In 1636, in Newtowne, Massachusetts, an appropriation was made by the General Court for a public school. In 1638, the Reverend John Harvard of Charlestown contributed a substantial addition to the appropriation; the public school became a College; it was renamed Harvard. The shop of the first bookseller-publisher in the American colonies opened in Newtowne in 1638, just prior to Newtowne's taking its new name in that year -- Cambridge.

In 1715, Jonathan Edwards, born in Connecticut in October, 1703, entered Yale College (founded in 1701). By the age of twenty-three, he was an associate pastor in Northampton. Eventually, through his published sermons, his preaching ushered in the "Great Awakening," which called for a radical conversion to virtue, beauty, and humility in individual hearts -- it spread like wildfire through the colonies. For all that, Edwards was dismissed from his Northampton post in 1750. In 1751, he moved to Stockbridge to serve as a missionary to the Housatonnoc Indians.

In 1731, Benjamin Franklin had set up the first subscription library in America, the Free Library Company of Philadelphia. Franklin, born in Boston at the outset of 1706, urged Philadelphia's mechanics and merchants to set up their own, less expensive libraries. By 1770, Isaiah Thomas was publishing, in Boston, the magazines the Massachusetts Spy, the Royal American Magazine, and the New England Almanac.

When Benjamin Franklin met Thomas Paine in London in 1774, he encouraged him to emigrate to America. Paine, born in England in 1737, settled in Philadelphia, where he became a journalist, publishing several articles in the Pennsylvania Magazine, including one advocating the abolition of slavery. Paine published Common Sense at the outset of 1776 , hotly demanding America seek independence from England. Paine, joined George Washington's army and moonlighted, publishing articles and pamphlets vaunting democracy and damning monarchy.

In April 1775, three days before the battle of Concord, in which he took part, Isaiah Thomas had moved his presses from Boston to Worcester where, beyond publishing and selling books and magazines, he had built a bindery and a paper-mill (Thomas would later, in 1812, found the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester).

Within ten years of the birth of the new country, the printer William Butler was in Northampton, printing a weekly paper, The Hampshire Gazette. It was so successful, Butler built his own paper mill. (In 1797, a cousin of William Butler, the printer Simeon Butler, would open a successful bookstore in Northampton, on Shop Row. Starting in 1823, Simeon's son, Jonathan Hunt Butler, would carry forward the lucrative printing/publishing/bookselling establishment.)

In February 1790, in Philadelphia, the bedridden Benjamin Franklin signed a petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery and an end to the slave trade. Franklin died that spring, at the age of eighty-four. To raise money for the American cause, Tom Paine had travelled to France in 1781. By 1792 Paine, now a French citizen, had been elected to the National Convention but, in opposing the execution of Louis XVI, he'd fallen out favor with his revolutionary colleagues. Arrested and imprisoned under threat of execution from December 28, 1793 to November 4, 1794, Paine was released only after the American minister, James Monroe, put pressure on the French government to free him. Paine returned to America in 1802 only to find the popularity he'd enjoyed during the War of Independence had vanished. Banned from Britain, Paine remained in America until he died, in New York, in June, 1809.

The Transcendentalist schoolteacher Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott's father) was born November 29, 1799 in Wolcott, Connecticut. John Brown was born May 9, 1800 in Torringon, Connecticut. The great advocate for the reform of all insitutions serving (or not serving) persons living on society's fringes, Samuel Gridley Howe, was born November 10, 1801 in Boston. Advisor to housewives and passionate abolitionist Lydia Maria Child was born February 11, 1802 in in Medford. Ralph Waldo Emerson was May 25, 1803 in Boston. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was born May 16, 1804 in Billerica. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem. In May 1819, Walt Whitman was born, on Long Island, New York.

In 1823, in the Cornhill section of Boston, today's so-called "oldest continuously operating bookstore in America" opened on Brattle Street -- The Brattle Book Shop. When Brattle Street disappeared in the 1970s with the construction of the government center, so did the earlier shop (George Gloss would take over the name Brattle Book Shop and, relocating the store to West Street would, through masterly public relations, make the business a success).

Born in Cummington, Massachusetts in 1794, William Cullen Bryant moved to New York City in 1825. He'd studied law, then settled in Great Barrington. In New York, Bryant became owner and editor of the New York Evening Post (a passionate advocate for antislavery, Bryant's media savvy would play an important role in getting Abraham Lincoln elected president in 1860). Charles Eliot Norton was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1827 (his father, Andrews Norton, was the Unitarian theologian and professor of sacred literature at Harvard who'd be the controversial adversary and renouncer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and all Transcendentalists). In 1828, Nathaniel Hawthorne published, at his own expense, the novel Fanshawe (it wasn't very long before he regretted the decision, him running around trying to find and destroy every existing copy. Emily Dickinson born December 10, 1830 in Amherst. Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife Ellen died of tuberculosis in Concord in February 1831, the year Isaiah Thomas died in Worcester; the year William Lloyd Garrison started up The Liberator in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

In 1832, William D. Ticknor established a publishing business in Boston, doing business downtown, at the Old Corner Bookstore. After printing in Wendell, Massachusetts for twenty years, John Metcalf, who'd become eminently successful as a printer of children's toy books, featuring tiny woodcuts illustrating moral virtues, moved his business to Northampton that same year, 1832 -- the year Emerson preached his controversial Lord's Supper sermon (October 8, 1832); the year Emerson resigned his pastorate at Second Church (December 25, 1832); the year Lewis Carroll was born (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England; the year Moncure Daniel Conway was born (March 17, 1832 in Stafford County, Virginia.

In 1833, Lydia Maria Child published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.

1834 (William Ellery Channing II (1818-1901), the son of Walter Channing (1786-76) and the nephew of his namesake, a poet and member of the Transcendentalist circle, had been born in Boston in 1818). Channing enrolled in Harvard in 1834, after an early education at Round Hill School (George Bancroft, born October 3, 1800 in Worcester, ahd moved to Northampton in 1823 and, with Joseph Cogswell, founded a school for boys aged 9 to 12, the Round Hill School, which attracted children of the national elite. Tuition was nearly triple that of Harvard College and only a few local students attended, but the town appreciated the school as a major intellectual enterprise) and the Boston Latin School. In 1834, Channing was enrolled in Harvard, but he ran away after a few months to go write poetry at Curzon's Mill (upriver from Newburyport). At one point, Channing proposed marriage to Mary Russell Curzon, who lived year round in the Yellow House, next to the Mill. (She had allready been courted by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who would row across the Merrimac to visit the Marquand sisters and write truly boring sonnets about the women, the river, and Curzon's "bowery mill.") The artist William Morris Hunt ahd also proposed marriage to Mary. She had turned them all down. Channing married Ellen Fuller, the younger sister of Margaret Fuller. He lived in Concord most of his later life. He wrote, for a while for Horace Greeley's Tribune (even as his wife and family and their life together disintegrated). He was a devoted friend of Henry David Thoreau, and was Thoreau's first biographer.

1835 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody published The Record of a School (about Bronson Alcott's school) anonymously.

1835 Emerson married Lydia Jackson September 14, 1835, giving her a new name, Lidian.

1836 The Transcendental Club was formed in September, 1836.

1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Nature, was published September 9, 1836.

1836 Emerson's son Waldo was born October 30, 1836.

1837, Little, Brown and Company was formed by two former bookstore clerks, Charles C. Little and James Brown.

1837 Emerson delivered his The American Scholar address at Harvard on August 31, 1837.

1838 Emerson delivered the Divinity School Address at Harvard on July 15, 1838.

1839 Emerson's daughter Ellen was born on February 24, 1839.

1839 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) leased a building at 13 West Street in Boston and opened her West Street Bookstore (and circulating library) in the front parlor. The shop, stocked with books, magazines, art supplies, and homeopathic medicines, became a meeting place for Transcendentalists drawn to the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Novalis, Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Plato, Swedenborg, Confucius, and the Bhagavad Gita.

1839-1844 Margaret Fuller held her Conversations with women on a variety of intellectual topics at the West Street Bookstore.

1840-1844 Dial magazine published, edited by Margaret Fuller (1840-1842); by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1842-1844).

1841 Brook Farm. In April 1841, George and Sophia Ripley, a former Unitarian minister and his wife, arranged to rent a farm in West Roxbury where they'd spent several summers, planning now to start a utopian community there. They meant to form a community based on individual freedom and egalitarian relationships, regarding commerce as evil and planning to make their communal farm self-supporting and independent of outside markets. All members of the community were to share equally in the work and the rewards. There would be no "wage slavery." Cooperation and mutual support would replace the competitive spirit of the marketplace, and work would be mixed with opportunities for intellectual discussion, education, and socializing. Calling the idyllic place Brook Farm, they would transform the buildings into communal housing, kitchens, classrooms, eating, and social spaces. Over the course of the summer, many Transcendentalists and other interested people from the Boston area would visit the farm. By autumn, they would be joined by about 15 other Transcendentalists and other interested persons, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was in love with one of the Brook Farm women. Convinced that the experiment would succeed, in October George Ripley committed the fledgling organization's funds to buying the 192-acre farm. Each person who had joined the community purchased at least one $500 share. Mortgages covered the remainder of the sale price.

1841 Thomas Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History.

1841 Emerson's Essays, First Series published March 20, 1841.

1841, Walt Whitman moved to New York City to work first as a compositor for New World magazine and later as a journalist and printer for Aurora and The Evening Tattler. He published his first stories, among them Death in the School Room (1841) and a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842).

1842 Emerson's son Waldo died on January 27, 1842 (Later, Emerson wrote and published Threnody).

In 1842, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody began publishing the Dial. As a contributor, her article about Brook Farm, A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of Society, appeared in the October, 1841 issue. Her article on Fourierism appeared in the April, 1844 issue. That year, 1844, William Cullen Bryant convinced New York City officials to save a strip of parkland for conservation before the city became completely developed. Bryant eventually worked closely with Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park.

