Collecting Shakespeare
Collecting Shakespeare

Author: Stephen H. Grant

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-04-26

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1421411873

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The first biography of Henry and Emily Folger, who acquired the largest and finest collection of Shakespeare in the world. In Collecting Shakespeare, Stephen H. Grant recounts the American success story of Henry and Emily Folger. Shortly after marrying in 1885, the Folgers started buying, cataloging, and storing all manner of items about Shakespeare and his era. Emily earned a master's degree in Shakespeare studies. The frugal couple worked passionately as a tight-knit team during the Gilded Age, financing their hobby with the fortune Henry earned as president of Standard Oil Company of New York, where he was a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller Sr. While a number of American universities offered to house the collection, the Folgers wanted to give it to the American people. Afraid the price of antiquarian books would soar if their names were revealed, they secretly acquired prime real estate on Capitol Hill near the Library of Congress. They commissioned the design and construction of an elegant building with a reading room, public exhibition hall, and the Elizabethan Theatre. The Folger Shakespeare Library was dedicated on the Bard's birthday on April 23, 1932. The library houses 82 First Folios, 277,000 books, and 60,000 manuscripts. It welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year and provides professors, scholars, graduate students, and researchers from around the world with access to the collections. It is also a vibrant center in Washington, DC, for cultural programs, including theater, concerts, lectures, and poetry readings. With unprecedented access to the primary sources within the Folger vault, Grant draws on interviews with surviving Folger relatives and visits to 35 related archives in the United States and in Britain to create a portrait of the remarkable couple who ensured that Shakespeare would have a beautiful home in America.

Hosmer Genealogy
Hosmer Genealogy

Author: George Leonard Hosmer

Publisher:

Published: 1928

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13:

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James Hosmer, son of Stephen Hosmer, was baptized in 1605 in Hawkhurst, county of Kent, England and later settled in Massachusetts. Descendants lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, New York, Michigan, Illinois, and elsewhere.

Peter Strickland
Peter Strickland

Author: Stephen H. Grant

Publisher: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

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This is the first biography of Capt. Peter Strickland, a little-known Connecticut Yankee who crossed the Atlantic 100 times in command of a sailing vessel, traded with French and Portuguese colonies during the period 1864-1905, and served as the first American consul to French West Africa for over 20 years. We know about Peter Strickland's long life (1837-1921) because he wrote a daily journal from the age of 19 until the year he died. He broke away from a long line of Connecticut farmers to adopt a seafaring life at the age of 15. Capt. Strickland's merchant marine career led him from the east coast of the United States to the west coast of Africa. He introduced American tobacco and wood products into French and Portuguese colonies and on the return trips carried animal hides and peanuts in his 100-ton schooners. He wrote and published a book on behalf of sailors. The most knowledgeable American in the African trade for 40 years, Strickland struggled to maintain an American competitive edge among the dominant commercial presence of French trading houses from Bordeaux and Marseilles. The U.S. State Department asked him to become the first consul in French West Africa, with residence in Senegal. The captain accepted the terms: he would receive no salary, but he could keep the port fees he collected and continue to practice his import-export business. Living on the former slave island of Gorée, Strickland battled epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. He suffered from malaria and catarrh. His 23-year-old son George accidentally drowned off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. Demoralized and ill, Strickland retired to Boston in 1905 and became a gentleman farmer. At age 77, he recopied his entire journal into bound volumes.

Index; 1951
Index; 1951

Author: University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Publisher: Legare Street Press

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9781013944963

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