“Women’s Work For Women”

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In 1881, the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church published a collection of reports from or about female missionary doctors who had gone to work in the MEC’s “mission fields” in India and China. Women’s auxiliary groups to mission societies were not unusual in the United States. Many missionary groups refused to admit women or required that they form their own society; they could be associated with but not on the same… Continue reading

Public Health Nursing in the Settlement House

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Our collection includes a series of reports from the the Henry Street Settlement House, one of the many settlement houses that sprang up across the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; some still survive, although in vastly different form. The Henry Street House was in New York City, in a thickly settled district largely populated by immigrants and transient population. This particular settlement house was more… Continue reading

Boom

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Probably best not to try any of the techniques for making your own fireworks in Robert Jones’s 1776 instructional, Artificial fireworks, improved to the modern practice, but the names alone are worth the read: drove stars, tailed stars, common stars, gold rain, silver rain. Continue reading

Happy Solstice

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A search for ‘midsummer’ in our collections doesn’t yield a ton of results but they do include two volumes of “nothing more than a hasty record” from Matthew Woods of travels in Europe in the late nineteenth century. I don’t know about you but my “hasty record” is generally much briefer than two volumes! Continue reading