1842 The Reeverend William Ellery Channing died October 2, 1842 in Bennington, Vermont.

1843 Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe were married in 1843.

1844 Nathaniel Hawthorne had published his first commercial book, Twice Told Tales in 1837. It wasn't financially successsful. In 1839 he'd obtained a position as an inspector at the Boston Custom House, weighing and measuring the goods shipped in and out of the harbor. Distracted from doing any substantive literary work, Hawthorne was glad to be relieved of his job when the administration changed in 1844. Hawthorne moved to Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, a communal experiment founded by a group of writers and thinkers associated with the Transcendentalist circle. There he intended to establish a "mode of life, which shall combine enchantment of poetry with the facts of daily experience". He left after eight months and married Sophia Peabody. They took up residence at Concord at the old Manse, a house built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather.

1845 Paperbacks (small-sized reprints of existing books) were introduced in the United States as newspaper supplements in or around 1845.

1845 Margaret Fuller published her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

1845 Thoreau began his stay at Walden Pond.

In 1846, Old Cambridge, Cambridgeport, and East Cambridge joined together to create the city of Cambridge. In 1849, in cambridge, Henry Oscar Houghton, who'd been a printer's apprentice at the Burlington Vermont Free Press at the age of thirteen, at twenty-six raised $1,500 in order to open H. O. Houghton & Company, later known as The Riverside Press.

1846 Margaret Fuller sailed for Europe.

1846 Thoreau jailed on July, 1846 for refusal to pay poll tax, giving rise to his essay, Resistance to Civil Government, later known as Civil Disobedience.

1846 Emerson's poems published December 25, 1846.

1847 Thoreau returned to town from Walden Pond in the summer, to stay with Emerson's wife and children while Emerson traveled to Europe, and then, in September, for good and for all.

1847 Margaret Fuller settled in Italy.

1849 Margaret Fuller secretly married Giovanni Angelo, Marchese Ossoli.

1849 Henry David Thoreau published Resistance to Civil Government, later known as Civil Disobedience, in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers, in May 1849.

1849 Englishman James Redpath, born in August, 1833, emigrated with his family to Michigan in 1849. “I came to America to be a printer,” Redpath later reminisced. He entered the trade in Kalamazoo, then moved to Detroit where, under the pseudonym “Berwick,” he wrote passionate anti-slavery copy.

1849 Nathaniel Hawthorne published his greatest work, The Scarlet Letter. In its first week of publication, it sold 4,000 copies. In the spring of 1850, he moved to Lennox, Massachusetts, where he began writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was more varied in tone and less somber than The Scarlet Letter. In 1851, he wrote The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales. From Lenox, Hawthorne moved to Newport, where he wrote The Blithedale Romance (1852), a book that satirized the pretensions and delusions of social reformers.

Emily Dickinson had started composing poems around 1850. "Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, / Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!" she said in her earliest known poem, dated March 4, 1850 (published in the Springfield Daily Republican in 1852).

1850 Margaret Fuller, her husband, and their son Angelo drowned off Fire Island, New York on July 19, 1850. Her manuscript history of the Italian revolution was also lost.

Charles Eliot Norton, having graduated from Harvard in 1846, toured through India and England in 1849, returning to America in 1851.

In 1851 Moncure Conway entered the Harvard Divinity School. The son of a Virginia plantation owner who'd graduated from Dickinson College in 1849, he'd been ordained and had become a circuit-riding itinerant Methodist minister. "Early in 1851, Conway abruptly announced to his family that he would no longer pursue a legal career, but instead would become a Methodist minister. Although his parents were surprised by the announcement, as devout Methodists, it was difficult for them to protest." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

1852 Moncure Conway had graduated from Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, in 1849, where he'd united with the Methodist church. He'd began the study of law at Warrenton, Washington, and while there had written for the Richmond Examiner, of which his cousin, John M. Daniel, was editor, in support of extreme southern opinions. He abandoned the law to enter the Methodist ministry, joined the Baltimore conference in 1850, was appointed to the Rockville circuit, and in 1852 to Frederick circuit. He was a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, and published a pamphlet, Free Schools in Virginia, in which he advocated the adoption of the New England common-school system..

"Conway did not see a significant contradiction between Methodist theology and Emersonian transcendentalism, but that was largely because he had only begun to dabble in the writings of the New England sage." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

"Conway officially became a circuit-riding Methodist minister on his nineteenth birthday, 17 March 1851. He devoted himself wholeheartedly to his new calling, developing oratory skills in rural Maryland and Virginia that would serve him well in later life in more prestigious venues. But Conway continued to read Emerson and other radical authors, such as the English Theist Francis William Newman, and soon began to question the compatibility of his own spiritual development and Methodism. Increasingly, his sermons raised eyebrows as he emphasized the fulfillment of a person’s life on this earth rather than preparation for the afterlife. A brief but crucial encounter with a Quaker community that particularly valued independent thought led Conway to an important breakthrough. He recognized that his interest in educational reform, his opposition to the conservatism of the slaveholding aristocracy in Virginia, and his attraction to Emerson and other radical writers (by now he was reading the memoirs of Margaret Fuller) could all be summarized as a desire for autonomy, for himself to be sure, but also for all men and women. Conway now embarked, whether he fully realized it or not, on the quest of a freethinker. Much like Thomas Paine, who in later life became one of Conway’s heroes, he would seek to expose and root out arbitrary authority wherever he encountered it." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

He'd left Methodism for Unitarianism a year after being ordained. At the age of 22, Conway arrived in Cambridge, befriending six-foot-five fellow Harvard freshman Frank Sanborn. On hearing Theodore Parker and Ralph waldo Emerson, and after meeting the colorful abolitionist conversationalist Alcott, Conway now completely abandoned any inherited pro-slavery sentiments. Later, as a Unitarian minister, editor, lecturer, abolitionist agitator and patron of the arts, Conway would, like Frank Sanborn, promote Alcott's reputation and give generous aid to his family through the years.

1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The House of Seven Gables while living in a little red cottage just outside of Lenox, Massachusetts, a prosperous farming and mill town (the seat of Berkshire County) -- the cottage was actually in Stockbridge, but Hawthorne thought he lived in Lenox, as its village center was closer. In 1850, Herman Melville had purchased a property in nearby Pittsfield, which he'd dubbed "Arrowhead" (he'd been fourteen when he'd first visited Pittsfield, in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, in the summer of 1833. That year he'd visited his his uncle Thomas at the farm later known as "Broadhall." Several years later he'd returned to work on the farm. In 1837, he'd taught for a term in the nearby Sikes district school). At Arrowhead, with his growing family, Melville would spend thirteen of the most productive years of his life. Throughout the fall and winter of 1850 and summer of 1851, Hawthorne and Herman Melville were visiting and writing to each other. On June 29, 1851, Melville wrote to Hawthorne, "I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together." Melville's visit to the little red farm house took place on August 1, 1851. Hawthorne wrote of it in his journal: "Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night...."

1851 On the 5th of July, 1851, Thoreau wrote his sister Sophia to say he'd heard that Mr. Pierce, the presidential candidate, had been in town visiting Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pierce's college chum, and that Hawthorne was writing a life of him for electioneering purposes. Hawthorne was in fact at work on a political biography of Pierce, who reward him after his election by making him the U.S. consul in Liverpool.

Daniel Webster died in 1852. Mark Twain was then seventeen, living in Hannibal, Missouri and contributing to his brother's newspaper. Horace Greeley, who'd recently discovered the antislavery writing of James Redpath, in the fall of 1852 offered him a position as a correspondent. Redpath, barely nineteen, went to work at Greeley's New York Tribune.

"By the end of 1852, Conway’s theological heresy and now open opposition to slavery were beginning to alarm the Methodist faithful in Virginia, and he decided, much to his father’s dismay, to leave the ministry in order to attend Harvard Divinity School. In the Boston area, Conway soon befriended several local luminaries such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose Harvard poetry class Conway attended with zeal, and Jared Sparks, who introduced Conway to the study of Paine. And although initially put off by the radical transcendentalism of Theodore Parker, Conway gradually came to admire the firebrand and would ultimately go beyond Parker’s radical theology. Of course Conway also made the short pilgrimage to Concord to meet Emerson, with whom he had corresponded for some time. Emerson gave Conway the literary tour of the town, introducing him to Thoreau and others." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

1853-1857 Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed as Consul to England from 1853 to 1857. Discontent, he moved to Italy where he wrote his last complete novel, The Marble Faun, (1857).

1854 On May 22, 1854, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska Act, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Western territories could determine by popular sovereignty whether to admit new states as free or slaveholding.

On May 24, 1854, free slave Anthony Burns was taken prisoner in the downtown Boston Court House. Armed with revolvers, axes and butcher knives, some twenty-five men assaulted the Court House door. Thomas Wentworth Higginson took charge of forcing the front doors open with a piece of timber used as a battering-ram while people in the street shouted encouragement, also throwing stones and shooting out windows. Higginson, alone amid soldiers inside the Court House, yelled “Cowards!” to his friends. A couple of his comrades now squeezed in.

Colonel Suttle made a hasty exit by the east door, leaving his “property," Burns, behind. Burns’s keepers crouched in the farther corner of the jury-room, which had been used as a prison, it having been ruled that fugitives could not be confined in a Massachusetts jail. State and the United States troops were called out to preserve order. As Mr. Higginson later remarked, “It was one of the best plots that ever failed.” Steps were taken to secure Burns’s release by legal process through the Writ of Personal Replevin. It was the opinion of Sewall and Bowditch that Burns should be taken out of the hands of the Government even if force were necessary. Colonel Suttle moved into the attic. Four or five negroes kept watch unceasingly beneath his windows, with the special purpose of intimidating him. He finally decided to sell his slave (for $1,200).

