Society Archives Research Articles

Atmospheric footnotes: Ada Lovelace on climate

This article brings to light correspondence between Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) and Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871) from the Royal Society archives. The 1848 letters reveal the extent of her contribution to an article authored by her husband, William King, Lord Lovelace (1805–1893), on the role of climate on crop growth. This involvement uncovers little-known facets of her scientific pursuits: her interest in the application of photography to meteorological instrumentation, her budding study of astronomy, and her development of mathematical treatments to model the environmental conditions required for plants to grow. The exchange situates Ada Lovelace in the larger context of Victorian science and reflects more widely on the complicated access of women to institutional science.

The Library of Duke Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-Weimar and the Provenance of Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft Publications in the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Abstract In 2004, fire struck the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek (HAAB), particularly affecting its seventeenth-century collections, among them rich holdings of works associated with the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbearing Society), the foremost seventeenth-century German cultural society. Scholars and librarians feared that unique copies of titles that Society members deposited or once owned, which represent valuable source material relating to early modern German and European thought and culture, were lost or damaged in the fire. This article examines the development and dispersal of the library of the second head of the Society, Duke Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-Weimar, and analyzes its Society connections and context, including the handling of deposit copies members sent to the Erzschrein, or Society archive. This library, as one of the predecessor libraries to the Ducal Library and ultimately the HAAB in Weimar, is a channel through which unique copies of Society works may have reached the HAAB. Through analysis of archival sources related to Wilhelm’s library and the Society in Weimar, application of bibliographic methods, and physical inspection of HAAB copies of Society titles for evidence of provenance, this article investigates their fate from a qualitative perspective in the wake of the library fire.

“They polluted our cropfields and our rivers, they killed us”: Farmers’ complaints about mining pollution in the Katangese Copperbelt

The adverse impacts of mining industries on human health, local biodiversity, and food security are well-documented in the Katangese Copperbelt. However, farmers' perceptions of pollution and their struggles to obtain compensation for the externalities of mining industries are little addressed in scientific and public debates. Drawing on interviews with smallholder farmers, local civil society archives, oral histories, and analysis of satellite images, this article presents a case of farmers of Mulungwishi Valley whose fields and waterways were polluted by mining effluents. While 25% of respondent farmers argued that they had noticed pollution from the beginning of the 2000s, testimonies from civil society, customary authorities, and farmers concurred that the phenomenon has increased since 2010. Particularly between 2013 and 2014, the death of fish in the Mulungwishi River, the coloration of the water, the spread of mining effluents across the valley, and crop failure raised concerns and despair among farmers. Remarkable changes in land cover and use were noticeable. Since a joint impact assessment in 2014 by la Générale des Carrières et des Mines’ (Gécamines) experts and farmers, civil society unsuccessfully continued a struggle to obtain compensation for about 2570 farmers affected by pollution. Despite an absolute silence of the polluter, 88% of these farmers insisted on the depollution of the valley and were willing to accept, if it was offered, financial compensation of $US 2820 per farmer. The decade-long persistence of farmers in asserting these requests debunks the view of farmers as passive or not concerned about environmental pollution. This article will be helpful for stakeholders (victims and polluters) to find common ground when resolving this environmental issue that has resulted in socio-economic difficulties beyond the valley.

Report: Melville Society-Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2022

