MHS News

Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009
MHS honors Senator, Fellow

The Trustees and staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society were saddened to note the passing of a dear friend and Fellow of the Society, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.  Sen. Kennedy, who was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1968, was a staunch supporter of the MHS throughout the years, particularly when it came to presenting the award named for his late brother, the John F. Kennedy Medal.  The medal is awarded by the Society to a person doing outstanding service for history and is its highest honor.

Sen. Kennedy and wife Victoria reading excerpts from the Adams correspondence in 2007.

Sen. Kennedy served as the keynote speaker at the Society’s bicentennial dinner at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on 17 May 1991, where he presented the Kennedy Medal to Oscar Handlin.  MHS Pres. Dennis Fiori recalled Sen. Kennedy’s attendance at the 25 October 2006 dinner honoring Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., with the Kennedy Medal.  Having just arrived from a rally for Gov. Deval Patrick, Fiori observed that the senator still had “plenty of the Kennedy fight in him.”  Sen. Kennedy then displayed his famed across-the-aisle conciliatory style by personally greeting all the guests, including noted Massachusetts Republicans George Lodge and the late Bill Saltonstall, and giving a poignant presentation reminding all of the ties and friendships among the great Massachusetts political clans.

“This is a great loss for the Massachusetts Historical Society, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole,” stated Fiori.  “Sen. Kennedy not only displayed a keen interest in our nation’s history, but helped form it.  He appreciated the need to have history inform our understanding of the problems we face as a nation today and help educate the citizens of tomorrow.”

Due to Sen. Kennedy’s long association with the Society, he filmed a piece for the Today Show at 1154 Boylston Street in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in 2004.  Most recently, Sen. Kennedy and his wife, Victoria, gave a spirited reading from the letters of John and Abigail Adams as part of an evening celebrating the publication of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, edited by Margaret A. Hogan, Managing Editor, and C. James Taylor, Editor in Chief of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The event, held on 19 November 2007, drew a crowd of over 700 people to Boston's Faneuil Hall and included Gov. Deval Patrick and Diane Patrick and Gov. Michael Dukakis and Kitty Dukakis.  To see the event in its entirety, visit the WGBH Forum (http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/letters-john-and-abigail-adams).

Was John Quincy Adams a Tweeter?

Starting on 5 August 2009, the Massachusetts Historical Society will begin posting daily entries on the "micro-blog" site Twitter on behalf of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and son of John Adams, the second president. The project, which can be viewed here, is being launched in conjunction with the bicentennial of Adams's trip to Russia as the first US minister.

The idea for the project came about in May when a student on a tour of the MHS saw Adams's line-a-day diary notes and exclaimed, "It's like he's using Twitter." The Society's library staff realized the comparison was an interesting one, blogging about it in the MHS official blog, the Beehive. Once they recalled that some of the entries coincided with a trip Adams took to Russia exactly 200 years ago, the MHS staff decided that this was an opportunity too good to pass up. Beginning on 5 August, the JQ Adams project on Twitter will feature Adams's daily entry from exactly 200 years previous and, where possible, will be augmented with maps showing his location (Adams provided regular latitude and longitude readings), links to longer diary entries, and other information.

"Making Adams a voice in the social web conversation will definitely increase his profile--and ours too, for being willing to be innovative. We don't know of any other institutions using historical source material from their collections that so perfectly fits the format of Twitter. These posts are John Quincy Adams's own succinct comments about his day," stated Nancy Heywood, MHS digital projects coordinator and one of the staff members responsible for this project. "We certainly hope others will find Adams's journey as fascinating as we do," added her colleague on the project, Assistant Reference Librarian Jeremy Dibbell.

Twitter offers its users a platform to answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. Adams's line-a-day diary entries do just that, although unlike Twitter, they were neither meant for nor available for immediate public consumption at the time. Adams's succinct entries are surprisingly rich, full of details about his reading, meals, weather, and shipboard activities. For example, the entry for 6 August, "Thick fog. Scanty Wind. On George's Bank. Lat: 42-34. Read Massillon's Careme Sermons 2 & 3. Ladies are Sick." A single volume contains most entries and spans periods of time from 1 January 1795 to 12 May 1801 and 5 August 1809 to 30 April 1836.

