Anti-Slavery Movement

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Anti-Slavery Collection

  The nucleus of this collection was presented to the Library in the late 1890s by the family of William Lloyd Garrison and other individuals involved in the anti-slavery movement. The collection features artifacts, books, documents, letters, and pamphlets from Boston reformer Wendell Phillips and the letters and papers of orator and abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison dating from the 1830s through the 1870s, totaling more than 16,000 items. The collection also contains daguerreotypes of noted abolitionists; the papers of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; and the papers of Maria Weston Chapman and Deborah Weston, Amos Augustus Phelps, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel Joseph May, and John Bishop Estlin. Other items include the full run and the account books of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; records of the American, New England, and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery societies; scrapbooks concerning Anthony Burns and John Brown; and the files of Ziba B. Oakes, a slave broker from Charleston, South Carolina.  The library also has extensive holdings of printed material relating to the anti-slavery movement. The libraries of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker are here, all rich in relevant pamphlets and broadsides. The Hunt Collection on the West Indies is another fine resource from a different perspective, as is the E.A. Phelps British Anti-Slavery Society Papers. In addition, an 89-page unpublished typed index to The Liberty Bell is available in the Rare Books Department. Online access: For more information about the collection, including its contents, history, and organization, please consult the BPL research guide, opens a new window. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Anti-Slavery Movement

20th Regiment Collection

(Rare Books and Manuscripts) This collection contains books, manuscripts, images, and artifacts relating to military affairs, with a particular focus on the American Civil War and on Massachusetts soldiers and regiments. The collection is particularly strong with respect to regimental histories, containing a near complete run of the General Orders of the various Departments of the Union Army, as well as contemporary sheet music (southern as well as northern). The collection also includes 10 scrapbooks of patriotic envelopes and 9 portfolios of the battle and camp photographs by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. In 1896, the surviving members of the 20th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, donated $10,000 remaining from funds collected for the marble memorial lion in the McKim staircase to establish a special collection of books "of military and patriotic nature."  As part of their original gift, members of the 20th Regiment Association donated copies of their own diaries, reports, and letters. To these have been added other manuscript materials pertaining to both North and South. While works concerning other wars and military engagements are not as extensive, there are interesting items from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, and the monumental sets of official records of the 1st and 2nd Divisions of the American Expeditionary Force. There are also 345 volumes of personal narratives and other works on World War I, the gift of [Mary Boyle O'Reilly]. The collection continues to grow, now also adding materials focusing on Massachusetts' participation in World Wars I and II. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Anti-Slavery Collection

  The nucleus of this collection was presented to the Library in the late 1890s by the family of William Lloyd Garrison and other individuals involved in the anti-slavery movement. The collection features artifacts, books, documents, letters, and pamphlets from Boston reformer Wendell Phillips and the letters and papers of orator and abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison dating from the 1830s through the 1870s, totaling more than 16,000 items. The collection also contains daguerreotypes of noted abolitionists; the papers of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; and the papers of Maria Weston Chapman and Deborah Weston, Amos Augustus Phelps, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel Joseph May, and John Bishop Estlin. Other items include the full run and the account books of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; records of the American, New England, and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery societies; scrapbooks concerning Anthony Burns and John Brown; and the files of Ziba B. Oakes, a slave broker from Charleston, South Carolina.  The library also has extensive holdings of printed material relating to the anti-slavery movement. The libraries of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker are here, all rich in relevant pamphlets and broadsides. The Hunt Collection on the West Indies is another fine resource from a different perspective, as is the E.A. Phelps British Anti-Slavery Society Papers. In addition, an 89-page unpublished typed index to The Liberty Bell is available in the Rare Books Department. Online access: For more information about the collection, including its contents, history, and organization, please consult the BPL research guide, opens a new window. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Parker, Theodore (1810-1860) Library

(Rare Books & Manuscripts) A leading American intellectual born in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1810, Theodore Parker was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1836. Parker was a notable religious reformer, a scholar, a member of the transcendentalist movement, and a major voice in the anti-slavery movement. The Theodore Parker Collection comprises approximately 12,800 volumes, 4,600 pamphlets, and many manuscripts. The collection includes grammars, dictionaries of foreign languages, encyclopedias, Latin and Greek classics, literary histories, books on jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, and material on the anti-slavery movement, including broadsides, scrapbooks, and associated ephemera. After his death in 1860, Parker's books came to the BPL via bequest. The second major donated collection of rare materials after the Bowditch Collection, opens a new window, Parker's library brought with it the first medieval manuscript acquired by the BPL, and many of the finest and most important incunabula, opens a new window in the collection. Online access: Those items that have been electronically cataloged can be retrieved in either of the online catalogs, opens a new window via a title search for "Theodore Parker Collection." Many items from the collection have been digitized. Most of the volumes and pamphlets are included in the index to the Catalogue of the Books in the Bates Hall of the Boston Public Library., opens a new window For an early description of the collection, see: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Report to the Trustees of the Boston Public Library on the Parker Library” in The works of Theodore Parker (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907) vol. 15, pp. 1-10., opens a new window (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

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