Report:Melville Society-Bezanson Archive Fellowship 2022 Christopher Rice Click for larger view View full resolution Christopher Rice in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, May 2022. Photo courtesy of Christopher Rice. [End Page 127] When Bob Wallace first wrote to me about visiting the Melville Society Archive in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, it was not easy to foresee it being more than two years before I might set foot inside. A few (too many) catastrophes later, and it became no simple feat to envision the same academic purpose I once had amongst the reverberations of much larger events. Suddenly the archive seemed worlds away across a border which was now mostly sealed shut—at least for the purposes of would-be literary scholars. Soon, I found myself retaining the ambiguous honour of being the longest-standing Bezanson fellow: an honorific of belatedness which I happily wear with pride. I was more than ready to go in spring 2022. With final grades and dissertation work freshly submitted that morning, I hopped in a rental car and made the drive down from Montreal, through the lush, exhilarating old roads of Vermont, towards my New Bedford lodgings, which sat directly across from the "Sawmill" Acushnet River reserve. Here I often returned in the early evenings away, enjoying the trails that threaded through restored wetlands, perhaps even experiencing once or twice something like that temporary "all" feeling on days otherwise spent poring over fragments, maxing out my time in the reading room. I had come (I recalled) to make use of the Melville Society Archive's resources on Clarel and Melville's development as a poet. By the time travel was permitted, I arrived in the archive especially interested in how certain modal patterns or tendencies I had been tracing in Mardi might help illuminate the structure of Clarel. I thought looking at some of the editions of poetry that Melville engaged with during his poetic development could clarify my thinking about the poem's composition and structure. Yet I also came under no illusions; having read many of the previous fellows' reports, the common, nearly gothic, experience of the archive seemed to involve this: that whatever one went in for, the archive had other plans. I have my own theory regarding this apparently recurring phenomenon, since it remains unclear whether the space itself exerts this unconscious effect on all who fall within its orbit, or whether Melvilleans as a class possess some unique propensity that thwarts the pursuit of any single-minded endeavor in the face of such vast, rich resources—possibly, however, some Bezanson fellows are just easily distracted. On my first morning in the archive, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards arrived to greet me. She explained the collection in great detail, got me oriented without delay, and what's more, made me feel incredibly welcome. I was certainly made to feel more welcome than I deserved for which I remain extremely grateful. We chatted away in the stacks as I loaded up the trolley with anything and [End Page 128] everything that happened to catch my eye. The resultant haul looked more like bottom trawling than angling, but its bulk was visibly composed of heavy boxes packed with Walter Bezanson's papers, with some of Jay Leyda's thrown in, too. Bezanson's description of the Leyda papers, which he had donated to the archive, is fairly well-known and quite alluring: he describes receiving them at a time when Leyda and his wife Si-Lan Chen appeared to have no other "place" but the "beat up car in which they arrived," referring to the collection of documents as "merely a fragment from his incredibly productive and slightly mysterious life" (Jay Leyda Papers Finding Aid 1). As I sifted through the notes and letters contained in these boxes, I detected at once the energy and vitality instilled throughout Leyda's endeavour. He was constantly in motion, flitting between places and jotting down stray hunches on the back of correspondence as he persistently pursued an unruly array of creative projects that set off in disparate directions. In the midst of so much motion, Leyda steadily, and meticulously, sought out traces of Melville...

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

Borrowed Books and Scholarly Interventions in Sarah Josepha Hale’s Genius of Oblivion (1823)

ABSTRACT Historical society archives and libraries in the early United States often appear as strictly masculine spaces in which few, if any, women had access and influence. Although scholarship tends to depict these archives and the historical narratives that they promoted in this light, women found a range of ways to engage with these institutions between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879), prior to her emergence as the most influential magazine editor in the antebellum United States, demonstrates this in her mostly neglected early poem, “Genius of Oblivion” (1823). Through the analysis of her unexamined personal correspondence with New Hampshire librarian Jacob Bailey Moore and a closer reading of her poetry, this article illuminates Hale’s use of her social network to access library materials and engage through poetry with the scholarship of contemporary male authors.

Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union?

Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union? Cécile Vaissié Josephine von Zitzewitz, The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union. 248 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ISBN 978-1788313766. $120.00. Samizdat appeared in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1950s, and Josephine von Zitzewitz defines it very validly as "the production and circulation of texts without the involvement of the state publishing houses and the censor's office" (1). She thus underlines that samizdat is not defined by the genre or the political stances of its texts, but by the ways these texts were produced and circulated. She adds that it was "a mass phenomenon" in the later decades of the Soviet Union, since estimations of the number of people involved range "from hundreds of thousands to several million people" (2). Therefore, samizdat deserves very well to be researched, and studying it has been made much easier by the fact that, as stated by Zitzewitz, samizdat texts are being made more and more accessible to researchers. Book collections are being progressively put online (as is the case, for example, for Viacheslav Igrunov's Antologiia samizdata [Anthology of Samizdat]), and rich collections of samizdat are now available in research centers all over the world: in various branches of Memorial in Russia (officially closed by the authorities since December 2021), in the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen (Germany), the Open Society Archives at the Central European University (apparently still in Budapest), the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, the University of Toronto with its program for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence, and so on. This facilitated access to samizdat texts has helped, especially in the past decade, to develop scientific publications on this topic. The excellent journal Acta Samizdatica/Zapiski o samizdate and its editors, Elena Strukova and [End Page 941] Boris Belenkin, have greatly contributed to encouraging a scientific approach to samizdat. Prepared by Memorial International and the Historical Library in Moscow, Acta Samizdatica, which put out its fifth issue in December 2020, has since 2012 published articles on various aspects of samizdat and tamizdat, encouraged young researchers' publications, and coordinated the works of more senior scholars from the ex-Soviet Union and from "the West."1 Researchers and archivists from Memorial—such as Aleksei Makarov, Olga Rosenblum (who recently started a cycle of Zoom conferences, "The Dissident Library"), Gennadii Kuzovkin, and Aleksandr Daniel´, a samizdat "veteran"—have helped enormously to develop this research on samizdat.2 Scholars such as Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Ann Komaromi have done the same outside of Russia.3 Furthermore, more books on the dissident movement have been published, as well as memoirs written by dissidents and interviews of dissidents.4 Some Internet sites popularize high-quality, accessible resources on samizdat, dissidence, and late Soviet culture, and Arzamas may be the best site on such topics (https://arzamas.academy/courses/40/2). In this context of growing research and publications, Zitzewitz's last book nonetheless stands out, since it explores seriously some very understudied questions. One of her main positions consists in disconnecting samizdat, as a cultural and social practice, from the dissidence movement with which it is often associated. She is indeed right in stating that if "all dissidents were involved in samizdat" (9), not all readers of samizdat were active dissidents (10), even if the latter "made samizdat famous beyond the Soviet Union" (1). Furthermore, Zitzewitz aims [End Page 942] at analyzing samizdat readers and practices, not samizdat texts and authors, as many have already done, including Zitzewitz herself in her previous book.5 Since the samizdat reader was rarely only a reader, she explores the "individuals with personal experience of reading, reproducing, editing and circulating samizdat texts" (3), which has her returning, in her last two chapters, to some of the samizdat actors she analyzed in her first book. Zitzewitz points out the essential notion of "networks": people were reading samizdat mainly because they knew people who were reading/receiving/diffusing samizdat and not so much, or not only, because they had oppositional political positions or were looking for alternative texts. Therefore, she explores more generally the...

Obituary: Éva S. Balogh (1936–2021)

Born in Pécs, Éva S. Balogh was a twenty-year-old undergraduate student at Eötvös Loránd University at the time of the 1956 revolution. During the uprising, she helped publish a revolutionary student newspaper and fled Hungary in December 1956 to find refuge in Canada following the Soviet suppression of the revolt. Balogh completed a B.A. in history at Carleton University in Ottawa, followed by an M.A. and PhD in history from Yale University. Her scholarly career included serving as a professor of Russian and Eastern European history, as well as working in senior academic administration as the dean of Yale’s Morse College from 1973 to 1978. After this, Balogh’s career shifted focus, and she helped establish Brevis Press, a publishing company.Balogh was an early user of the Internet in March 1994, being an active participant in two nascent discussion groups on Hungary and Hungarian politics. Eventually, she established and moderated her own online discussion group on Hungary, before launching the Hungarian Spectrum blog in June 2007 from her home in Bethany, Connecticut. In a video interview with journalist Benjamin Novak, Balogh once recounted a friend’s initial reaction to her first blog post. “Oh, Éva,” the friend said with a tone of gentle pity, “a blog isn’t meant to be a historical treatise.”1 That comment reflected the challenge of transitioning from academic to journalistic writing.However, it was a challenge that Balogh would meet head on, as she wrote daily blog posts that mostly read like long-form journalistic articles. Her pieces offered analysis of Hungarian current affairs and trends in contemporary society, based on a wide range of Hungarian-language sources, as well as on her own connections to, and discussions with, key people in Hungarian democratic opposition circles. Balogh’s writing combined informed opinion and news reporting—all from a broadly liberal democratic angle. Balogh also produced English translations of Hungarian written sources. Over the course of fourteen years, Balogh published some 5,000 articles in Hungarian Spectrum—rarely missing a day and writing nearly all the published pieces herself. Her process was to spend each morning reading Hungarian news sites—both from the left and the right political spectrum—and then the second half of the day on writing her daily blog posts, most of which exceeded 1,000 words in length.In 2011, Balogh’s commitment to democratic values in Hungary led her to become a founding member of the Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter. Her diligent daily reporting in Hungarian Spectrum also brought her widespread recognition. In 2019, when George Soros won the Ridenhour Courage Prize, he donated the $10,000 that he had received to Hungarian Spectrum, in order to raise international awareness of Hungary’s slide into authoritarian rule. In addition to her thousands of Hungarian Spectrum articles, Balogh also published guest columns in the Hungarian daily Népszava.When Balogh died suddenly of cardiac arrest on November 30, 2021, Hungarian Spectrum had over 7,000 subscribers. The site became a true vocation for Éva—her commitment and passion never wavered. While her sudden death leaves a void for thousands of loyal readers, Hungarian Spectrum is archived by the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University and by the Library of Congress.2