1854 On the night of May 26th, upon Burns’ arrest, the Boston Vigilance Committee called a meeting in Faneuil Hall to protest Burns’s detention. Among them were Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

1854 Thoreau was eager to see the publication of his eight-year work-in-progress, Walden. In May, he sent the printer’s copy to Ticknor & Fields. Thoreau was, in the meantime, putting together a speech culled from jottings in his 1854 Journal (about Anthony Burns in 1854, and fugitive slave Thomas Sims in 1851).

1854 Anthony Burns was convicted of being a fugitive slave. In Boston, 50,000 people watched as Burns, in shackles, was taken to the harbor to the transport ship June 2, 1854.

1854 Moncure Conway graduated with a B.D.from the Harvard Divinity School. Conway, having undergone a change of political and religious convictions, partly through the influence of a settlement of Quakers among whom he lived, he left the Methodist ministry and entered the divinity-school at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was graduated in 1854. He then returned to Virginia, in the hope of preaching his humanitarian ideas and transcendental and rationalistic doctrines; but upon reaching Falmouth, where his parents resided, was obliged by a band of neighbors to leave the state under threats because he had befriended Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave from the same district. The same year he became pastor of the Unitarian church in Washington, District of Columbia, where he preached until he was dismissed on account of some anti-slavery discourses, especially one delivered after the assault on Senator Sumner.

1854 "As the nation’s sectional crisis reached a crescendo with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Conway graduated from Harvard Divinity School and accepted the prestigious Unitarian pulpit in Washington D.C. at the young age of twenty-two. Conway found himself torn between his opposition to slavery and his allegiance to the South. Although he had come to abhor slavery by this time, he disliked radical abolitionists’ blanket condemnations of all southerners and argued that northerners had been complicit in the growth of southern slavery because they too were servile to the status quo. Nonetheless, northern abolitionists, including radicals like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, welcomed Conway as one of their own and immediately recognized the power of an abolitionist agitator from such an influential, slave-owning Virginia family." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

1854 The Fourth of July gathering in Framingham, Massachusetts presented Henry David Thoreau with an opportunity of public exposure. Thoreau vigorously took on the role of to be an antislavery spokesman, condemning northern complicity with pro-slavery forces, forcefully protesting the situation of fugitive slave Anthony Burns, calling for an end to the Union -- a union which condoned slavery. His speech linked him inextricably with the radical abolitionists (He after published the speech as an essay, Slavery in Massachusetts). William Lloyd Garrison not only spoke at the Fourth of July rally, he also burned an American flag right on stage. Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen S. Foster both spoke that day, as did Lucy Stone, the Reverend John Pierpont, and Sojourner Truth, chastising whites for tolerating slavery in spite of their supposed religious convictions. Moncure Conway also spoke that day. (Conway observed Thoreau’s impact on the audience: "Thoreau had come all the way from Concord for this meeting. It was a rare thing for him to attend any meeting outside of Concord, and though he sometimes lectured in the Lyceum there, he had probably never spoken on a platform. He was now clamoured for and made a brief and quaint speech. He began with the simple words, 'You have my sympathy; it is all I have to give you, but you may find it important to you.' It was impossible to associate egotism with Thoreau; we all felt that the time and trouble he had taken at that crisis to proclaim his sympathy with the 'Disunionists' was indeed important. He was there a representative of Concord, of science and letters, which could not quietly pursue their tasks while slavery was trampling down the rights of mankind. Alluding to the Boston commissioner who had surrendered Anthony Burns, Edward G. Loring, Thoreau said [Conway misquoted Thoreau slightly], 'The fugitive’s case was already decided by God,—not Edward G. God, but simple God.' This was said with such serene unconsciousness of anything shocking in it that we were but mildly startled." William Lloyd Garrison, having summarized Thoreau’s lecture in the Liberator as “a racy and ably written address,” published “Slavery in Massachusetts” in the July 21, 1854 issue of the Liberator. The New-York Tribune ran the text of the speech on August 2nd. Horace Greeley praised it for its “‘racy piquancy and telling point’.” The National Anti-Slavery Standard reported Thoreau’s presence under the heading “‘Words that Burn’.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to Thoreau to request a copy of “a literary statement of the truth [that] surpasses everything else.” He then congratulated Thoreau on Walden, “which I have been awaiting for so many years.”).

1854 Publication of Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau on August 9, 1854.

1854 Emerson met Walt Whitman in December, 1854.

1855 Charles Eliot Norton sought out John Ruskin (also Thomas Carlyle; and the Pre-Raphaelites).

1855-1857 After failing at various attempts at business, Charles Eliot Norton returned to Europe in 1855, remaining there until 1857.

1855 Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass; (795 copies, 12 poems and a preface). Emerson had written an exuberant letter of support, which Whitman exploited fully, later.

1855 The year that Thoreau and Whitman met.

1857 London - The South Kensington Museum came into being (In 1899 it would become the Victoria and Albert Museum).

1858 Moncure Conway met and married Ellen Dana (they would have three children). Conway's first job after gradutaing from Harvard had been as a minister in Washington, D.C. That was short-lived due to Conway's abolitionist views. His next post was in Cincinnati, Ohio where, in 1857, he had becomeminister of the Unitarian Church. In Cincinnati Conway published the pamphlets A Defence of the Theatre and The Natural History of the Devil. The publication of books on slavery and its relation to the civil war led to an invftation to lecture on this subject in New England, as he had already lectured gratuitously throughout Ohio. During the war, his father's slaves escaped from Virginia and were settled by Moncure in ill Yellow Springs, Ohio.

1858 "Conway flourished in the heavily Germanized city of Cincinnati, marrying Ellen Dana, the well-educated daughter of a prominent businessman in 1858. Conway was particularly impressed with several German intellectuals in the city, especially John B. Stallo and August Willich, the latter of whom sharpened Conway’s perception of the problems faced by labor in the industrializing city. Under the influence of German free thinkers, Conway’s theology moved further to the left as he studied David Frederich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesus and began to question the veracity of Biblical accounts of miracles, the divinity of Jesus, and the authority of the Bible. German influence on Conway’s theology is apparent in The Dial, a magazine he edited in Cincinnati as a successor to the New England transcendentalist journal of the same name. In 1859, the church split over Conway’s increasingly heretical theology, but he retained a sufficient following to remain in the pulpit. He finally left the Unitarian church in 1862 and, after heroically leading the Conway family slaves to safety in Ohio, Conway moved to Boston to serve as coeditor with Franklin B. Sanborn of an antislavery weekly, The Commonwealth." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

1858 In Cincinnati Conway published "The pamphlets, A Defence of the Theatre and Natural History of the Devil."

1859 Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was born in Paris. He was descended from a Polish Jewish family on his father's side, while his mother was from an English and Irish Jewish background. His family lived in London for a few years after his birth. Before he was nine, his parents crossed the English Channel and settled in France. Henri became a naturalized citizen of the French Republic.

1859 John Brown led a raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) on October 16, 1859. He surrendered the next morning to the U.S. military force.

1859 To the citizens of Concord, Henry David Thoreau delivered, on October 30, 1859, A Plea for Captain John Brown.

1859 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody developed interest in kindergartens (she published her last book on this topic in 1886).

1859 John Brown, after conviction for murder, slave insurrection and treason, was hung in Charles Town, Virginia (now in West Virginia) on December 2, 1859.

1860 Walt Whitman received a letter from a new publishing firm [Thayer & Eldridge] in Boston: "BOSTON FEB 10/60. WALT WHITMAN. DR SIR. We want to be the publishers of Walt. Whitman's poems -- Leaves of Grass."

1860 Mid-March: "The records of the famous old library in Boston, the Athenaeum, show that on March 17 [1860] Emerson introduced 'W. Whitman [of] Brooklyn, N.Y.,' and presumably secured reading privileges for him. Emerson also, according to his neighbor F.B. Sanborn, wanted to take Whitman as his guest to the exclusive Saturday Club, but Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes all insisted that they had no desire to meet the Brooklyn poet, and consequently Emerson did not extend the contemplated invitation." ( -- Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: MacMillan, 1955. p. 238).

1860 Mid-March: "Whitman arrived in Boston scarcely more than a month after he had received the first letter from the publishers [Thayer & Eldridge]. [Whitman later recalled] a two hour stroll and discussion there [in Boston, under the big elm trees on Tremont and Beacon Streets] with Emerson [on or about] March 15 [1860]. The talk with Emerson was apparently Whitman's first important experience in Boston.... Whitman revealed that Emerson attempted on that memorable day to persuade him not to publish his 'Children of Adam' poems, and this may have been one of the reasons for Emerson's prompt hospitality, for he probably hoped to prevent Whitman from sending these poems to the printer....[The] poems were still in manuscript, and Emerson could only have read them if Whitman had sent them to him in manuscript (or in proof sheets supplied by Rome Brothers). There seems a strong possibility, too, that Emerson had been consulted by Thayer and Eldridge about publishing Leaves of Grass... For two hours, Whitman recalled, Emerson advanced every argument he could command against publishing these poems...Whitman replied...'I only feel more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify it.' Against this Dutch stubbornness Emerson was helpless, but he accepted the reply calmly, 'Whereupon,' Whitman adds, 'we went and had a good dinner at the American House'." ( -- Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. New York: MacMillan, 1955. pp. 237-238).

1860 April 4: "During [Walt] Whitman's stay in Boston, Sanborn was brought to trial for aiding some of John Brown's followers; and Sanborn remembered Whitman sitting in the courtroom in his workingman's outfit -- to make sure justice was done, Whitman later said, and help rescue Sanborn if necessary." (--Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984. p. 317). "Whitman [was present] when on April 4, 1860, the educator Franklin B. Sanborn, one of the 'secret six' Northerners who had backed Brown's raid, was brought to trial in Boston. Sanborn later recalled the courtroom, mobbed with spectators, at the rear of which on a high stool sat the tall, gray-bearded Whitman, wearing a loose jacket and an open shirt. Whitman's eyes, intense under his shaggy eyebrows, scanned the courtroom. He saw several who had come to take action should the trial go the wrong way. There were his publishers, Charles Thayer and William Eldridge, along with one of their authors, James Redpath, whose biography of John Brown was one of their most popular books. Also there was the journalist Richard Hinton, who had recommended Leaves of Grass to Thayer and Eldridge, and, probably, William Douglas O'Connor, the blue-eyed firebrand whom the firm was paying twenty dollars a week to write an antislavery novel, Harrington, based on the Anthony Burns case." (-- Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. pp. 383-384).

