Select Idiosyncratic Corrections

This Fourth of July, consider sending someone fireworks, a flag, or a very dramatic patriotic scarf.

The redesigned Newberry Postcard Sender lets you pick a postcard image from Newberry Digital Collections, write a note on the back, and send it to a friend.

There’s a Fourth of July collection if you’re feeling festive — and plenty of other options if you’re not. Invite someone for coffee. Send a dog. Make plans. Be mysterious.

Also in this week’s Digital Newberry newsletter: Revolutionary-era manuscripts to transcribe, a new America at 250 digital gallery, and more than 2,200 newly added pages on Newberry Transcribe.

If you’ve ever wanted to read someone else’s mail — historically, responsibly, and with library approval — good news.

Newberry Transcribe is our crowdsourced transcription site, where volunteers help make handwritten manuscripts from the Newberry Library’s collections easier to search, read, and discover. No special experience required — just patience, curiosity, and a willingness to spend a little time with someone else’s handwriting.

A while back, we added letters from Jenny Hecht to her father, Ben — and people loved them. Jenny’s letters are funny, strange, illustrated, dramatic, and sometimes magnificently unimpressed. Now we’ve added the correspondence from the other direction: letters from Ben Hecht to Jenny.

Ben Hecht was a Chicago journalist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and one of the writers who helped invent the fast-talking, wisecracking style of screwball comedy. In these letters, that voice turns personal: funny, affectionate, theatrical, and unmistakably dad-like.

Help us transcribe the Ben Hecht letters and make them searchable for everyone

Or browse everything newly added to Newberry Transcribe

A recent New York Times article on the return of cursive clubs points to a problem that many archivists, librarians, teachers, and researchers know well: when students don’t learn cursive, they lose access to a huge part of the historical record.

At the Newberry, we think about this all the time. So much of our collective past is handwritten: letters, diaries, drafts, notes, recipes, ledgers, marginalia. Some of it is famous. Most of it is not. But all of it can tell us something about how people lived, worked, and wrote.

That’s where Newberry Transcribe comes in.

Every page transcribed by volunteers becomes easier to search, read, and use. A letter that once required patience, practice, and a good eye for nineteenth-century handwriting can become discoverable to a student, a teacher, a genealogist, a researcher, or a curious reader halfway across the world.

And we’ve just added a new batch: 700 pages from the Sherwood Anderson papers.

Anderson is best known for Winesburg, Ohio, his 1919 story cycle about small-town life, loneliness, ambition, and the ache of wanting something more. More than a century later, readers and writers are still finding themselves in it. In a recent Guardian interview, novelist Lily King remembered reading Winesburg, Ohio as a teenager and recognizing something of herself in Anderson’s young observer, George Willard. The book, she said, helped make her own desire to become a writer feel possible.

That’s one of the lovely things about manuscript collections: they let us see literature before, after, and around the finished book. We encounter drafts, correspondence, notes, revisions, friendships, professional networks, and the ordinary business of a writer’s life. A handwritten page can feel surprisingly close, even when it’s a century old.

But first, someone has to read it.

By transcribing the Sherwood Anderson papers, volunteers help make these materials available to everyone: students encountering Anderson for the first time, scholars studying American literature, teachers looking for primary sources, or readers curious about the life and work behind the books.

→ Transcribe now

Not much is known about Washington Hall, the African American slave author of three 1836 letters to his wife, Jemima Hall. Hall’s owner was Levi E. Hall, a large landowner near Florida, Missouri, who had ten slaves in 1840 and probably produced cash crops like hemp and tobacco. When Levi Hall died in 1849, his son took over the farm and continued to own slaves. Whether Washington Hall was among them is not known.

The outlines of Jemima Hall’s life are clearer. Born in Virginia, she was about twelve years old in 1822 when she was purchased for $300 by the Davidson family and given as a wedding present to Mary Davidson Rodgers. That same year, Jemima moved with Mary and her husband, Alert Rodgers, to Missouri, where she eventually married Washington Hall. Jemima likely was given her freedom in 1836, when she accompanied the Rodgers family to their new home in Warren County, Illinois. She lived with them until her death in 1875.

