Josiah Quincy thrived in the public eye. For most of his adult life, the square-jawed, stocky Quincy was an uncompromising…
From Lectern to Laboratory: The Great Harvard Hall Fire of 1674
In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded a small town eight miles north of Boston and named it Newtowne. It…
From Lectern to Laboratory: The Sillimans at Yale
As the middle of the nineteenth century approached, college presidents and faculty were struggling to provide a meaningful curriculum to…
From Lectern to Laboratory: Discipline and Furniture of the Mind
The traditional undergraduate curriculum at most early nineteenth-century colleges rested on the English classical liberal arts model, which had as…
From Lectern to Laboratory: Paul Revere Saves “Another” Day
In the fall of 1862, one year after the outbreak of the American Civil War, Edward Pickering began his studies…
From Lectern to Laboratory: Schools and Schoolmasters
In the same year that the Massachusetts State Legislature passed the nation’s first compulsory school attendance law, Edward Charles Pickering…
From Lectern to Laboratory: A Walking Tour of Beacon Hill
Let’s imagine that the year is 1856, the year that Edward Pickering turned ten years old and was preparing to…
