close to the Western Front, Hall aided soldiers from both Allied and Axis nations. While there she was regularly forced to seek shelter from German bombardments. After the Armistice, Hall explored the destruction of the surrounding region; her diary entries, letters, and photos reveal a world of ruins and human remains.After Hall returned to the United States, she wrote a memoir that she shared privately with friends and family. Published here for the first time, Hall’s words offer a first-hand account of life on the Western Front in those last months of the war and its immediate aftermath. Balancing her deeply held convictions about the horror of this conflict with both wry humor and a sense of urgency, Hall’s narrative gives the reader an unusually immediate and individualized testimony, one that rivals those of similar but better-known war memoirs, such as those by Vera Brittain and Edith Wharton.The book features dozens of Hall’s striking and never-before-published photographs, including of the movement of troops through town, women working just behind the front lines, and the landscape left when the war was “over.” The pairing of Hall’s remarkable images with her vivid reporting results in an invaluable, and uniquely personal, account of one of the most cataclysmic events in history.

One of U.S. history’s most eminent figures, Thomas Jefferson is as elusive as he is revered. The Private Jefferson opens a window onto the third president’s inner life by exploring the single largest cache of Thomas Jefferson’s private papers, held--to the surprise of many--at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Essays by Peter S. Onuf (""The State of the World: Thomas Jefferson’s Political Vision""), Andrea Wulf (""Revolutionary Gardens: Jefferson, Politics, and Plants""), and Henry Adams (""The Architectural Jefferson: The Draftsman and His Ideals"") underscore aspects of Jefferson’s character--his unusual creativity and less frequently studied perspectives on the world--rather than retelling the well-known achievements of his political career. The qualities that come to the forefront are, instead, the principles, passions, and faith that suffused his actions as a statesman, including his love of the natural world as well as his lifelong effort to find a balance between his role on an international stage and his need for a domestic retreat, a reverie for study and experimentation.Generously illustrated with full color reproductions of architectural drawings, letters, and other manuscripts, this volume is published as a companion to the exhibition The Private Jefferson: From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Both exhibition and book celebrate the society’s 225th year.

As America's first historical society, the Massachusetts Historical Society has collected family materials since 1791, including long-cherished pieces of clothing that were acquired alongside papers such as letters and diaries. Because of the different storage requirements for textiles and manuscripts, these survivors-many of them hundreds of years old-have largely been divorced from their familial ties. Fashioning the New England Family, an initiative encompassing a fall 2018 exhibition and this companion volume, reconnects the textiles with the associated stories carried in the family papers.Generously illustrated with full-color photographs of garments, fabrics, and accessories, including exquisite detail shots, the book creates a lasting overview of the exhibition but also delves into specific topics. The chapters cover a spam of more than three hundred years, tracing the history of New England clothing from the colonial seventeenth century, through the Revolutionary eighteenth century, and into the national nineteenth. In these pages, readers will find a fragment of Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins Alden's dress; Governor John Leverett's bloodstained buff coat, which saw battle in the English Civil War; and the luxurious Spitalfields green silk damask wedding dress and shoes that Rebecca Tailer Byles wore at her 1747 wedding in Boston.Across these examples and more, the text traces patterns of global production and local consumption and reuse, demonstrating how New Englanders used costume to establish their situation, especially in terms of class and gender, and also to express their political affiliations. Patriots and loyalists-Hancocks, Adamses, Dawses, and Olivers-make many appearances, as they are so well represented in the society's rich holdings. Manuscripts drawn from the collections-receipts, daybooks, account books, diaries-further amplify the historical insights, even at times making it possible to interpret the way in which a specific garment may have embodied one individual's sense of identity. Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The Papers of Robert Treat Paine is a selected edition of documents primarily from the Robert Treat Paine collection at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Covering his public and private lives, the published Papers draws together correspondence to and from Paine beginning with his days at Harvard. The five-volume edition includes all of his correspondence with family, friends, clients, and fellow lawyers. Selected pieces also provide examples of his allegorical writings, his sermons, and his Harvard undergraduate club writings.

Containing the letters of John Winthrop, Sr., and Jr., and their correspondents, this collection details the early years of the New England colonies. One of the most important manuscript sources about colonial New England, the Winthrop Papers are central to the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and to the study of American history. This series provides annotated transcriptions, prepared for a scholarly audience, of the most valuable documents from this resource. Winthrop materials at the MHS include a range of correspondence, commonplace books, printed works, maps, legal documents, portraits, artifacts, and photographs spanning the family's history from 15th-century England to 20th-century America.

Making available what is perhaps the longest-running diary in existence, ""Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, 1838-1855"" offers what arguably is the most complete account we have of a nineteenth-century American woman's life. Dall (1822-1912), a participant in the transcendentalist, abolitionist, women's rights, and social science movements, filled her journals with intelligent reflections and keen analysis of her world. This, the first of three volumes, begins with her adolescence at Beacon Hill. The journals will address a wide range of topics covering some three-quarters of a century, including family and social rituals and interactions; the routines of ""woman's work""; illnesses, both physical and mental, and their treatment; examples of cross-class and cross-race relations; and the larger world of business, politics, literature, reform, war, religion, and science. In detailing Dall's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development, the journals also convey a compelling personal story.