Washington Hall’s correspondence and that of his master make plain the cruel realities of human bondage. In his poignant and affectionate letters to Jemima, written soon after her departure for Illinois, Washington was unable to do more than plead with her to come back to him and urge her not to let her former owner persuade her to stay with them. Levi Hall’s stern letter spells out the ground rules for Jemima’s return to Washington. He informed her that, on condition of “correct deportment,” he would “make you and Washington as happy as circumstances will admit, but not to free him, nor do I think your freedom will much better your condition.” If Jemima were to rejoin her husband, it seems she had to agree to be free in name only. She went on without him.

Correspondence from African American slaves is quite rare, and letters addressed to family members especially so. Writing was not a common form of expression among this mostly illiterate population. When it does survive, it provides an immediate and tantalizing glimpse into the lives, thoughts, and feelings of the enslaved. In addition to their almost overwhelming emotional content, the Hall letters offer clues about friendships, slave-master relationships, literacy, and religious belief that are difficult to tease out from other sources.

– Martha Briggs; originally published in The Newberry 125: Stories of Our Collection (Newberry Library: 2012).

THIS is an alley.

An alley is essentially a narrow street which cuts through the middle of a block. It's how people access their garages and where you keep your garbage and recycling bins. There's no need to roll the bins out to the curb and then retrieve them after the pick-up. The garbage truck simply drives through the alley on collection days. Also, it's usually where poles hold up most electric, internet, and cable lines.

Almost every block in Chicago has an alley. There are roughly 1,900 miles (3,060 km) of alleys in the city. Older suburbs close to Chicago also have alleys. If you move from Chicago to a place which does not have alleys, you feel like you've lost a major convenience.

One brand new thing is that Firefox just released a version of its browser which allows users to shut off all browser related AI.

I installed Firefox 148 a few minutes ago and shortly thereafter activated the AI kill switch. Obviously it will take a while to see how things work out.

TO SUPPORT THE ABOLITION of slavery, the American Anti-Slavery Society issued four publications soon after its 1833 founding: a newspaper, Human Rights; two magazines for adults, Anti-Slavery Record and Emancipator; and a sixteen-page, monthly children’s magazine, The Slave’s Friend. Letters from Arthur Tappan, a founder of the society, edited the latter from the organization’s New York offices from its first issue in 1836 to its last, only two years later.

Each issue of The Slave’s Friend included short stories, poems, and wood engravings—all designed to show the terrible conditions of slavery in the United States. The magazine portrays slaveholders as cruel and evil, while slaves are noble but abused. Time and again, in melodramatic and sentimental tales, the magazine’s writers drew on Christian piety to excoriate the nation for the sin and shame of slavery. Editors of The Slave’s Friend imagined children as political actors, calling on them to save their pennies, and those of their parents, for the abolitionists’ cause. An 1837 issue of The Slave’s Friend asks readers to form their own juvenile anti-slavery societies.

The small-format publication cost one cent per issue, though few were sold. Instead, the society distributed the magazine through the mail free of charge. Most readers were children from Northern states; few issues made it to the South, because postmasters there were reluctant to allow delivery of abolitionist propaganda.

The cover of issue number 5 depicts a Christian gentleman teaching black children. The scriptural reference, a common feature of the magazine, reads: “The lips of the wise disperse knowledge” (Proverbs 15:7). The same engraving and reference appeared on the cover of numerous issues. The opening of issue number 2 shows a chained black man praying on one knee over the caption: “O my great massa in heaven, pity and bless me a poor slave.” Opposite is the “Child’s Creed,” intended to teach youngsters that God is the father of all children, free or slave, and “that God loves a colored child as well as a white child.” Readers likely were expected to recite the portion of the creed that states, “I believe that it is right to be kind to the poor slaves, to pray for them, and to try to persuade slaveholders to give them their liberty; that it is wicked to buy and sell men, women, and children, and that it is very wicked to say that slavery is a dreadful sin, and that it is a dreadful sin to buy and sell men, women, and children.”

The Newberry purchased multiple issues of The Slave’s Friend in 1999. The periodical supplements a number of collection strengths, including abolitionist materials and children’s literature. The issues at the Newberry are particularly notable because they include their covers as issued. -- David Spadafora; originally published in The Newberry 125: Stories of Our Collection (Newberry Library: 2012).

View The Slave's Friend at Newberry Digital Collections

Burrowing owls from William Henry Hudson's Birds of La Plata v.2 (1920).