Weblinks for HSB 41

Inventing Harvard

Harvard History: A Bibliography

Laurel Ulrich on the lack of female portraiture in the renovated Barker Center.

Find your Harvard Ancestors in this list of Harvard graduates from 1642 to 1737.

Objects in the Harvard Archives reveal history and myth-making at Harvard and beyond.

The Fogg Museum houses Harvard's ceremonial silver, which dates from the foundation of the college in the 1630s.

Pilgrims & Thanksgiving

Plimoth Plantation is a great resource for all things Pilgrim. The Thanksgiving pages correct many of the myths surrounding the holiday.

On December 23 1881 the Philadelphia Press published an account of the first festival of the Pennsylvania Pilgrims’ descendents, including Mark Twain’s speech that attacks such meetings.

The American Sense of Puritanism is a UVA site which differentiates between Pilgrims and Puritans and tracks their competing memories in our culture.

Excerpts of Governor William Bradford’s journal that discusses the Pilgrims’ landing at Cape Cod.

Excerpts of James Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives. The part of interest talks about the early efforts to make Plymouth Rock a central part of the Pilgrims’ history.

Pilgrim Hall is a good example of the continuing tradition of great devotion to the Pilgrim idea. See the pages on Plymouth Rock, the history of Thanksgiving, and Forefathers’ Day.

The Smithsonian owns a piece of Plymouth Rock, a testament to its importance in American culture.

These cartoons show just how much influence some people think the Pilgrims had on the formation of the American republic.

Etext of ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish.’

Etext of ‘Thankstaking,’ an article by Jane Kamensky also included in the Sourcebook.

The text of Lincoln’s first proclamation of a national day of Thanksgiving.

The text of Daniel Webster’s famous speech at the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing.

Excerpts from a number of presidential proclamations.

Witch-Hunting

A Documentary Archive of the Salem Witch Trials.

The City of Salem witch pages, including a timeline.

The official Site of the Witches’ League for Public Awareness.

An Interactive Salem site from National Geographic.

Take the Salem Witch-trials Quiz.

Interactive Map of the Salem Witch Trials.

Hawthorne Etexts

Etext of ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’.

Etext of ‘Young Goodman Brown’.

Etext of ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ also included in the sourcebook.

The House of the Seven Gables

Official House of the Seven Gables site.

Etext of The House of the Seven Gables.

The House of the Seven Gables Opera.

Buy the Haunted House of the Seven Gables Miniature Savings Bank.

Paul Revere

The official site of the Paul Revere House. Includes links to pages on Revere himself, the history of the house, and the infamous ride.

A Video Presentation of Paul Revere’s Ride.

An umbrella site of Revere-related links.

Etext of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ also included in the sourcebook.

Longfellow

CNN considers the renaissance of Longfellow’s poetry to commemorate the restoration and renovation of the Longfellow House.

Longfellow’s Cambridge House at 105 Brattle St. was Longfellow’s residence for much of his life. Today, the National Parks Service oversees the house and the Longfellow archives that reside there.

Longfellow’s Portland House: Longfellow’s house on Brattle St. is the one made famous in his poems and where he did the bulk of his writing, but he spent his childhood in Portland, ME. The Maine Historical Society maintains the house today and recently did a full restoration.

Photographs of Minnehaha Falls spoke to Longfellow who saw them shortly before writing “Hiawatha” and decided to name his heroine after the impressive falls.

The Minnehaha Falls Visitor Center is a two-thirds scale replica of the Longfellow house on Brattle St. It was built in 1907, and associates Longfellow with the falls, a place he never actually visited.

The official website of Longfellow's Wayside Inn

Etext of ‘Hiawatha’.

The Evangeline Homepage - a site full of links to the history and culture of Acadia.

Etext of ‘Evangeline’.

Etext of ‘The Skeleton in Armor’ also included in the sourcebook.

Whittier

Auto-biographical narrative of Whittier’s life.