Adams was a prolific diarist--filling 51 volumes over 69 years (amounting to nearly 15,000 pages)--and often kept multiple diaries simultaneously. The line-a-day entries and the rest of Adams's diaries are part of the Adams Family Papers and are available on the MHS website as "The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection." This project was partly funded by a 2003 "Save America's Treasures" grant, which allowed the MHS to conserve the diaries and create the digital versions.

Through the JQ Adams project on Twitter, the MHS hopes to reach out to a new and different audience in an innovative, cost-effective way. This project will bring an interesting part of the American story to an online audience in conjunction with the MHS's mission to make the documents of US history more accessible to the public. In addition, the project will allow the MHS to address some of its strategic goals, including increasing the public's awareness of the MHS; publicizing the MHS's Adams Family Papers collections; and, on a technical note, adding transcriptions for the line-a-day entries to the existing digital collection of John Quincy Adams's diaries. In addition, the project will mark the bicentennial of this important trip, which represents the beginning of US-Russian diplomatic relations.

Staff Spotlight: Hobson Woodward

Hobson Woodward and the Publication of A Brave Vessel

The staff of the MHS is celebrating the publication of A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest," written by their colleague Hobson Woodward, associate editor for the Adams Papers editorial project.

Hobson did not plan on becoming an independent historian traveling to Bermuda on research or a documentary editor spending his days with the correspondence of America's second president. He originally studied English and philosophy as an undergraduate at Hobart College in upstate New York. An internship in manuscripts processing through the dual-degree program in History and Archives Management at Simmons College brought him to the MHS. During this time he was hired by the Adams Papers as a transcriber. Almost seven years later, Hobson is an essential member of the Adams Papers team, overseeing transcription, supervising production work, and assisting on research for both series--Papers of John Adams and Adams Family Correspondence. He has contributed to six volumes including three from each series.

In between his work with the Adams Papers and an active family life, Hobson managed to travel to London, Bermuda, and Jamestown, Va., to research A Brave Vessel, the true story behind the shipwreck that is thought to have inspired William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. The tale begins in 1609 as aspiring writer William Strachey sets sail from England for the New World aboard the Sea Venture. Caught in a hurricane, the ship separated from its fleet and wrecked on uninhabited Bermuda. Strachey's meticulous account of the wreck, the castaways's time on Bermuda, and their arrival in a devastated Jamestown was read by his contemporaries, apparently including Shakespeare. A Brave Vessel is the fascinating account of a near-miss in the settling of Virginia, the true story behind one of Shakespeare's great plays, and the tragedy of the man who failed as an author but who contributed to the creation of a masterpiece.

A Brave Vessel has already received coverage in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. Hobson will take time from his Adams Papers duties to give a Brown Bag presentation on his book at the MHS on 31 July at 12 p.m. Needless to say, the staff of the MHS is very proud of their colleague's achievement.

Recent MHS Grant Announcements - July

Support received from the NEH, Packard Humanities Institute, and LSTA

Sarah Gooll Putnam diary 2, 22-23 February 1862.

Friends of the MHS noticed a flurry of press in the last week of June as local media outlets including WBZ-TV, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram, Patriot Ledger, Bay State Banner, Fenway News, and a few local blogs announced that the Adams Papers was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to continue its work of publishing the papers of John and Abigail Adams and their extended family, in book and digital format. The NEH is providing the project with a two-year $450,000 grant ($200,000 outright, $250,000 matching). In addition, the Packard Humanities Institute has renewed its contract with the Adams Papers for the coming fiscal year for $317,800. The money from both organizations will be used to publish two books--The Papers of John Adams, vol. 15, and Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 10--as well as continue work on three other volumes and document transcription into the Early National period. It will also allow the MHS to prepare four more volumes to be added to its Founding Families Digital Edition website, which currently provides electronic access to over 30 volumes of the award-winning Adams Papers series.

In other grant news, the MHS was recently notified that it has been awarded a $16,771 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners to microfilm the diaries of Sarah G. Putnam. Putnam, a Boston portrait artist, began her diary on Thanksgiving Day in 1860 when she was nine years old and maintained it until her death in 1912, filling 27 volumes. The diaries are richly illustrated with approximately 400 watercolor paintings and chronicle Putnam's career as an artist as well as her extensive travels throughout the United States and abroad. As part of the project, which will run from 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2010, the MHS will create digital images of Putnam's color illustrations for use by researchers.