Review: Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, by Rochona Majumdar

Review: <i>Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony</i>, by Rochona Majumdar

The birth of Soviet workers-dissidents

ABSTRACT This article deals with the birth of workers-dissidents in the USSR in the late 1970s, through materials of the Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE-RL) Research Institute held at the Budapest Open Society Archive. Soviet dissidents are usually regarded as intellectuals. However, beginning from the late 1970s, a small phenomenon of labour dissent arose within the Soviet Union, which also tried to found independent trade unions. These workers-dissidents had similarities as well as differences from intellectual dissidents. While intellectuals focused more on individual, civil and political rights, labour dissidents focused on socioeconomic rights. Contrary to what one may believe, the birth of this phenomenon was reported in relative detail by the British and American press. Soviet labour dissent was an important discursive field in the late Cold War. Anti-Communist Western trade unions and political parties mentioned Soviet repression against workers-dissident to emphasise one basic contradiction of the Soviet system. However, many leftist political parties and trade unions also showed solidarity with Soviet labour dissidents, criticizing the same contradiction. With hindsight, these widespread reactions show that the USSR was becoming ideologically isolated, because even many Western Communists and Socialists were no longer prone to justify its antidemocratic and repressive methods.

Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century by Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund

Explorations in the Icy North contributes an original transnational and comparative study of Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. In four chapters, Kaalund draws from archival sources in Britain, Canada, Denmark, and the United States to track changes in Arctic travel narratives between 1818 and 1883. She investigates these changing narratives to spotlight broader shifts in the financial sponsors of expeditions, technologies of travel and field research, and cultural expectations of how explorers ought to present their work in print. Anyone interested in Arctic history, Arctic exploration, travel writing, nineteenth-century imperial history, or field science will find this work valuable. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be Kaalund’s integrative analysis of primary-source documents across several national contexts.As a vast geographical region carved into more than a half-dozen nation-states and many more Indigenous settlement areas, the Arctic presents serious barriers to comprehensive historical inquiry. Yet, as Kaalund points out, the majority of historical scholarship about Arctic exploration remains constrained to national boundaries, rarely venturing into international or transnational waters. In contrast, the archival research supporting Explorations in the Icy North spans four significant repositories that have rarely been treated together—the U.S. National Archives, the Royal Society Archives in London, the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and the Statsbiblioteket at Aarhus Universitet in Denmark. Kaalund deliberately mobilizes this collection of sources to scrutinize and de-center British experiences in the Arctic, which historians have sometimes treated as a model or benchmark for imperial ambition in high latitudes. Kaalund finds that American, Canadian, and Danish travelers did not always emphasize heroism, “gentlemanly” behaviors, or mourning for lost expeditions as the British itinerants did. This comparison leads Kaalund to conclude that science in the Arctic is far more contingent than even the British example suggests. Authority, in Kaalund’s view, is dependent upon the physical location of field sites, audience, instrumentation and technology, and the political and economic power of funding organizations.Any comparative study must deal with the inevitable challenges of breadth, depth, and emphasis. Although Kaalund’s transnational approach helps to provide a better explanation of the complexities in Arctic science during the nineteenth century, the reader deserves more information about how and why she selected her particular case studies. In each chapter, Kaalund focuses the analysis on a handful of expeditions that she asserts to be the most revealing about explorers’ relationships, travel accounts, field sites, and intellectual communities. Yet she does not cover or quantify the other expeditions that she opted to leave out of her analysis. Nor does she regularly qualify or substantiate claims with evidence from the extensive existing literature about Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century.The tradeoff in this book should be familiar to practitioners in interdisciplinary history, especially transnational history. On one hand, the book covers a wider range of actors than typically appears in “national” Arctic history—missionaries, fur traders, researchers working at Arctic field stations, and both amateur and professional explorers dashing to the North Pole. Pointing to this diversity, Kaalund concludes that the category of explorer and the nature of Arctic science was highly unstable during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the book begs the question about the extent to which this conclusion reflects the selection of sources rather than the full record of Arctic expeditions during the period. Moreover, because travel accounts were not always read by the same audiences—even within Kaalund’s own chapter-by-chapter groupings—systematic or consistent comparisons of narrative devices is not possible. How can transnational analysis—notwithstanding the richness in its characterization of agency and historical contingency, especially in this work—defend itself more robustly against charges of selection bias?Even with this lingering question, Exploration in the Icy North gives readers much to consider about the nature of field science, exploration, intellectual authority, travel writing, and transnational history. Kaalund’s book advances our understanding of the Arctic, particularly how and why its nineteenth-century explorers, as well as the imperial powers behind them, recorded their efforts to enter, research, and exploit the region.