1860 May: "Whitman established a daily routine....Boston struck him as both progressive and straitlaced...[He] wrote...'Everybody here is so like everybody else -- and I am Walt Whitman!'..." (-- Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. p. 385).

1860 Theodore Parker died May 10, 1860 in Florence, Italy.

1860 Publication, by Ticknor & Fields, of The Marvellous Adventures and Rare Conceits of Master Tyll Owlglass, Newly collected, etc. by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, with Illustrations by Alfred Crowquill [pseudonym of Alfred Henry Forrester (1804-1872), English artist and comic writer]. "This is a very beautiful edition of a very amusing book," stated the review published in The Atlantic Monthly. "The preface and notes of Mr. Mackenzie will commend it to scholars, while the stories themselves will divert both young and old. A book of this kind, which can keep life in itself for more than three hundred years, must have some real humor and force at bottom. It is as good a specimen of mediaeval fun as could anywhere be found. With nothing like the satiric humor of the 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum,' it appeals to a much larger circle of readers. We are very glad to meet it again in so handsome a dress, and with such really clever illustrations. It is just the book for a Christmas gift."

1860: Abraham Lincoln nominated Republican candidate for U.S. President, May 18, 1860.

1860 "Year of meteors! brooding year!.../O year all mottled with evil and good -- year of forebodings!" Walt Whitman wrote in Year of Meteors (1859-60). An unusual meteor shower above Manhattan in November 1860 was, in his eyes, a metaphor for the thrilling yet ominous events of this period.

1861 Civil War broke out.

1861 Julia Ward Howe wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" after visiting an army camp near Washington, D.C.

1862 Julia Ward Howe published her "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1862.

1862 Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on April 15, 1862, asking for his opinion of several of her poems. When Higginson, who would become her eventual, unlikely benefactor, finally met her in person at her home in Amherst, he wrote to his wife, "I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her."

1862 Henry David Thoreau died in Concord on May 6, 1862.

1863 James Redpath published Louisa May Alcott's war nurse letters, Hospital Sketches.

1863 Mary Moody Emerson died October 3, 1863.

1863 Conway sailed to London on a mission to enlighten the British public in regard to the causes of the war, to "persuade the English that the North is right" and that the Civil War was an "abolition war." In London wrote and lectured as a representative of the anti-slavery opinions of the north. He also contributed to Fraser's Magazine and the Fortnightly Review. Toward the close of 1863 he became the minister of South Place Religious Society in London (remaining there until he returned to the United States in 1884).

"Conway’s reasons for leaving Cincinnati went far beyond theology, however. As the escalating sectional crisis turned to war in April of 1861, Conway was thrust into the most difficult period of his tumultuous life. By the end of the first year of fighting, Americans were appalled at the level of violence. While his abolitionist allies abandoned their pacifism to support the Union cause, Conway nearly succumbed to the psychological pressures that resulted from his commitment to the abolition of slavery and his inability to see southerners as a depersonalized enemy. Throughout the war, Conway argued that immediate emancipation of the slaves and an immediate end to the bloodshed should be linked as one overriding goal because emancipation would destroy the South’s ability to prosecute the war by motivating southern slaves to burst the bonds that held them. Thus, although he felt the horror of war more profoundly than other Americans, Conway’s commitment to the abolitionist cause never wavered, and he lectured at numerous venues on the subject throughout the war. In 1863, he managed to convince his rather skeptical abolitionist colleagues that he should travel to England to promote their cause. It is not entirely clear why Conway felt compelled to leave the United States, but it seems that he could not tolerate the emotional whirlpool into which he had been drawn." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

When Conway sent an offer to the Confederacy "on behalf of the leading antislavery men of America," offering the preservation of the Confederacy after the war's end in exchange for emancipation of the slaves, support for Conway was angrily withdrawn. Feeling no longer welcome in America, he went briefly to Venice. There he was reunited with his wife and children. Conway, his wife, and his sons went to live in London. Conway was invited to speak at South Place Chapel, a dissenting church founded as Universalist by an American in 1793. Speaking there, Conway discovered that "the preacher had revived in me," and the congregation invited him to become its regular minister. Conway accepted. He also supported himself through journalism, book sales, and being a literary agent (he represented Mark Twain's interests in Britain). Conway made friends among the literary and intellectual elite, e.g., Thomas Carlyle and Charles Darwin.

"Conway’s own account of the time he spent in England during the war should be supplemented by a study of other sources, because it was the most controversial period of his life. In the summer of 1863, Conway sent a letter to James Murray Mason, the Confederate envoy in London, in which he proposed that if the Confederacy would liberate its slaves, American abolitionists would advocate an end to the war that would allow the southern states to secede from the Union. Conway had always favored a peaceful division of the states over war, so the letter did not represent a radical departure from sentiments he had expressed publicly. The controversy arose because he presented himself as a representative of American abolitionists, knowing full well that the proposal would not be accepted among their group. Mason leapt at the opportunity to discredit American abolitionist leaders as duplicitous to their supporters, publishing his correspondence with Conway in the rabidly pro-Confederate London Times. Conway immediately realized the foolishness of his proposal and the way he had misrepresented his position. He became the bane of American abolitionists who rushed to repudiate his position. Feeling utterly alienated, Conway sent for his wife and sons, having unintentionally severed his ties to the United States by betraying his abolitionist allies." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

1863 Emancipation Proclamation, January 1. Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3, followed by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19.

"Conway enjoyed the spiritual and intellectual freedom he found in England. In 1864, he was appointed minister of London’s most radical religious institution, South Place Chapel, a free thought church that to this day meets in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. Conway became an active participant in the artistic and free thought social circles in London." -- James A. Good, from the Introduction to Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003 (http://www.thoemmes.com/american/conway_intro.htm).

Conway was the London correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial. The Rejected Stone, or Insurrection versus Resurrection in America first appeared under the pen-name A Native of Virginia and attracted much attention before the authorship became known. The Golden Hour was a similar work. Conway contributed to the daily liberal press in England, wrote extensively for magazines both in England and and in the United States. A series of articles entitled South Coast Saunterings in England appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1868-1969.

1864 In the spring of 1864, William D. Ticknor died unexpectedly. His son Howard M. Ticknor joined the business, carrying on with Ticknor and Fields.

In the spring of 1864, traveling with ex-President Pierce in New Hampshire, Nathaniel Hawthorne took ill. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 19, 1864. His body was taken to Concord, Massachusetts and buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

1864 Henry Oscar Houghton joined with Melancthon M. Hurd to publish books under the imprint Hurd & Houghton. Houghton had a desk right in the Old Corner Bookstore, where he transacted all his business with publishers.

1864–68 Charles Eliot Norton, with James Russell Lowell, edited the North American Review between 1864 and 1868.

1865 With Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902), Charles Eliot Norton co-founded The Nation magazine.

1865 Thoreau's book Cape Cod was published posthumously.

1865 Abraham Lincoln assasinated April 15th.

1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865 under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier: Lewis Carroll [In 1856 he had published his first piece of work under the name; a romantic poem called "Solitude" had appeared in The Train under the authorship of Lewis Carroll. Also in 1856, Christ Church had hired a new Dean, Henry George Liddell, who brought with him a young wife and children. Dodgson became close friends with the mother and the children. He liked to photograph them, taking the children out on the river for picnics. It was on one such expedition, in 1862, that Dodgson had invented the outline of the story that became the first Alice book. Alice Liddell begged him to write it down. He took the manuscript to Macmillan. Dodgson undertook to pay for the cost of publication himself, in return for 90% of the royalties. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, under the pen-name Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier -- Lewis Carroll.

1865 Frederic W. Goudy (1865-1947) born in Bloomington, Illinois.

1867 Ticknor and Fields moved its offices from the Old Corner Bookstore to No. 124 Tremont Street. Magazines were also acquired and added to its publishing list (the Atlantic Monthly, Our Young Folks, and the North American Review). The firm went through transitions, taking many names (Ticknor and Fields, Fields, Osgood & Co., and James R. Osgood & Co.).

1868 James Redpath, an ardent abolitionist and biographer of John Brown who saw his literary endeavors as an outgrowth of his self-named position as "Crusader of Freedom," started the Boston Lyceum Bureau, later known as the Redpath Bureau, to supply the renewed demand for speakers and performers for lyceums across the country. Representing figures such as Mark Twain, Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott, the Redpath Bureau became the most prominent and successful agency of its kind. Redpath, however, earned very little money from it and sold his interest in 1875 in order to pursue a variety of business ventures as well as to resume newspaper work.

1869 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue born April 28, 1869 in Pomfret, Connecticut. (He died April 23, 1924 in New York).

1870 The Massachusetts legislature passed an act authorizing the teaching of drawing in public schools. The Massachusetts Drawing Act made it mandatory for state schools to incorporate art as one of the required subjects taught in the classroom. Though funding was not included to provide for this act, it did give people the opportunity to take part in art. The act made the provision of free drawing classes for women, men, and children mandatory in all communities with populations over 10,000. As a result, twenty-three cities provided the classes for their communities.

1870 Frederick Law Olmsted lectured on plans to create an "emerald necklace" of parks and parkways in Boston.

1871 Emerson traveled to California, where he met John Muir.

1872 Calligrapher, type designer, author, teacher Edward Johnston was born February 11, 1872 in San José, Uruguay (he died in Ditchling, England on November 26, 1944). Having studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Johnston got his PhD in 1898 and moved to London. He studied ancient writing techniques in the British Museum.

