Cambridge Not Sure Women Should be Police Officers

Cambridge Chronicle 19 October 1918.

Cambridge had a long history of women doing police work as social workers under the auspices of the Social Services Center.  When in 1918, the city tried to pass an ordinance to hire and pay women police officers, the Cambridge City Council said no.  There was a lively discussion in which Councillor Apted argued for the city to pay for women already doing the work of police officers whereas Councillor Counihan declared it was an unnecessary expense.  Councillor Stratton asked for the Council on Public Safety to take up the matter, causing a delay in the city hiring women police officers.

It wouldn’t be until 1921 when Edith J. Taylor of 428 Broadway became the first women on the Cambridge Police force.    The brief history on Taylor’s career, written by the Cambridge Police Department, can be read here.

Edith J. Taylor, Cambridge’s first woman Police Officer.

The Hip Archivist Backlash – It’s Not about Dusty Archives

Annemarie van Roessel, reference archivist at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, featured in the April 28, 2013 article, “Leaving Cloister of Dusty Offices, Young Archivists Meet Like Minds.”

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a great article on archivists working in New York City.  We were so excited that archivists made it on the front page of the New York Times website that we completely missed a perfectly valid point that former MIT Archivist Helen Samuels made in a  rejoinder the following week in a Letter to the Editor.  Samuels points out that archivists are rarely working in dusty archives but rather are working to manage the growing terabytes of data that they are now required to access, preserve, and make available to researchers.

The Best Cambridge Chronicle Issue of all Time

Cambridge Chronicle, 8 October 1921.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to peruse the 60 page anniversary edition of the Cambridge Chronicle, published on October 8, 1921, you’re in for a treat.

In addition to the front page congratulatory letter from President Warren Harding, there is:

• A history of the Cambridge Police
• A history of Cambridge’s Milk business
• A history of the Cambridge Chronicle

There are also these little historical gems:

• Somers Brothers, Hat and Haberdashery
• Casey’s Phenom by the author of Casey at the Bat
• Cambridge’s Occupation Statistics

Explore away!

The History of Mother’s Day

 Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis organized several “Mothers Day Work Clubs” in the 1850s to improve the poor sanitation and health conditions in Appalachia.

Few people realize that Mother’s Day has its roots in 19th Century activism and feminism.

Mother’s Day began:

• In 1858, when Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, organized “Mother’s Work Days” to improve the sanitation and avert deaths from disease-bearing insects and seepage of polluted water.
• In 1872, when Boston poet, pacifist and women’s suffragist Julia Ward Howe established a special day for mothers –and for peace– not long after the bloody Franco-Prussian War.
• In 1905, when Anna Jarvis died. Her daughter, also named Anna, decided to memorialize her mother’s lifelong activism, and began a campaign that culminated in 1914 when Congress passed a Mother’s Day resolution.

Read more about the fascinating activist history of Mother’s Day at the National Women’s History Project.

City Archivists Collect at the Marathon Bombing Memorial

A team of city workers and archivists were working Tuesday morning to preserve paper memorials in Copley Plaza.  Courtesy of the Boston  Globe.

This past Tuesday, Archivists from the City of Boston Archives – John McColgan and Marta Crilly – worked to pack up and permanently preserve materials documenting the Marathon bombing.   The materials will reside in the Boston City Archives.  Read the Boston Globe article here.

 

Digital Archives Inspire New Designs

In honor of the newly completed renovations of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’s famous national museum filled with Dutch Renaissance material objects and paintings – including a few by Vermeer and Rembrandt – the museum unveiled its digital archives of 125,000 works aptly named Rijksstudio.  To highlight the creative potential of the digital collection, Dutch designers at Studio Droog mined the archives for inspiration and created a new series of artwork.  Studio Droog took this pleated linen collar from 1615:

To this…

A minimal napkin holder for the dinner table.

Check out the other Studio Droog creations here and start your own Rijksstudio here.

What would you do with the Dutch wooden shoe, otherwise known as a sabot, in the Cambridge Room collection?

The Geography of Job Loss and other amazing data

Click on the photo above to view job loss and gain between 2004 and 2011.  Courtesy of tipstrategies.com.

Statistical data can be used in such interesting ways.  Click on the link above to see a graphical representation of job gains and loss in the U.S. between 2004 and 2011.  Notice the red around New Orleans in 2005 just after Hurricane Katrina.  It takes about one minute to go through 7 years of economic growth and decline.  It’s surprising to see – especially in the Boston area.

There are a few other sources that aggregate data in such a way.  Check out data360.org and gapminder.org for more ways to easily visualize data and make comparisons.  Enjoy!