Did you know that Pennsylvania has the longest and most varied fall foliage season in the United States? 

John Moran, “Now Autumn leaves are falling fast, and rustle on the ground,” ca. 1861. Albumen on stereograph mount.

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Nearly two centuries ago, U.S. Superintendent of of Indian Trade Thomas McKenney commissioned Charles Bird King to paint portraits of Native American delegates who travelled to Washington, D.C. to negotiate treaties with the federal government. McKenney also hired James Hall, a judge and writer, to craft biographies of portraits’ subjects.

The resulting portraits and biographies were reproduced as a series of three volumes titled History of the Indian Tribes of North America. McKenney’s aim in publishing the volumes was to preserve “in the archives of the Government whatever of the aboriginal man can be rescued from the destruction which awaits his race.” This intent fed into the popular myth of the “vanishing Indian,” which justified the United States’ violent removal of indigenous people from their land.

Charles Bird King, “No. 3 Mon-Hon-Go, An Osage Woman” from a series of proofs after plates from McKenney and Hall’s “History of the Indian Tribes of North America” (Philadelphia: ca. 1865). Chromolithograph.

In honor of #NationalMoldyCheeseDay falling on a #FinisFriday, here is the (not moldy) finispiece from a 1796 treatise on dairying. 

Josiah Twamley. Dairying exemplified, or, the business of cheese-making. (Providence, 1796.)

Alt title: workday lunch 2020. 

Frederick Saunders. Salad for the Solitary. New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1856.

Galloping  into #spookyseason like…
Raise your scythe if you also just love October.
Woodcut from: Thomas Chamberlain. The minister  preaching his own funeral  sermon. (Boston, 1790).

Fanny Lawrence was one of the many formerly enslaved children whose portraits were reproduced and disseminated in service of the abolitionist cause. Lawrence was born in Virginia and was baptized at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn by Henry Ward Beecher. 

Children like Lawrence became powerful symbols for white abolitionists, who were appalled by the fact that people who passed as white were subjected to the cruelties of the slave trade. The plight of white passing enslaved people was a point of cultural fixation throughout the 19th century and was even the subject of Mark Twain’s 1894 novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson. 

James Wallace Black, Fannie Lawrence, ca. 1863. Albumen on carte-de-visite mount.  

Spooky season approaches! Here’s a page from an anatomy book that once belonged to Marjorie E. Bullock, who was a student in an Artistic Anatomy course at the University of Montana in the 1920s. 

Marjorie E. Bullock, Artistic Anatomy, ca. 1920-1923. Ink drawing. 

It’s Friday and we wanted to do something fun so here are some funghi. 

This hand colored plate is from Rambles in Search of Flowerless Plants, by British botanist Margaret Plues. Margaret wrote an  entire series of “Rambles,” which were marketed towards the general public, in addition to other scientific works on British grasses and ferns. 

Margaret Plues. Rambles in  Search of Flowerless Plants. (London, 1865)
#FunghiFriday #Botany #WomeninScience #WomeninSTEM #WomensHistory #RareBooks #SpecialCollections #NewAcquisition

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was first published in 1855. A small book of twelve poems, it was Whitman’s first. He spent  the next 37 years revising and  rewriting it, and when he died in 1892 the book had grown to almost 300 poems.   

The 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass was banned in 1882 by Boston D.A. Oliver Stevens as “obscene literature.”  The first printing, 1000 copies, sold out in a single day. 

 This week is #BannedBooksWeek, which celebrates the freedom to read. Head over to our Instagram stories for more! 

 Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. (Brooklyn, 1855).

This summer, Franklin & Marshall intern Lydia Shaw worked on a range of women’s history projects at the Library Company, including the social media posts for the exhibition Women Get Things Done: Women’s Activism, 1860-1880, which opened last week. In this election season, it’s worth reading what Lydia wrote about Victoria Woodhull … the remarkable woman who ran for president in 1872 … only one of many chapters in her remarkable life.

To read about  the 1872 election, and the Beecher-Tilton scandal, and Victoria Woodhull - the woman who dared to be outspoken - check out the blog post here.