Alexander Kluger Presents @ Brown Bag Lunch

Last Wednesday (January 5th) visiting scholar Alexander Kluger from the Universitat Wurzburg (Germany) spoke at a brown bag lunch event on the subject of his research while in residence here at the Massachusetts Historical Society. In this post, I offer a brief summary of Alex's prepared talk, "What Is ‘Influence'? German Literature and American Transcendentalism," and the discussion that followed.

Prior to beginning his year-long residency, Kluger proposed to examine the influence of German literature on the work of the American Transcendentalists. With this research, he sought to fill a gap in the existing scholarship, providing a more focused study than many previous works that have explored (for example) broader themes such as the German influence on New England authors, or narrower studies that constructed direct lines of connection between German author A and American scholar B.

During his research, it became clear to Alex that to speak of German "influence" on the Transcendentalists, particularly in the narrow sense of German authors' style and thought substantially altering an American author's work, would be a mischaracterization of the relationship between the two intellectual traditions. Instead, Alex has come to think about the "role" of German writers, or German writing as "objects of reference" for the Transcendentalist thinkers. He gives as an example Margaret Fuller's poetry, which often references German writers, whom she greatly admired, but does not give any noticeable sign, in style or form or overall opinion, of having been substantially changed by her reading of (for example) Goethe.

Instead of being "influenced" by German intellectuals, Alex suggests that the Transcendentalists felt a kinship with their German contemporaries, with whom they shared the experience of having come of age as thinkers within a common "salon culture." Therefore, many similarities observed their approach and thinking previously attributed to German-to-American influence may in fact be a case of simultaneous development. As Alex put it, the Transcendentalists gravitated toward German writers because they looked at them as kindred spirits: "These are people who have thought the thoughts that we are thinking right now!"

During the discussion period following Alex's presentation, participants sought to clarify what the Transcendentalists, particularly, found so compelling about German thinkers. German intellectual culture was popular within a much broader group of Americans than the Transcendentalist circle. However, Alex suggests that many others who felt an affinity with German culture, such as George Ticknor, emphasized the lessons that could be learned from Germany concerning the development of educational institutions, whereas the Transcendentalists emphasized a more emotive, romantic connections. They used German thought as a vantage point from which they could critique American society. Also discussed were the intersections between theology, nationalism, and literary discourse, all of which energized young thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.

We congratulate Alex on a fruitful six months here at the Society and look forward to seeing where the next six months will take his research.

Welcome Short-Term Fellow Mary Kelley

This week the MHS welcomes Dr. Mary Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI). Dr. Kelley is a long-time friend of the MHS, having been elected as a Massachusetts Historical Society Fellow in 1994 and, among other programs, last spoke at the MHS in April 2010, delivering the keynote address at the conference "Margaret Fuller and Her Circles."

Dr. Kelley has been awarded the Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Fellowship at the MHS to conduct research for her book-length project, "What are you reading and what are you saying?", a quotation drawn from a letter written in the 1820s by Mary Telfair of Savannah, Georgia, to her friend Mary Few of New York City. As a scholar of 18th and 19th century intellectual and cultural history, Kelley plans to explore the way in which reading and writing between family members are "cultural acts [that] generate and articulate meaning within a specific historical context." She asks what might happen if books, texts, authors, and readers were understood as "cultural practices," part of the "cultural labor individuals deploy in making meaning of daily existence." To investigate this question, Kelley will utilize the myriad family papers, rich with correspondence, which the society holds.

The MHS staff welcomes Dr. Kelley back to the Society and wishes her a fruitful research visit.

Massachusetts Finds Her Voice

The year 2011 marks the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. Over the course of the next five years the MHS will mark this milestone with a number of public events, exhibitions, publication projects, and web displays. The first of these efforts, Looking at the Civil War: Massachusetts Finds Her Voice launched on the MHS website today.

Over the course of the next 52 months, January 2011 through April 2015, we will post one Civil War related item per month to our website. The selected item will be something either written in or related to an event that occurred in that month 150 years ago. The majority of these materials will be manuscript items -- letters, diaries, and other personal papers -- discussing some aspect of the war. We will highlight materials to represent the many voices of the citizens of Massachusetts: soldiers, statesmen, women, politicians, and children.
Each month the display will feature a digitized version of the document, available as a screen-sized image and in high-resolution, a full transcription of the document, and a short contextual essay.

To kick off the online exhibition we feature a draft letter from the John A. Andrew Papers, (collection guide available) in which Andrew, the newly inaugurated governor of Massachusetts, writes to Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, that Massachusetts will respond with "an alacrity & force" to any call for troops issued by the federal government. Andrew was the first governor to promise troops to the federal government, and when war broke out in April 1861, Massachusetts was one of the first states to answer Lincoln's call for troops to defend the nation's capital.

Be sure to visit our website each month to view the new object. In February, we will feature a letter written by Edward Everett in which he discusses the peace conference that met in Virginia and gives his opinion of the secession crisis. And plan to visit the library to view the larger manuscript collections from which these items are drawn.

Fans of our established Object of the Month can rest assured that the Civil War feature will run in addition to, not in place of the Object of the Month. So continue to look to that feature as well.

My Internship at the Massachusetts Historical Society

During my senior year at college, I finally reached a point where I had to decide what I was going to do with my B.A. in history. Then, my mom offered a suggestion I'd never thought of before: what about being a librarian?  As I began to explore this career possibility, I learned more about archives, and, through a tip from a Tufts University archivist, wound up with an internship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I enjoyed my time in the collections services department and decided to get my masters degree in library science at Simmons College. Last year, I was lucky enough to get another internship in the collections services department as part of one of my Simmons classes, and this semester, I came back for more! This time, I worked in the reader services department answering researchers' reference questions. 

Getting a taste of public services in an archives has been extremely valuable and a great complement to my behind-the-scenes experiences. It's rewarding to help people directly and see the immediate results of one's work. However, being in direct contact with researchers has its added pressures. For example, I received one question about how slavery ended in Massachusetts that I spent half a day on but still could not find the answer. Despite the frustration, the search for the answer was educational for me because I learned a ton about the end of slavery in Massachusetts. As a plug, an especially great resource was the Massachusetts Historical Society's online exhibit: http://www.masshist.org/endofslavery/. 

This internship also reinforced for me the importance of building connections between different cultural institutions, such as museums, archives and libraries, and knowing other institutions' collection strengths. Researchers asked me several questions this semester that our library didn't have the right resources to answer, so I sent people to other repositories. For example, since genealogy is not a collecting focus of the MHS I referred several people to the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the Massachusetts State Archives. However, I did have one genealogical victory. A researcher wanted information on an ancestor that lived in Charlestown during the 17^th century, and I was surprised to discover several mentions of him in our ready reference collection, as well as an autobiography on Google Books!

Overall, this internship gave me a greater appreciation of reference librarians. There is so much information, not only in the physical collections but also on the web, that knowing which sources to check takes trial and error, experience, and a great memory. I was lucky to pick up a few tips in my time here.