1872 Charles Eliot Norton, who had married Susan Ridley Sedgwick in 1862, made a trip with her to Europe in 1868. He had stopped in England to pursue his interests in architectural history and the history of Britain. In 1869 they'd visited Italy prior to settling in Dresden in 1871. In 1872, his wife died in childbirth. Shattered, Norton returned via England to the United States.

1873 Charles Eliot Norton's cousin, Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot, appointed Norton to be the first lecturer of Fine Arts at Harvard 9the first finearts professorship in the U.S.). Norton, who'd gaduated from Harvard in 1846, was professor of the history of art at Harvard from 1875 to 1898.

1872 The Great Boston Fire of 1872 was Boston's largest urban fire and remains, to this day, one of the most devastating and costly fire-related property losses in American history.

1872 Emerson's home burned down in the night of July 24, 1872. Emerson's health now took a sharp turn. In the fall, while friends and neighbors rebuilt the house, Emerson went abroad with his daughter Ellen, traveling to Europe and Egypt (he'd return just after his seventieth birthday to a cheering crowd and a restored home).

1873 Emerson and his daughter Ellen were in London in the spring of 1873. [Lewis Carroll notes Emerson's being in London on April 20, 1873. He made mention, in his diary [Diaries of Lewis Carroll, Journal No. 10, published as Volume 6, April 2, 1868 to December 31, 1876], of "Mr. Emerson" (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and "Miss Emerson" (his daughter Ellen).

1873 "[Rarely can] the same degree of beauty appropriate to dining-halls [be encountered] as may be found at the South Kensington Museum.... The regular dining-room in the Museum was intrusted to Morris & Co., who have placed on the upper part of the walls a rich floral decoration of embossed plaster, colored (gray-green) by hand. The lower part of the wall, extending over two yards from the floor, consists panels, on each of which is painted, on a gold ground, some allegorical figure. These figures represent the sun, the moon, and signs of the zodiac; they were designed by Burne Jones, and bear too much of that mystical light and expression which invest all forms and faces evoked by his magic touch to be gastronomically suggestive... One may dine at South Kensington amid one of the pleasantest little picture-galleries in existence. When Ralph Waldo Emerson was last in London, a poet who wished to give him a dinner conceived the happy thought of bringing him here, and the sage of Concord no doubt approximated his friend Alcott's ideal of 'dining magnificently'; even the 'bowls of sunshine' with which A. would replace wine were supplied by the rich stained windows of Morris, and by the brilliant white-and-gold of the restaurant which separates the two rooms soexquisitely decorated." -- Moncure Conway, from "Travels In South Kensington; with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England. London: Trubner & Co., 1882. [pp. 135-137].

1874 Henry Hobson Richardson (who'd graduated from Harvard in 1859) returned to Boston. His studio/office was in Brookline.

1875 Moncure Conway again visited America, preaching from his old pulpit in Cincinnati. He also preached in Parker's former pulpit, the 28th Congregational Society, where he was offered a settlement. He turned down the opportunity, wishing to remain in London.

1876 Samuel Gridley Howe died in Boston on January 9, 1876.

1876 Birth of printer publisher, and typographer William Edwin Rudge (1876-1931), born in Brooklyn, New York.

1876 The American Library Association was founded; the first issue of the Association's magazine Library Journal was published.

1876 Melvil Dewey, Amherst College librarian, developed the Dewey Decimal System of classifying library collections.

1877 Michael Anagnos became Superintendent of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, in South Boston, on the death of his father-in-law, Samuel Gridley Howe, who'd begun its operations with six blind children, including Laura Bridgman.

1878 The houses of Hurd and Houghton and James R. Osgood & Company (formerly Ticknor and Fields) merged, becoming Houghton, Osgood & Company.

1879 Moncure Conway's book Demonology and Devil Lore was published in 1879. "Since Conway first wrote the Natural History of the Devil, in this country, twenty years ago, the subject has haunted him: he has explored libraries in its behalf, ransacked the British Museum, visited cathedrals ; he has had the aid and counsel of men like Tyior, Lubbock, and Max Muller; he has given a course of lectures on this theme at the Royal Institution in London; and these lectures, still further expanded, take form in two thick octavos, profusely illustrated and crowded with information, quotation, and allusion." -- from a review in The Nation magazine, Volume: 28, Issue 716, March 20, 1879.

1880 James Osgood retired from Houghton, Osgood & Company. George H. Mifflin, who'd been connected with the Riverside Press, became a partner after Osgood retired. The company now became Houghton Mifflin & Company.

1880 William Addison Dwiggins was born in Cambridge, Ohio. He arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1904, to study with type designer Frederic Goudy. When Goudy left for New York the following year, Dwiggins remained in Hingham with his wife Mabel, and stayed the rest of his life. A renowned type designer, calligrapher, illustrator, and writer, he designed books, typefaces, and ads. He also designed and constructed furniture, painted murals, made lampshades and woodcarvings, stenciled draperies, and even a weathervane. He experimented for many years with a small marionette theatre, serving as artist, craftsman, playwright and director. He died on Christmas day, 1956.

1880 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody published her Reminiscences of Reverend William Ellery Channing.

1880 Lydia Maria Child died in Wayland, Massachusetts on October 20, 1880.

1881 Thomas Carlyle died in London, England on February 5, 1881.

1881 Walt Whitman supervised the publication of the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass by the Boston firm of James R. Osgood (293 poems); also Specimen Days; Whitman again visited Emerson in Concord.

1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson died in Concord on April 27, 1882.

1882 Whitman had withdrawn Leaves of Grass from Osgood, after the Boston District Attorney had threatened to ban the edition with the obscenity statute. Whitman now turned publication over to David McKay in Philadelphia. In 1882 came the publication of the prose works Collect, and Specimen Days.

1882 Publication of Moncure Conway's Travels In South Kensington; with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England. London: Trubner & Co., 1882. [Note: " 'Come,' said my friend Professor Omnium, one clear morning, 'let us take an excursion round the world'.... 'My dear friend,' said I, 'it is among my dreams one day to visit India, China, Japan, California, but at present you might as well ask me to go with you to the moon.' 'You misunderstand,' replies Professor Omnium, 'I do not propose to leave London. We can never go round the world, except in a small, limited way, if we leave London.... Ten thousand people and a dozen governments have been at infinite pains and expense to bring the cream of the East and of the West to your own doors'." -- Conway, from Travels in South Kensington] [Note also: "It is said that the Londoner may be known, in any part of the world where he may die, if his lungs are examined -- they being of a sooty color." -- Conway, from Travels In South Kensington].

1882 Eric Gill born. (1882-1940).

1883 Dard Hunter born (1883-1966).

1883 The first photogravure produced in Britain was made by T. and R. Annan of Glasgow.

1883 "Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by myself, and entitled Our Corner; its first number was dated January, 1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among its contributors were Moncure D. Conway,... Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw..." -- Annie Besant, from her autobiography, published in London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.

1884 Charles Eliot Norton joined The Tavern Club, along with other major influential artists/craftsment of Boston (and New England). the club was founded in 1884.

1884 Walt Whitman bought his first home on Mickle Street in Camden.

1884 Publication of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.

1884 In lieu of a formal education, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue moved to New York in 1884 to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell (one of its principals, James Renwick, was the architect of Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City).

1884 Theodore Low De Vinne (1828–1914) was one of the founding members, in 1884, of the Grolier Club. De Vinne, born in upstate New York, the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher, was apprenticed to the printer’s trade in Newburgh, NewYork but came to New York City in 1848, where he eventually became a partner in the shop of Francis Hart. On the death of Hart in 1877, De Vinne took over the business, which became the De Vinne Press. His printing of wood engravings, together with his fine presswork, brought him an international reputation and great wealth. He was, for years, the primary printer for the Century Company. With a comprehensive knowledge of the history of typography, De Vinne made significant scholarly contributions to the study of typography, primarily incunables. His four volumes on typography are classics. Active in printer’s organizations, De Vinne was a founder of the Typothet’ of New York City and of the United Typothet’ of America. He strove to make printing a profitable craft and to establish good relations between owners and employees.A founder (1884) and president (1904-1906) of the Grolier Club, he was responsible for the printing of most of its early publications.

1884 Mergenthaler invented linotype.

1885 Samuel Gray Ward, the Boston banker who later was to finance the U.S. purchase of Alaska, had built his summer home near Nathaniel Hawthorne's red cottage, in 1845. After Ward spread the word about the beautiful Berkshire countryside to his friends back in Boston, many joined him in the area as summer, or even year-round residents. Among the early summer people was Fanny Kemble, one of the most noted Shakespearean actresses of the day. By the late 1800s, Lenox and Stockbridge were booming as the summer homes of many of the country's elite. The peak building year in Lenox was 1885, when construction began on several of the gigantic mansions these wealthy families whimsically called "cottages." The most magnificent of these was Shadowbrook, built for railroad baron Anson Phelps Stokes on 900 acres at the edge of Lenox and Stockbridge. With 100 rooms, it was one of the largest homes in North America (Andrew Carnegie, who later bought the house, died there in 1919).

1885 Moncure Conway retired from his South Place ministry and returned to America with his wife to live in New York, near their children.

1885 By the mid-1880s, Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842–1904), was well-known as a painter and stained glass artist, one of the earliest and most successful and influential of American book cover designers.

1886 Linotype invented by Otto Mergenthaler.

1886 Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts on May 15, 1886.

In 1887 Dewey founded the nation's first school of "library economy" at Columbia College. With the new respectability that Dewey brought to the profession, and spurred by a rising literacy rate, the public library movement blossomed at the turn of the century. Much of its success was due to the generosity of private benefactors like John Jacob Astor, who before dying on the Titanic in 1912, got the New York Public Library started, and Andrew Carnegie, whose "gospel of wealth" left its mark in scores of public libraries throughout the U.S.

