Browse Projects
Charles Lang Freer Papers, Art vouchers, 1911
Charles Lang Freer's vouchers for art purchases in 1911.
Browse projects by Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
District of Columbia Education, School Reports, Monthly Teachers' Reports, Feb.–Apr. 1869, Part 1
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Superintendent of Education for the District of Columbia, Series 7: School Reports.
Additional resources are available on the Freedmen's Bureau Instructions Page. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the lives of formerly enslaved men and women during the Reconstruction Era.
Face-to-Face: Barry Goldwater portrait
As part of the National Portrait Gallery's education program "Face-to-Face," Martin Sullivan, director of NPG, discusses Bernard Safran's portrait of Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater, Face-to-Face talk. Born Phoenix, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign laid the groundwork for the subsequent triumph of Republican conservatism. Challenging the Republican establishment for its timidity, Goldwater provided a full-throated critique of New Deal and Great Society liberalism. Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide, in part because he was depicted as a dangerous extremist who threatened prosperity at home and peace abroad through his reactionary programs. Goldwater returned to the Senate, where he rose to the status of Washington "wise man," helping usher Richard Nixon from office in 1974. He lived long enough to see his more aggressive, populist vision of the Republican Party, one based in the South and West, triumph under Ronald Reagan. Recorded at NPG, October 7, 2010. Image: Barry Morris Goldwater / Bernard Safran / Acrylic on board, 1964 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine. Face-to-Face talk currently located on the National Portrait Gallery's iTunesU page. ["Barry Goldwater" by Bernard Safran. NPG.78.TC410]
District of Columbia Education, School Reports, Monthly Teachers' Reports, Feb.–Apr. 1869, Part 2
The Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Superintendent of Education for the District of Columbia, Series 7: School Reports.
Additional resources are available on the Freedmen's Bureau Instructions Page. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the lives of formerly enslaved men and women during the Reconstruction Era.
Project PHaEDRA - Annie Jump Cannon - Annie Cannon Notebooks #101
At Harvard College Observatory (now the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Women Astronomical Computers studied glass plate photographs of the night sky. Here they cataloged stars, identifying variables, interpreting stellar spectra, counting galaxies, and measuring the vast distances in space. Several of them made game-changing discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In these books, follow the work of Annie Jump Cannon, who in 1901 devised a robust and elegant stellar classification scheme that astronomers still use today. Interested in historical women? Love astronomy? Help us transcribe the work of the Harvard Observatory's women computers and see which stars shine the brightest.
Browse projects by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"Ode to the Evening" in Juvenile Letters: Being a Correspondence Between Children, From Eight to Fifteen Years of Age
Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753 – 1784) was born in West Africa and captured by slave traders as a child, whereupon she was sold to John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston, Massachusetts. She was named after the slave ship on which she was transported to the Americas and the name of her enslavers, but her surname of Peters is that of the man she married in 1778—John Peters, a free man of color. The story of the discovery of her talent by the Wheatley family is oft told—they taught her to read and write, and by age fourteen, she had begun to write poetry that was soon published and circulated amongst the elites of late eighteenth century America and Great Britain. Her first and only volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was published in London with the assistance of wealthy abolitionists. Peters’ poetry brought her renown in abolitionist circles as proof of the humanity of those of African descent and the inhumanity of the institution of slavery. The Wheatleys manumitted Peters in 1773 under pressure from critics who saw the hypocrisy in praising Peters’ talent while keeping her enslaved. They died within a few years of this decision, and Peters soon met and married grocer John Peters. Her life afterwards was indicative of the troubled freedom of African Americans of the period, who were emancipated but not fully integrated into the promise of American citizenship. Peters was also affected by the loss of all three of her children—the birth of the last of whom caused her premature death at age 31 In 1784. Despite being feted as a prodigy while enslaved, the emancipated Peters struggled to find the support necessary for producing a second volume of poetry and her husband’s financial struggles forced her to find work as a scullery maid—the lowest position of domestic help. Posthumous publications of Peters’ poetry in various anthologies and periodicals solidified her image as a child poet for the benefit of abolitionist activism and African American cultural pride in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twenty-first century, the accumulation of this collection is a restoration of Peters the woman and the influence of her poetry and activism today.
Browse projects by National Museum of African American History and Culture
Texas Assistant Commissioner, Reports, Received and Retained Reports Relating to Rations, Lands, and Personnel, 1867, Part 2
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Assistant Commissioner for Texas, Series 7: Reports.