Между литературным сообществом и индивидуальным жизнетворчеством: Пушкин и Вольное общество любителей российской словесности

Abstract: The article reviews the history of Pushkin's participation in the activities of the Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, one of the most significant literary and social institutions of the 1810s and the first half of the 1820s. The author reconstructs in detail the cases when Pushkin's texts were presented at the meetings of the Free Society in 1819–23 using the materials of the Society's archive, including unpublished documents. She also introduces previously unknown information about the presentation of the Lycée cycle of "Tableaux"—"The Faun and the Shepherdess" ("Favn i Pastushka") in 1820 and identifies which of Pushkin's poems was read at the Free Society's May 1823 public meeting under the title "Farewell" ("Proshchanie"). This newly discovered information allows us to revisit the question of why, despite his participation in the Society, Pushkin was never inducted as a member. The answer offered here proceeds from analysis of both Pushkin's literary strategy 1819–25 and the Free Society's institutional principles: the poet did not fit into the organizational structure of the Free Society, and his literary strategy at the time eschewed legitimization from any literary society, salon or circle.

In Search of a New Home: From Andrii Yakovliv’s Letters to Lev Okinshevych

The Shevchenko Scientific Society Archives in New York houses the correspondence between Ukrainian jurist Lev Okinshevych and various figures of science, culture, and politics. Among them are letters from the famous lawyer and historian of law Andrii Yakovliv, whose life in the postwar years is mostly unknown. We can partially fill those gaps using the eight letters from Yakovliv to Okinshevych, written in 1947-1949. After leaving his job at the Ukrainian Free University (UVU) in Prague, Andrii Yakovliv moved to the part of Germany occupied by the Western Allies, worked at the Ukrainian Technical and Economic Institute in Regensburg, and maintained ties with UVU, where he received the honorary doctorate in 1947. He later moved to his family in Belgium, gave lectures to Ukrainian students at the Catholic University of Louvain and was actively involved in research. Among other things, at this time, Yakovliv was engaged in arranging papers of Viacheslav Prokopovych and preparing for publication his unfinished book The Seal of Little Russia: Sphragistic Etudes, which was published in 1954 as a separate volume of Memoirs of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In parallel, the scholar prepared for publication his monograph Ukrainian Code of 1743 “Rights on which the Little Russian people are judged,” its history, sources, and systematic presentation of content, took an active part in preparing the section “Law” for the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, worked on Memories, or The Tale of the Bygone Years of My Life. Besides sharing the academic interests, Yakovliv and Okinshevych had quite a friendly relationship. In his letters, Yakovlev discussed his scholarly plans, the publication of his research, the work of Ukrainian educational and research institutions in exile, as well as issues related to the work on the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, and the problems of his family’s relocation to the United States. This correspondence sheds light on the last stage of Yakovlev’s life in Europe, his activities and relations with colleagues during this period. From these letters, we learn many interesting details about the private and academic relations of the scholar with many members of the Ukrainian scholars’ emigration group, about the circumstances of founding and activity of Ukrainian scientific institutions in Western Europe, about the fate of the Ukrainian Museum in Prague. This epistolary heritage is of exceptional value not only for the study of the intellectual biography of Andrii Yakovliv but also for the prosopographical study of the Ukrainian scientific emigration of the 1940s and 1950s.