1887 On April 20, 1887, forty-seven officers from thirty-three Boston area printing companies approved a charter to create The Master Printer’s Club of Boston.

1887 On October 18, 1887, United Typothetae of America was organized at a convention in Chicago attended by sixt-eight delegates representing eighteen master printer’s associations from twenty-two cities. Its purpose was “to develop a community of interests and a fraternal spirit among the master printers of the United States and Dominion of Canada and for the purpose of exchanging information and assisting each other when necessary.” The United Typothetae of America would eventually become Printing Industries of America..

1887 On October 24, 1887, the Master Printer’s Club of Boston voted unanimously to join the United Typothetae of America, known today as Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (PIA/GATF).

1888 Whitman suffered paralytic stroke that left him bedridden.

1888 Amos Bronson Alcott died in Concord on March 4, 1888.

1888 Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888.

1889 Stanley Morison born (1889-1967). British scholar-typographer.

1890 Harris Press, American automatic platen press.

1890 By the middle of the nineteenth century, in support of the library movement, Massachusetts had taken the lead from its northern neighbor: hundreds of Massachusetts communities had founded such institutions by the 1880s, and in 1890 the state established the first library commission in the nation.

1890 Moncure Conway returned to London.

1890 Florence Farr (July 7, 1860 - April 29, 1917) moved in with her sister at Bedford Park (London), a Bohemian center for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers, discussing and writing about Art and Politics with women on equal standing with men.

1890 Under a full moon, John Todhunter put on his play, "A Sicilian Idyll" with Florence Farr as the Priestess Amaryllis, who invoked the Moon Goddess Selene to destroy her faithless lover. George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats were both in attendance. Both fell in love with her -- with her starling beauty, large expressive eyes, crescent eyebrows, and luminous smile. Shaw and Florence would have a passionate love affair -- despite his simultaneous attentions to Jenny Patterson (a widow friend of his mother's and his first lover) and May Morris Sparling (William Morris's married daughter). Shaw noted in his diary five days after Florence's first Enochian lecture that they were both "very happy" spending their evenings reading Walt Whitman to each other. But this peaceful interlude was not to last. Jenny Patterson, returning from a trip to Italy, burst in upon Florence and Shaw, screaming that Florence could not have him. The next day Shaw made Jenny write a note of apology which May Morris delivered. Florence refused to see Shaw for a month, during which he wrote the scene into his new play, The Philanderer. Florence countered with a novel, The Dancing Faun, in which an enraged woman kills him and gets away with it.

"I often attended South Place Chapel," Annie Besant wrote in her 1893 autobiography, "where Moncure D. Conway was then preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my views on the deeper religious problems... Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no echo of man's cry.... One day in the late spring, talking with Mrs. Conway -- one of the sweetest and steadiest natures whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few friends -- she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other people's prejudices so sadly common, 'No, I have never been there. Mr. Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?' 'He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard," she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright...." -- Annie Besant, from her autobiography, published in London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.

The Leicester Secular Society had been founded in 1851. (The term secular, deriving from the Latin saecularis, means pertaining to the real world of the here and now, as contrasted with imagined or dream worlds such as heaven, some golden age set in the past, or some future utopia. Secularism emphasizes living our lives in the here and now and not allowing ourselves to be carried away by wish-fulfilment into believing things just because they sound nice or are what we might like to be true.) Some of the people who met at Secular Hall, Leicester, in the late 1880s and early 1890s included William Morris, Kropotkin, Annie Besant, Bernard Shaw (and even, later, Bertrand Russell). "Darwinism had destroyed Genesis, but theology was still wedded to superhuman intervention, and bolstered up by myths, some much older than Christianity, such as the god impregnated birth, the supernatural miracles, and the physical resurrection. 'The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate' was accepted as a divine order and the underprivileged taught to look to a heaven after death as their salvation. It became imperatively necessary to liberate man from these superstitions if man was to win human fulfilment by his own effort in this life. This did not mean an absence of inspiration in beauty and even in universal consciousness. It did mean that religion was bigger than accepted theology and the creeds taught in a thousand churches." -- Lord Fenner Brockway 1888-1988 (from "A Century of Progressive Thought: The Story of Leicester Secular Society," 1972, by Gillian Hawtin, http://homepages.stayfree.co.uk/lss/history.htm).

1890 Margaret Armstrong (1867–1944), from a wealthy New York state Hudson River Valley family, started designing book covers. Her (eventually more than 300) designs were used over and over again by the publishers, in the original colors or in variations. She designed the very reknowned series of covers in deep blue for Scribner's Henry Van Dyke books. Her sister, Helen Maitland Armstrong, occasionally collaborated with her, between 1890 and 1913, decorating the pages of books as well as the covers. After 1913, Margaret Armstrong took up writing, becoming a bestselling author.

1891 At the end of the first week in February, James Redpath was struck by a vehicle while crossing Broadway in New York. On February 10th, he died of his injuries.

1891 Meynell, Sir Francis, d.1975. founder of the Nonesuch Press in 1923.

1891 American Type Founders Company started.

1891 Lessing J. Rosenwald, d. 1979. Former chairman of Sears, Roebuck Co. gave to the nation 2,600 exquisite volumes, the greates benefaction in the Library of Congress' history, including an enormous two volume illuminated manuscript known as the Great Bible of Mainz. produced in 1452, this book is thought to have influenced motifs and ornamentation used in the design of Gutenbergs 42 line bible, which was printed in the same year. Other treasures included Prolemy's Cosmographia; William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience; the only known copy of the first edition of the English version of the Lohengrin legend, The Knight of the Swan; and the only ilustrated book published by Manutius, Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

1891 Thomas Bird Mosher printed his first book in 1891 in Portland, Maine. He went on to publish more than 700 books and journals before his death in 1923. The son of a sea captain, Mosher began in the business as a stationer and book collector. He was an important printer during the small press revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. His books reflected the artistic styles of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Art Nouveau. Mosher's interpretation of copyright law has led to his being called a pirate, but he was able to introduce the American public to new European authors. His disregard for copyright, however, led to his books being banned in England. Flora M. Lamb took over the press's production after Mosher's death.

1891 Kelmscott Press founded by William Morris and Emery Walker at Hammersmith, England. Kelmscott Press is perhaps the most prominent private press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Morris was already noted for his designs for fabrics and household objects. He believed everyday objects, including books, should be held to a high standard of beauty and design. In his quest for the perfect book, Morris looked back to the decorative motifs and techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Kelmscott Press produced books still celebrated for the clarity and balance of their type, the intricacy and beauty of the wood-engraved illustrations, and the fine craftsmanship of the printing and binding. Between 1891 and its closure in 1898, the press produced 53 books. The "Kelmscott Chaucer" is widely regarded as the press's finest achievement..

1891 Hubbard's first book, The Man was published under the pseudonym Aspasia Hobbs (J.S. Ogilvie, N.Y 1891). The book was written in collaboration with Alice Moore, with whom he was having an affair.

1891 After Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue won a design competition for St. Matthew’s in Dallas, he moved to Boston, where he was befriended by a group of young, artistic intellectuals involved in the American Arts and Crafts movement. It was through this group that Goodhue met Ralph Adams Cram, who would be his business partner for almost 25 years. In 1891 Cram and Goodhue formed the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth, and Goodhue. Cram and Goodhue were members of several societies, including the Pewter Mugs and the Visionists. In 1892-1893 they published a quarterly art magazine called The Knight Errant.

1892 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed the Book of Common Prayer for D. B. Updike, who founded Merrymount Press in Boston in 1893.

1892 Moncure Conway's biography of Thomas Paine was published in 1892.

1893 William Morris published the Kelmscott Chaucer.

1893 Daniel Berkeley Updike established the Merrymount Press in Boston. His goal, as he put it, was to do even common work well. The Merrymount Press published ephemera in addition to books. The press, influenced by the ideals of William Morris's Kelmscott Press was known for the excellence of its printing. Updike was recognized as an authority on the history of typography and wrote several books on the subject.

1890s Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue kept busy drawing initials, borders, and decorations for books and magazines similar to those in Kelmscott Press prints.

1892 Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey on March 26, 1892.

1892 Lidian Emerson died on November 13, 1892.

1893 Elbert Hubbard, having sold his business interest of $65,000 in the Larkin Company in 1892 (he'd saved enough money to become independent). He began to work for the Arena Publishing Company in Boston (his wife Bertha was still living in East Aurora). Alice Moore was then living in Hingham, Massachusetts (where W.A. Dwiggins would be living and working in the early 1900s). The first book to carry Elbert Hubbard's name, One Day: A Tale of the Prairie, was published by Arena Publishing Company. Hubbard went as a special student to Harvard, taking English Literature classes, starting in January, 1893. He was home in March, and went back to Harvard in September. He didn't continue as a student, but did find at Harvard the germ of an idea for The Little Journeys (he would write some 120 of them).

1893 After his successor departed, Moncure Conway's contract as minister at South Place Chapel, London was renewed for four years.

1890s The Norwood Press, located in Norwood, Massachusetts, was founded in the 1890s.

1892 Walt Whitman published Goodbye, My Fancy and the ninth edition of Leaves of Grass (the "Deathbed Edition"). Whitman died, at Mickle Street, on March 26. He was buried March 30 at Harleigh. He'd left the request that his tomb door should be left ajar at twilight so that his spirit could "stroll abroad."

1893 In Boston, Daniel Berkeley Updike established the Merrymount Press in 1893. He was the proprietor for forty-eight years.

Mid to late1890s Frederic W. Goudy began experimenting with layout and printing while working as a bookkeeper in Chicago. Goudy, one of the finest and most prolific type designers in history, created a total of 124 type designs, executing many from drawing to casting.