Both a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and at the head of the Modern Library's list of the one hundred best English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century, ""The Education of Henry Adams"" has long been revered as a great work of literature. Written by Adams in the third person, the book became known for founding a new genre best described as 'an education' - an account not of life, but of learning. A tireless historian, politician, and traveler, Adams was from first to last a dedicated learner capable of great originality. In this text, Adams uses his background information (such as place of birth, voyage destinations, and alma mater) but little else, placing his protagonist in front of life's various pitfalls with the object of providing those stepping out into the world with the tools they need to handle themselves in the face of adversity. By inventing his own fictional missteps, Adams allows readers to educate themselves on how to approach life's curveballs.Although ""The Education of Henry Adams"" has long been considered a classic, until now the only editions available were those from 1907 and 1918. The former, which appeared in Adams' lifetime, was a private printing of only one hundred copies, containing hundreds of printer's errors and editorial inconsistencies. The latter, printed by the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Mifflin Company after Adams' death in March of 1918, amounted to a wholesale modernization of Adams' work, leaving telling defects, including stylistic inconsistencies and incomplete sentences.With ""The Education of Henry Adams: A Centennial Version"", editors Edward Chalfant and Conrad Edick Wright have at long last returned this celebrated book to the author's vision. Combining close attention to the private printing's typesetting and editorial shortcomings with valuable insights into the history of the book and Adams' reasons for writing it, they have also inserted marginal corrections by Adams in his working copies of the 1907 printing. With an introductory note, an invitation to readers, and a postscript, they have both traced the text's own story and offered a compelling interpretation of the author's motives.

Ellen Wayles Coolidge arrived in London in June 1838 at the advent of Queen Victoria’s reign—the citizens were still celebrating the coronation. During her nine-month stay, Coolidge kept a diary that reveals the uncommon education of her youth, when she lived and studied at Monticello with her grandfather, Thomas Jefferson. London’s docks, theaters, parks, public buildings, and museums all come under Coolidge’s astute gaze as she and her husband, Joseph Coolidge Jr., travel the city and gradually gain entry into some of the most coveted drawing rooms of the time.Coolidge records the details of her conversations with writers such as Samuel Rogers, Thomas Carlyle, and Anna Jameson and activists including Charles Sumner and Harriet Martineau. She gives firsthand accounts of the fashioning of the young queen’s image by the artists Charles Robert Leslie and Sir Francis Chantrey and takes notes as she watches the queen open Parliament and battle the first scandal of her reign. Her love of painting reawakened, Coolidge chronicles her opportunities to view more than four hundred works of art held in both public and private collections, acknowledging a new appreciation for the modern art of J. M. W. Turner and a fondness for the Dutch masters.As rich as her experience in England proves to be, Coolidge often reflects on her family in Boston and Virginia and her youth at Monticello. As she encounters her mother’s schoolgirl friends and recalls the songs her grandfather sang while working in his study, Coolidge’s thoughts return to Monticello and the lessons she learned there.Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

One of U.S. history’s most eminent figures, Thomas Jefferson is as elusive as he is revered. The Private Jefferson opens a window onto the third president’s inner life by exploring the single largest cache of Thomas Jefferson’s private papers, held--to the surprise of many--at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Essays by Peter S. Onuf (""The State of the World: Thomas Jefferson’s Political Vision""), Andrea Wulf (""Revolutionary Gardens: Jefferson, Politics, and Plants""), and Henry Adams (""The Architectural Jefferson: The Draftsman and His Ideals"") underscore aspects of Jefferson’s character--his unusual creativity and less frequently studied perspectives on the world--rather than retelling the well-known achievements of his political career. The qualities that come to the forefront are, instead, the principles, passions, and faith that suffused his actions as a statesman, including his love of the natural world as well as his lifelong effort to find a balance between his role on an international stage and his need for a domestic retreat, a reverie for study and experimentation.Generously illustrated with full color reproductions of architectural drawings, letters, and other manuscripts, this volume is published as a companion to the exhibition The Private Jefferson: From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Both exhibition and book celebrate the society’s 225th year.

The fourth volume of this series encompasses Robert Treat Paine’s time as Massachusetts attorney general. Paine, best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, spent the remainder of his public career in state service. The documents in this volume highlight the quest for order in a nation gripped by violence and upheaval. Paine focused on reforming and enforcing the laws. He prosecuted crimes directly and indirectly tied to the Revolution, including treason, an uprising by prisoners of war, piracy, and tax riots, which are detailed in his opaque but fascinating trial notes. He also confronted the bounds of revolutionary citizenship when he was tasked with confiscating loyalist estates, some of which had belonged to former friends and neighbors. Outside of the courtroom, Paine obsessed over stabilizing the economy, and this volume showcases his fiery views on seemingly mundane topics such as price control and counterfeiting. While Paine focused on controlling and stabilizing the state, he often neglected his family life. His correspondence with his wife reveals her dissatisfaction when faced with wartime shortages and the challenges of raising a growing brood of children on her own. The volume concludes with one of Paine’s most influential cases, the first of many treason trials in the aftermath of Shays’ Rebellion.Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society.