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF AMOEBIASIS IN REPTILES IN A ZOOLOGICAL INSTITUTION.

Amoebiasis is a significant protozoal disease of reptiles causing nonspecific clinical signs including diarrhea, anorexia, and lethargy. It frequently results in acute death. Investigation of the pathophysiology of amoebiasis in reptiles has been hampered by the inability to accurately identify amoeba to the species level using conventional techniques. This study reviewed reptile medical records from the Wildlife Conservation Society's archives from 1998 to 2017. Amoebae were identified histologically in 54 cases in 31 different species. Of these, amoebiasis was the cause of death in 32 (18 chelonians, 7 lizards, and 7 snakes), a significant co-morbidity in 14 (six chelonians, two lizards, and six snakes), and seen incidentally in eight cases (one chelonian, six lizards, and one snake). Relocation from one enclosure to another was also evaluated and 65% of cases had been moved within 180 days of death (median 46 days). Frozen tissue samples from 19 of these cases were tested via an Entamoeba (genus-specific) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay. PCR products were sequenced and Entamoeba species were identified. Six individuals were positive for Entamoeba invadens (three chelonians, two snakes, one lizard), two for Entamoeba ranarum (both snakes), and one for Entamoeba terrapinae (chelonian); the other 10 cases were negative via PCR. Entamoeba ranarum has typically been considered a disease of amphibians with only one report of disease in a snake. Entamoeba terrapinae has only been reported without associated disease in chelonians. These results suggest that amoebiasis is a complicated and nuanced disease of reptiles, and warrants additional study.

“Fraternally Yours”: The Role of Women in Montreal’s Prominent Scottish Fraternities, 1870s–2000s

Fraternal societies were integral to both the social and fiscal security of newcomers and to established generations of Scottish-Canadians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Montreal, scholars have identified the pan-Canadian Sons of Scotland Benevolent Association and St. Andrew’s Society of Montreal as having been particularly active fraternal organizations. Much of the existing literature on Scottish associational culture in Canada understands it in terms of ethnicity. However, the underexplored concept of gender in associational culture can provide an equally valuable framework. Despite a seemingly shared ethnic identity, the lived experiences, beliefs, identities, socio-economic realities, religions, genders and approaches to inclusion were markedly different among Scottish-Canadian Montrealers. Through the use of an oral history project, the Sons of Scotland Benevolent Association and St. Andrew’s Society archives, and peer-reviewed literature, this article illuminates gender issues in androcentric Scottish-Canadian fraternal societies through careful examination of women’s lives within and on the periphery of Montreal’s fraternal orders.

Bringing early colonial astronomy to life

Abstract Anna Ridley describes a new exhibition at Old Government House, Sydney, that uses documents from the Royal Astronomical Society library and archive – and technology – to help tell the story of scientific endeavour in colonial New South Wales

MercadoLibre and the Democratization of Books: A Critical Reading of New Material Affordances and Digital Book History