1894 Eragny Press founded by Lucien Pisarro.

1894 The Yellow Book started (ran until 1897).

1894 Ashendene Press (Published until 1938).

1894 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody died in Massachusetts on January 3, 1894.

1894 Putnam's published Elbert Hubbard's No Enemy But Himself, which, unlike his earlier works, met with critical acclaim and some commercial success. Hubbard's third novel, Forbes of Harvard (Arena 1894) was published (for the rest of his life, post-Harvard, Hubbard disdained higher education). In Arena magazine, The Rights of Tramps and A New Disease were published. In June Elbert Hubbard may (or may not) have met William Morris (the anecdotes reported years later by Hubbard do not match up with historical facts).

1895 In January, the publication of the first Little Journeys monthly magazine: the subject, George Eliot. In June, Elbert Hubbard began publication of The Philistine. 2,500 copies of the first issue were published and sent to leading thinkers around the country, in the first targeted mailing of its size.

1895 Henry Oscar Houghton died.

Mid 1890s Ethel Reed (1874–1910), a model as well as an artist, enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the mid 1890s designing posters, bookcovers, and endpapers, and illustrating children's (and other) books.

1895 Native Bostonian Will Bradley established (in Springfield, Massachusetts) the Wayside Press (editing and publishing his own magazine).

1895 In its first issue, the American magazine The Bookman included a list of Books in Demand, which predated the bestseller list later developed by Frank Mott (in his book, Golden Multitudes).

1895 Printer John Henry Nash arrived in San Francisco, becoming renowned for his fine editions of classic literature. (The press reached the peak of its prosperity in the 1920s. During the Great Depression Nash closed his San Francisco shop and retired to Oregon, where he was professor of typography at the University of Oregon. When he retired, the Grabhorn brothers acquired some of the type he'd used in his shop).

1896 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (creator of the Cheltenham typeface) designed the Merrymount typeface, ornamenting the Merrymount Press edition of the Altar Book, and other publications issued by Updike's Merrymount Press. Goodhue also contributed numerous book designs for Stone & Kimball publishers, Chicago.

1896-1897 Will Bradley (1868–1962): Bradley His Book (1896-1897).

1897 Bruce Rogers (1870-1957) went to work for the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1897. The eminent designer and typographer was at the Riverside Press, a division of Houghton Mifflin, from 1897 to 1911.

1897 The Boston Arts and Crafts Society was founded in 1897. Involved were Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University, Ernest Fenellosa of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. [As Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton passed on to his students his belief in the "moral power of art" and used his position to build up a fellowship of leaders who would guide the nation along its proper path of enlightened cultural and social pursuits. Bostonians collected and preserved works of art and architecture and created a number of institutions and associations for the promotion of good taste. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum all had their beginnings during Norton’s years. Influential individuals in their own right who were students of Norton included Charles Fletcher Lummis, Bernard Berenson, Wallace Nutting, and Theodore Roosevelt. Underlying Norton’s philosophy, and that of the colonial revivalists, Arts and Crafts designers, and SACB (Society of Arts and Crafts) leaders was a message to immigrants, that proper American behavior could only be achieved within the values of a moral work ethic translated by members of the Arts and Crafts community. Norton's followers included numbers of women who found success in social reform and as artists. As individuals or in cooperatives, women were involved in pottery, textiles, needlework, print-making, metal work, and the book arts..

1897 Moncure Conway traveled to New York City with his terminally ill wife, who wished to die in America. Not long after her death in New York City on Christmas Day, he began lecturing in the U.S. on the Spanish-American War, free religion, and voting rights. Again disillusioned with Americans, marching to war with Spain, Conway left in 1898 to live in France, where he devoted himself to the peace movement and to writing.

1898 The Kelmscott Press, founded by William Morris and Emery Walker at Hammersmith, England in 1891, closed in 1898. In just seven years, the press had produced fifty-three books.

1898 Essex House Press founded in London by Charles Robert Ashbee (the press would close in 1910).

1898 The architectural firm Cram, Wentworth, and Goodhue was renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, a leader in neo-gothic architecture.

1898 Goodspeed's rare book shop was founded in Boston by Charles Eliot Goodspeed in 1898.

1898 Philip Hofer (1898-1984) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1898 (he would die in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1984).

1899 Denman Ross began teaching at Hatvard (Architecture and Fine Arts department). Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ross graduated from Harvard (B.A. 1875; M.A. 1880; Ph.D. 1880), worked under Henry Adams and, beginning in 1899, taught in Harvard's architecture and fine arts department. He also worked, beginning in 1909, in the fine arts department of the Fogg Art Museum. He wrote several theoretical books on art, including A Theory of Pure Design (1907). An avid traveler, he collected oriental art, especially, which he donated to both Boston's and Harvard's Fogg Museums.

1899 Elbert Hubbard published a ten-page pamphlet, A Message to Garcia. The pamphlet sold about 45 million copies. That same year Hubbard received an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts.

1899 Bookbinder Arno Werner was born in Germany in 1899 (Werner studied with Ignatz Wiemeler, a disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement in England).

1899 Insel Verlag founded in Leipzig by the Paris-born, English-educated son of a German-Swiss father and an Irish mother, the diplomat and patron of the arts Count Harry Kessler.

1899 London - The opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum (formerly known as the South Kensington Museum, which had been founded in 1857).

1900 Doves Press established at Hammersmith, London by Cobden-Sanderson.

1900 Fritz Kredel (1900-1973) wasborn in Germany in 1900. His career began in the 1920s, under the tutelage of Rudolf Koch. As his skills grew, he became a master woodcut artist.

Early 1900s William Addison Dwiggins (1880-1956), type designer, book designer, calligrapher, illustrator, and writer, had studied illustration in Chicago under Frederic Goudy. In the first years of the new century, he moved to Hingham, Massachusetts to work with Goudy at his Village Press. (Dwiggins stayed in Hingham the rest of his life).

1900 Beatrice Warde, writer and lecturer on typography, born in 1900 (died in1969).

1900s Boston-based George H. Hallowell (1872–1926), an artist working in oil painting, stained glass, poster design, journal illustration, and book design (illustrated book covers), was very highly regarded around the turn of the century.

1900s Boston-based Thomas Buford Meteyard (1865–1928), primarily a painter, was friends with poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey for whom he designed covers, title pages, and endsheets.

1900s Boston-based Theodore Brown Hapgood, Jr. (1871–1938), a devotee of medieval art, designed tombstones, church vestments, plaques, inscriptions, and books.

Early 1900s At the turn of the century, John Cotton Dana, director of the Newark, New Jersey Public Library, was a strong advocate of the "Populist" approach: "Youth and libraries were of special concern to him," writes James Baughman in his Trustees, Trusteeship, and the Public Good. "He believed that 'the library should be the most inviting, the most wholesome, the most elevating and the most popular place in the city...It should attract...visitors and it should hold them.' "

1901 Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) was born in Cologne, Germany. He produced his first prints at eighteen, and illustrated two important classics by twenty-one. He moved to the United States in 1933.

1902 Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) translated (loosely) The Blue Flower of Novalis, published in 1902. Van Dyke was U.S. minister to the Netherlands 1913–16. Little Rivers had been published in 1895; Fisherman’s Luck in 1899.

1902 Edith Wharton's Lenox estate, The Mount, was built in 1902. Wharton, born into a wealthy and socially prominent New York family, in her youth preferred reading books to participating in high society. In 1885 the twenty-three year old Edith Jones nevertheless married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker thirteen years her senior. They divided their year between New York and Newport and later Lenox, Massachusetts, where Edith had designed their mansion, The Mount (built in 1902, the year her first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published, followed in 1905 by The House of Mirth, which established Wharton's reputation).

1902 McClure's Magazine printed Tweed Days in St. Louis by C.H. Wetmore and Lincoln Steffens. The article introduced the muckraking era.

1902 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue designed the Cheltenham Old Style typeface.

1902 Graily Hewitt did exquisite work for the Ashendene Press. Charles St. John Hornby prevailed upon Hewitt to provide manuscript initials in red, blue, and burnished gold for his version of Song of Songs, printed in 1902.

1903 An early and celebrated pupil of Johnston, William Graily Hewitt was a student of medieval calligraphy and especially of gilding techniques, a virtuoso display of which was done in platinum and gold on purple vellum for Sydney Cockerell in 1903.

1903 Elbert Hubbard had had an affair with Alice Moore, a teacher at East Aurora Academy, resulting in a daughter, Miriam (Alice and Miriam had lived, for a time, in Concord, Massachusetts). Now Bertha divorced from Elbert. Bertha retained custody of two of their children.

1904 Alice Moore and Elbert Hubbard were married in 1904. Alice Hubbard was a partner in managing the Roycroft enterprises.

1904 William Graily Hewitt contemplated setting up a cooperative scriptorium along medieval lines -- an aim which would be fulfilled in his memorials for the fallen in World War I. He aimed for work that was not so much artistically inventive as approaching, in his execution of the work, technical perfection.

1904 Having founded the innovative Leipzig publishing house Insel Verlag in 1899, Count Harry Kessler he came to London to seek the advice of Emery Walker on the design of books for Insel. While there he was introduced toEric Gill and Edward Johnston, both of whom he commissioned to draw title pages for Insel Verlag. (Kessler would later ask Walker to produce a type for the Cranach Presse). Kessler's interests in fine printing were interrupted by World War I and his posting to Poland as ambassador.

1904 Edward Pearson Pressey and Carl Purington Rollins published The Arts and Crafts and the Individual, in Montague, Massachusetts (The New Clairvaux Press, 1904. Limited to 200 copies.) . This was one of the first publications of The New Clairvaux Press. Edward Pearson Pressey was an ordained Unitarian Minister who founded New Clairvaux in Montague, Mass., a utopian community based on the Arts and Crafts ideal. He advocated a return to the self-sufficient, pre-industrial age in which the dignity of labor was revived and service to all honored. The community never consisted of much more than six families, students and apprentices who shared common work areas.