Additional resources are available on the Freedmen's Bureau Instructions Page. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the lives of formerly enslaved men and women in Texas during the Reconstruction Era.
Project PHaEDRA - Annie Jump Cannon - Annie Cannon Notebooks #100
At Harvard College Observatory (now the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Women Astronomical Computers studied glass plate photographs of the night sky. Here they cataloged stars, identifying variables, interpreting stellar spectra, counting galaxies, and measuring the vast distances in space. Several of them made game-changing discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In these books, follow the work of Annie Jump Cannon, who in 1901 devised a robust and elegant stellar classification scheme that astronomers still use today. Interested in historical women? Love astronomy? Help us transcribe the work of the Harvard Observatory's women computers and see which stars shine the brightest.
Browse projects by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
First edition of De la Littérature des Nègres by Henri Grégoire
Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753 – 1784) was born in West Africa and captured by slave traders as a child, whereupon she was sold to John and Susanna Wheatley of Boston, Massachusetts. She was named after the slave ship on which she was transported to the Americas and the name of her enslavers, but her surname of Peters is that of the man she married in 1778—John Peters, a free man of color. The story of the discovery of her talent by the Wheatley family is oft told—they taught her to read and write, and by age fourteen, she had begun to write poetry that was soon published and circulated amongst the elites of late eighteenth century America and Great Britain. Her first and only volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was published in London with the assistance of wealthy abolitionists. Peters’ poetry brought her renown in abolitionist circles as proof of the humanity of those of African descent and the inhumanity of the institution of slavery. The Wheatleys manumitted Peters in 1773 under pressure from critics who saw the hypocrisy in praising Peters’ talent while keeping her enslaved. They died within a few years of this decision, and Peters soon met and married grocer John Peters. Her life afterwards was indicative of the troubled freedom of African Americans of the period, who were emancipated but not fully integrated into the promise of American citizenship. Peters was also affected by the loss of all three of her children—the birth of the last of whom caused her premature death at age 31 In 1784. Despite being feted as a prodigy while enslaved, the emancipated Peters struggled to find the support necessary for producing a second volume of poetry and her husband’s financial struggles forced her to find work as a scullery maid—the lowest position of domestic help. Posthumous publications of Peters’ poetry in various anthologies and periodicals solidified her image as a child poet for the benefit of abolitionist activism and African American cultural pride in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the twenty-first century, the accumulation of this collection is a restoration of Peters the woman and the influence of her poetry and activism today.
Browse projects by National Museum of African American History and Culture
Texas Assistant Commissioner, Registers of Letters Received, Vol. 1, Feb. 1866–Aug. 1867, Part 1
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Assistant Commissioner for Texas, Series 3: Registers of Letters Received.
Additional resources are available on the Freedmen's Bureau Instructions Page. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the lives of formerly enslaved men and women in Texas during the Reconstruction Era.
Mississippi Field Offices, Subordinate Field Offices: Grenada, Press Copies of Letters Sent, Vol. 139, Apr.–Dec. 1868, Part 1
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, often referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established on March 3, 1865. The duties of the Freedmen’s Bureau included supervision of all affairs relating to refugees, freedmen, and the custody of abandoned lands and property. These documents come from the Records of the Field Offices for the State of Mississippi, Series 3.17: Subordinate Field Offices: Grenada (Subassistant Commissioner).
PLEASE NOTE: Press copies were made by moistening a piece of thin paper and pressing it on the original letter through the use of a press copying machine, which transferred some of the ink to the moistened paper. Because of the relative crudeness of this method, many of the press copies are difficult to read and some are virtually illegible. Please mark any illegible text as [[illegible]].
Additional resources are available on the Freedmen's Bureau Instructions Page. Please help us transcribe these records to learn more about the lives of formerly enslaved men and women in Mississippi during the Reconstruction Era.
Project PHaEDRA - Muriel & Sylvia Mussells - Classifications of Nebulae, U. #G66
At Harvard College Observatory (now the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Women Astronomical Computers studied glass plate photographs of the night sky. Here they cataloged stars, identified variables, interpreted stellar spectra, counted galaxies, and measured the vast distances in space. Several of them made game-changing discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In these books, you can follow the work of Sylvia and Muriel Mussells, two sisters who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the 1920s and 1930s. Muriel Mussells discovered three new ring nebulae in the Milky Way and Sylvia Mussells discovered the first dwarf galaxy. You can help us find out what else we can learn about them and their work!
Browse projects by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