MercadoLibre and the Democratization of Books:A Critical Reading of New Material Affordances and Digital Book History Nora C. Benedict (bio) At the heart of most research related to book history is the archive, or the physical places that store historical and cultural records—whether manuscripts, books, photographs, or other forms of material (or digital) production. Most traditional archives tend to be housed in university libraries or cultural institutions, but here I will focus on a more democratic type of archive that does not rely on bureaucratic processes, unnecessary gatekeeping, or expert curators: MercadoLibre. This online marketplace, or what I deem a self-organized archive, functions as an open-access commons with equal opportunity for anyone to engage with and add to its holdings.1 Moreover, MercadoLibre, which has virtually no competitive pressure from similar sites such as eBay or Amazon, introduces new resources and perspectives for individuals who research and engage with the history of print production throughout Latin America.2 From never-before-seen publishers' catalogues and type specimen books, to entire runs of rare paperback editions from the early twentieth century, MercadoLibre provides access to materials that, more often than not, cannot be found in most library catalogues—whether national or international. In this paper I will discuss how Latin American book history in the twenty-first century is shaped by the (digital) availability of materials and online resources, specifically those available on non-Anglophone platforms such as MercadoLibre. In the process, I will reveal how the presence of rare, ephemeral materials in both a physical space and a digital, freely available space gives voice to often neglected literary traditions and marginalized global publishing histories.3 While online marketplaces might be described as databases, or places of solely monetary exchange, I would like to conceive of them as archives in the broadest sense of the term, or places where materials are stored and preserved. Since the term archive can mean any number of things in our contemporary world, I want to describe in more detail what I mean when I [End Page 177] talk about the archive—or archives—and, conversely, what I do not mean.4 In his first Rosenbach lecture, "The Transformissions of the Archive: Literary Remainders in the Late Age of Print," Matthew Kirschenbaum reminds us that "the archive is at once the site and the object of our analysis."5 It is simultaneously a physical space and a cache of material objects housed therein. For the purposes of this paper, I am most interested in the latter. Although my focus is on MercadoLibre as an online marketplace that also functions as a digital repository for rare and ephemeral materials, I am not interested in web archiving or how this particular space is maintained and preserved over time, but rather the opportunities that this site provides for bibliographical discovery and inquiry. In other words, I use the term archive to refer to the items that sellers list on MercadoLibre, as well as any and all data that these listings include.6 That is to say that I do not use the term archive to refer to MercadoLibre's overall architecture or interface. According to Richard Pearce-Moses, former president of the Society of American Archivists, archives are defined as "materials… preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain."7 Despite the fact that materials (or archival records) can have "enduring value" in a number of respects, ranging from aesthetic to social or historical, it is important to note that someone—or some group of people—will virtually always determine what counts in an institutional setting. As Elisabeth Kaplan notes, "the archival record doesn't just happen; it is created by individuals and organizations, and used, in turn, to support their values and mission."8 In essence, the archival record is created by the few for the many.9 As a result, "the central challenge facing the archival community is to better understand our predisposition to privilege dominant cultures, which results in gaps in society's archives."10 In contrast, the concern for an object's "enduring value" and the limitations placed on who decides on what counts both disappear in...

"Merged in a Joint Stock Company": 75 Years of Melville Society Officers and Committee Members