1905 Frederic W. Goudy established his first press, which he moved to New York City the next year (his wife, Bertha M. Sprinks Goudy, acted as typesetter). With his wife Bertha, he operated the Village Press from 1903 to 1939. Kennerley, Deepdene, Garamont, and Forum were a few of his more than 100 typefaces.

1905 Frederic W. Goudy established his first press, which he moved to New York City the next year. His wife, Bertha M. Sprinks Goudy, acted as typesetter. Kennerley, Deepdene, Garamont, and Forum are a few of his more than 100 typefaces. [Goudywas the author of The Alphabet (1918), Elements of Lettering (1922), Typologia (1940)and Half Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895–1945 (1947).

1906 Edward Johnston's book Writing and Illuminating and Lettering (still considered the most influential book on calligraphy ever written) was published in 1906.

1906 The IABA -- The International Antiquarian Booksellers Association -- was founded in 1906.

1907 Though typography was a secondary interest for Edward Johnston, his draft lettering and trials for the titling of the Doves Press edition of Milton's Areopagitica (1907) showed Johnston's thorough understanding of historical layout and design.

1907 Janus Presse, established in Leipzig by Carl Ernst Poeschel and Walter Tiemann.

1907 John Phillips Marquand, born in Wilmington, Delaware on November 10, 1893 to descendants of New England families, lived in Rye, New York until he was fourteen. At thirteen, he learned that the stock market panic of 1907 wiped out all of his family's fortunes. His father, who found employment working on the Panama Canal, departed with John's mother. John went to Newburyport, Massachusetts to be raised by relatives, three old women, in an isolated country house at Curzon's Mill, a remote section of Newburyport. His grandfather had married Margaret Curzon of Newburyport. His grandmother's sister, Mary Russell Curzon, lived year round at the Yellow House, next to the Mill. The poet William Ellery Channing and the artist William Morris Hunt had both proposed marriage to her; she had turned them down. Hr house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

1907 Alone in his Paris apartment, Moncure Conway died November 15, 1907.

1907 The Huntington Avenue building housing the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opened in 1907.

1907 Carl Purington Rollins bought the Van Dyke Mill in Montague, Massachusetts.

1908 Using William Morris’s famous handpress, The Kelmscott Press in Broad Campden, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Ananda Coomaraswamy brought out, on his own Essex House Press (taking fifteen months to print 425 copies), his first work as an art historian, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. The book dealt with the later traditional arts of Ceylon prior to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Coomaswamy, who saw a unifying truth underlying all of the major religions of the world -- the so-called "Perennial Wisdom," was influenced by William Blake (freedom and creativity and the primacy of the Imagination), anti-materialist back-to-nature Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the noble savage), John Ruskin ("industry without art is brutality"), William Morris (anti-industrialist social idealism and craft production), Christian mediaeval thought e.g., St. Augustine, and the oriental spiritual values of Jacques Maritain.

1908 Henri Bergson, in London in 1908, visited William James, the American philosopher of Harvard, Bergson's senior by seventeen years (James was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor). In an October 4, 1908 letter, James wrote of meeting Bergson, "So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."

1909 Denman Waldo Ross, art collector and educator and a member of the highly influential circle of intellectuals trained by Harvard’s first art historian, Charles Eliot Norton, joined the Harvard fine arts department faculty in 1909. The son of a prosperous Cincinnati family, he had graduated from Harvard in 1875 and had next earned a Ph.D. in economics before then turning to the study of art. He'd beeen a painter and had taught in the architecture and fine arts departments at Harvard since 1899.

1910 Julia Ward Howe died in Newport, Rhode Island on October 17, 1910.

1910-1911 William James assisted Arthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. James died in August, 1910. Published in 1911, the translation brought renewed interest in Bergson and his work. The world, according to Bergson, was not a great mechanism, but rather a living organism permeated by the élan vital -- the world is a always evolving and creative duration. The creative process begins with an enormous eruption, the first products of which settle in the heaviest forms as powerless matter. The course of creative evolution is the constant struggle of the élan vital with matter. Evolution is not hindered by any determinism. Reality has a psychic nature. The central point from which the élan vital radiates is God -- the source of life and the energy of life. Humans live in a reality of two elements -- are endowed with two kinds of cognition and memory. By rational cognition, a human is a worker who transforms the world (homo faber). By intuitive knowledge, a human is wise (homo sapiens). A human is free, but in practice he/she is subject to the pressure of material conditions and habits resulting from interhuman contacts (the social fabric), which create in him/her a secondary consciousnses -- the “superficial self” superimposed upon the “deep self” -- curtailing freedom and blunting creativity.

1911 Henri Bergson wrote the preface (Vérité et Realité) for the French translation of James's book, Pragmatism.

1911 Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 9, 1911.

1910-1930 Edward Johnston designed fonts for Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach-Presse in Weimar.

1911 Carl Purington Rollins established the Montague Press in Montague, Massachusetts 1911 (here Rollins made the first time use of Bruce Rogers' Centaur type).

1912 Flying Fame Press, founded in 1912 by Holbrook Jackson, Ralph Hodgson, and Claude Lovat Fraser, remained active until the start of World War I.

1912 Edward Johnston moved to Ditchling.

1912 Harry Graf von Kessler, having founded the Insel verlag in 1899, established his private press, the Cranach Presse, in Weimar, Germany.

1912 Truman Nelson born in Lynn, Massachusetts, February 17, 1912.

1913 Henri Bergson visited the United States for the first time in January 1913. The week before he delivered his first lecture (Spirituality and Liberty) at Columbia University, a long article about him was published by The New York Times. In 1914 Bergson would be elected a member of the Académie Française (the first Jewish member) and would teach courses on Modern Philosophy and Spinoza at the Collège de France.

1913 Elbert Hubbard pleaded guilty in 1913 to misusing the postal service to send "filthy" material. Among the materials cited was a joke that by today's standards would be considered quite tame (The bride of a year entered a drugstore. The clerk approached. "Do you exchange goods?," she asked. "Oh, Certainly! If anything you buy here is not satisfactory we will exchange it." "Well," was the reply; "here is one of those whirling-spray [contraceptive] affairs I bought of you, and if you please, I want you to take it back and give me a bottle of Mellin's [baby] Food, instead." And outside the storm raged piteously, and the across the moor a jay-bird called to his mate, "Cuckoo, cuckoo!") Hubbard was fined $100 and was deprived of his rights of citizenship. In order to secure a United States passport, the world-renowned Hubbard took the strange step of seeking President Wilson's pardon; Hubbard was rejected on the grounds that his application was premature. After war broke out Hubbard appealed to Wilson's secretary, Joe Tumulty, that Hubbard had to go to Europe to cover the war. Wilson granted the pardon.

1913 The Imprint magazine was established by Edward Johnston, J.H.Mason, and Charles Meynell in 1913. Only nine issues were published.

1914 Rupprecht Press founded by Fritz Helmut Ehmcke.

1914 Founding of American Institute of Graphic Arts.

1914 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue left the architectural firm Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson to begin his own practice.

1915 As lead designer for the 1915 San Diego Exposition (The Panama-California Exposition), Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue oversaw the architectural development, he developed a masterful Spanish Gothic revival style for the signature buildings on the toylike avenue in Balboa Park, the Exposition buildings expressing Spanish spirit and exoticism.

1915 Frank Brangwyn painted the murals in Skinners Hall at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco.

1915 Bruce Rogers printed Maurice de Guerin's The Centaur at Carl Purngton Rollins' Montague, Massachusetts press (Rogers designed the typeface, Centaur).

1915 Gustav Stickley's Craftsman enterprise declared bankrupt.

1915 John Marquand graduated from Harvard University. From 1915 to 1917, Marquand was assistant magazine editor of the Boston Transcript. After a brief period as advertising copywriter in 1920 and 1921, he became a novelist and published The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922). Marquand was a frequent contributor of short stories to several popular magazines of the day. (In 1922, Marquand married Christina Sedgwick. The marriage lasted thirteen years, bringing a son and a daughter. In 1936, Marquand married a wealthy Connecticut heiress, Adelaide Hooker. Two sons and a daughter were born. The marriage was wrought with arguments, affairs, and separations. The result was a chaotic privileged upbringing for his last three children. Marquand's relationship with the three children was little better than his relationship with his own father. Marquand's last novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, detailed the domestic failures. The marriage ended in divorce in 1958. John Marquand would die in his sleep of a heart attack in Newburyport, Massachusetts on July 16, 1960.

1915 Elbert and Alice Hubbard perished on the Lusitania on May 7, 1915.

1915 Thomas Merton was born in France, of American parents. His early education was at the Lycee de Montauban (1927-1928) and then in England (Oakham School, 1929-32; Clare College, Cambridge, 1933-4).

1916 Edward Johnston, having been commissioned by the London Transport in 1915 to design a typeface for the London Underground’s corporate identity, in 1916 produced a new typeface for the Underground (Eric Gill worked with Johnston on this project).

1916 The Mall Press was founded in London by Emery Walker and Bruce Rogers.

1916 The Hampshire Bookshop was opened by two Smith college graduates (Marion E. Dodd and Mary Byers Smith) in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1916. (More than forty books would be published under the imprint of The Hampshire Bookshop).

1916 Horace Liveright created his publishing company in 1916 in partnership with Albert Boni, and he fought censorship to publish works that were deemed radical at the time. Liveright is often credited with modernizing American book publishing. His Modern Library series became a staple of bookstores throughout the country, and the authors he discovered or promoted were frequently on bestseller lists. Due to financial problems, drinking problems, and failing health, Liveright sold the Modern Library series to Bennett Cerf in 1925. Boni & Liveright was dissolved by 1930, and Liveright worked for Paramount Studios in California for several years before his death in 1933.

1916 Last issue of Stickley's The Craftsman, December 1916.