Etext of Whittier’s ‘Skipper Ireson’s Ride’ also included in the sourcebook.

Etext of Whittier’s ‘How the Women Went from Dover’ and ‘Cassandra Southwick’ also included in the sourcebook.

Etext of Whittier’s ‘The King’s Missive’ also included in the sourcebook.

Lawrence and Cassandra Sedgwick site.

New England Slavery

Yale, Slavery, and Abolition, a site designed by three Yale graduates students that aims to set the record straight about Yale’s legacy of slavery.

A thoughtful reaction to the Yale, Slavery, and Abolition site.

David W. Blight, "If You Don't Tell it Like it Was, it Can Never Be As it Ought to Be." This was a keynote address at the Gilder Lehrman conference on Yale and Slavery.

Programme for a 2002 Yale conference on "Slavery and Freedom in New England"

Download a conference paper addressing the Yale connection to slavery in the Antebellum period.

The Amistad affair had many New England connections. This site promotes work on the Amistad events and includes a quilt making project and information on the reconstructed schooner.

Documents from the Amistad affair are summarized on this website from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University.

At Harvard University, research on New England slavery is supported by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research.

At Yale University, research on New England slavery is supported by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Revolution

Become a Special Agent charged with investigating the Boston Massacre in this historical role-play game.

The Summation of John Adams includes an interesting version of the events of the Boston Massacre.

In 1774 John Hancock made a speech commemorating the Boston Massacre.

This article traces the story of the discovery of six needlework samplers that were used to document revolutionary war Pensions.

Etext of William Nell’s ‘Colored Patriots’ also included in the sourcebook.

Official Site of the Freedom Trail.

Official Site of the Old South Meeting House.

Washington Elm

The National Register of Historic Trees lists lots of famous trees and other plants and allows you to order saplings of each. Try searching under the category of “American Revolution” for a slew of still living trees commemorating the Revolution.

The George Washington collections of the Library of Congress can be browsed and searched through the American Memory Project. Check out his diary, and the letters he wrote to the Continental Congress when he took over the army in July, 1775.

A scion of the Washington Elm is planted at the University of Washington.

Reference to the Washington Elm in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

A Denver Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution with an interest in the Washington Elm.

Several markers placed by the Cambridge Historical Commission dot the Cambridge Common, and billboard exhibits offer stories about Washington and Cambridge during the Revolution. How do these municipal public history projects tell the story? Visit the CHC list of historical marker..

Harvard University's own Fogg Museum of Art has in its possession an object shaped like a book carved out of the old elm. The object belongs to the collections of the Houghton library but was loaned to the Fogg several years ago for a historical exhibit.

The Cambridge Historical Society is housed in the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street, just a few blocks away from the Cambridge Common. A back room of the house contains a cut-out from the Washington Elm. Take a tour of the house, and you'll have a chance to learn lots about colonial architecture, and also get a chance to ask the guides for the latest version of the legend of the elm.

The Cambridge room at the Cambridge Public Library contains a table made out of timbers from the Washington Elm. The CPL is just a few blocks down Broadway from Harvard. The room is generally not open to the public, but if you explain why you're visiting they may let you see the table.

Charles River

Maps from the Historical Atlas of Massachusetts by Richard W. Wilkie and Jack Tager - Published in 1991. See especially Boston in 1722, the siege of Boston in 1775, and the creation of new urban areas.

On Indians and the Charles in Newton. This is from a history of Newton Upper Falls.

Allen Lutins’s 1992 SUNY Binghamton Masters Thesis on Pre-historic fish-weirs in North America.

A brief history of the Charles, told from the perspective of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The home for the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC)’s Master Plan for the Charles River Basin

A walking tour of Boston and surrounding towns centered on the Charles River.

A brief summary of a new book by Karl Haglund called, Inventing the Charles River.

Miscellaneous

Did the Welsh discover America?

The US Census began in 1790 and is available online.

Visit the Material Culture collections at the University of Wisconsin.