"Merged in a Joint Stock Company":75 Years of Melville Society Officers and Committee Members Mary K. Bercaw Edwards Tyrus Hillway founded the Melville Society in 1945, and it has since grown to one of the largest international single-author societies. The Society's earliest papers reside in the Melville Society Archive housed within the New Bedford Whaling Museum Library. The initial membership lists read like an author bibliography of seminal Melville studies. The first woman president was Elizabeth Foster, who was elected five years after the Society was founded. Most presidents served only one term, but with fewer members in the early days of the Society, individuals were often re-elected. Harrison Hayford served four terms as president. The Executive Committee presently includes the president, executive secretary, associate secretary, treasurer, editor, member-at-large, and Melville Society Cultural Project representative, but the composition of the executive committee has evolved over time. The roles of historian and director of development have both been discontinued and new roles added. Tyrus Hillway served as the secretary-treasurer for the first 15 years, from the founding of the Melville Society in 1945 until 1959. Hillway was not the only long-serving officer. Donald Yannella was acting secretary-treasurer for Hennig Cohen 1973–1974, then became secretary-treasurer in 1975, a role he filled until 1989. Cohen was the first editor of the Melville Society, a role he held jointly with that of secretary-treasurer until 1972. He continued as editor until 1975, when Yannella succeeded him. Yannella combined all three roles—secretary, treasurer, and editor—for fourteen years. His long service was eclipsed by John Bryant, who served as editor for 24 years, from 1990 until 2013. Bryant oversaw the transformation of the newsletter, first called Extracts and later Melville Society Extracts, into the award-winning journal Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, now published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The following history of Melville Society officers and committee members has been compiled with the assistance of Christopher Sten and other Society members. [End Page 138] President (elected, one-year term, serves on Executive Committee) Timothy Marr, 2021 Samuel Otter, 2020 Branka Arsić, 2019 Giorgio Mariani, 2018 Arimichi Makino, 2017 John Bryant, 2016 Hester Blum, 2015 Geoffrey Sanborn, 2014 Steven Olsen-Smith, 2013 Dennis Berthold, 2012 Wyn Kelley, 2011 T. Walter Herbert, 2010 Robert Milder, 2009 Carolyn Karcher, 2008 Andrew Delbanco, 2007 Gail Coffler, 2006 Edgar Dryden, 2005 Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, 2004 Christopher Sten, 2003 Robert K. Wallace, 2002 Douglas Robillard, 2001 Thomas Farel Heffernan, 2000 Harrison Hayford, 1999 Sanford E. Marovitz, 1998 Elizabeth Schultz, 1997 Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, 1996 Stanton Garner, 1995 Marvin Fisher, 1994 H. Bruce Franklin, 1993 Harrison Hayford, 1992 Hershel Parker, 1991 Donald Yannella, 1990 Walter Bezanson, 1989 Joyce Sparer Adler, 1988 Jay Leyda, 1987 William B. Dillingham, 1986 John Seelye, 1985 Milton R. Stern, 1984 Warner Berthoff, 1983 G. Thomas Tanselle, 1982 Edward Rosenberry, 1981 Henry A. Murray, 1980 Walter D. Kring, 1979 Robert G. Newman, 1978 Lewis Mumford, 1977 Jay Leyda, 1976 Hennig Cohen, 1975 Robert Penn Warren, 1974 [none], 1973 Nathalia Wright, 1972 Leon Howard, 1971 Harrison Hayford, 1970 Howard P. Vincent, 1969 [no record], 1968 Walter Bezanson, 1967 Henry A. Murray, 1966 Merlin Bowen, 1965 Merlin Bowen (in absentia), 1964 William B. Stein, 1963 Merrill Davis (deceased), 1962 Richard H. Fogle (served 2 years), 1961 Tyrus Hillway, 1960 Lawrence Barrett, 1959 Wilson L. Heflin, 1958 Howard C. Horsford, 1957 Nathalia Wright, 1956 Harrison Hayford, 1955 Walter Bezanson, 1954 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., 1953 Willard Thorp, 1952 Howard P. Vincent, 1951 Elizabeth Foster, 1950 F. Barron Freeman, 1949 William Braswell, 1948 Luther S. Mansfield, 1947 Charles R. Anderson, 1946 [none], 1945 [End Page 139] Executive Secretary (elected, three-year term, serves as Chair of the Executive Committee) Matthew Rebhorn, 2020–present Colin Dewey, 2017–2019 Tony McGowan, 2014–2016 Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, 2007–2013 Jill Barnum, 2003–2006 Christopher Sten, 1997–2002 Sanford E. Marovitz, 1994–1996 Stanton Garner, 1990–1993 Donald Yannella, (secretarytreasurer), 1975–1989 Donald Yannella (acting secretarytreasurer for Hennig Cohen), 1973–1974 Hennig Cohen (secretary-treasurer), 1969–1972 Howard P. Vincent (secretarytreasurer), 1964–1968 Richard Stavig (secretary-treasurer), 1960–1963...

A Beautiful, Sad Tale about Nonexistent Socialism in Hungary: The Story of Gyuri Cséplő

In the 1970s, director Pál Schiffer and his colleagues filmed the life story of Cséplő Gyuri (1978), a documentary feature about the prospect of a Gypsy protagonist breaking free from a slum in socialist Hungary. The original footage from the production is held in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. The footage brings to light how the Gypsy/Romani protagonist of the film was cast, how he was brought from a Gypsy settlement in Németfalu to Budapest, how the film was screened, how audiences reacted, and what the filmmakers debated withlocal communities. The tragic early death of Gyuri Cséplő raised the question among the filmmakers how it would be possible to break free from poverty and from Gypsy settlements. In a socialcritique, the filmmakers presented a parallel world outside that of modern socialist Hungary. The theory of multiple modernities – and studies written as a result – suggest that modernization is not a singular phenomenon; that it affected various social and ethnic groups and actors in divergent ways. This microhistory investigates what differences can be revealed between the perspectives of minority and majority communities in socialist Hungary.