State Library Newsletter - January Issue

Welcome January with the latest issue of our monthly newsletter! In it you'll find updates on our newest displays, upcoming events, a fun recently cataloged item and more.

Pictured here is a preview, but the full issue can be accessed by clicking here. And you can also sign up for our mailing list to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox.

On Display: An Astronomical Diary or Almanack, 1771 and 1778

Our tradition of starting the new year off with historical almanacs on display in our Collection Spotlight case continues this year. We're featuring both the 1771 and 1778 editions of An Astronomical Diary; Or, Almanack by Nathanael Low.

These are the only two issues of Nathanael Low’s almanac in our collection, though he began publishing them in 1762 and continued into the 1800s. We are displaying our two copies closed and with facsimiles of the January pages so that we can highlight a small detail found on their respective front covers. Published leading up to and then during the Revolutionary War, 1771 is listed as "In the XIth (eleventh year) of the Reign of King George III" and then 1778 is described as "The second Year of American Independence, which began July fourth, 1776." As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Independence this year, it is moving to see this contemporaneous and significant change in wording.

The 1771 edition was printed and sold by Kneeland & Adams on Milk Street in Boston and the 1778 edition was printed by J. Gill on Court Street and T. & J. Fleet on Cornhill, all locations that are near the State House. On the cover of the 1771 almanac, Low lists the contents as containing information about eclipses, lunations, sun’s and moon’s risings and settings, courts in the four New-England Governments, feasts and fasts of the church, spring tides, judgement of the weather, time of high water, roads with the best stages or houses to put up at, some necessary rules with regard to health, and many other things useful and entertaining. These almanacs seem like a one-stop shop for all your needs in the 18th century! The header for each month also includes a few lines of verse from various poems, spread out over a few months. January leads off with the first few lines of “Friendship: An Ode” by Samuel Johnson. 

The 1778 edition includes much of the same practical information, but does begin with an address to the reader, on monopoly and extortion, in regard to the war that was being waged at the time of publication. While the young country was united in its feelings of patriotism and a shared enemy against the British, the essay draws a critical eye to the personal gain that some were making from the war, writing that “it is the poor chiefly that feel the calamitous effects of monopoly and extortion; tho’ it is evidence these men were never more necessary than now, never more useful, and their services were never yet of greater importance. Surely such men are worthy of some notice. They claim some attention. They deserve all possible encouragements.”

Almanacs largely included practical information or republished poems/verses from other sources, but they did also grant the author some leeway to include personal essays and anecdotes that were of interest, like the 1778 essay, which gives each almanac in our collection a slightly different slant. Nathanael Low was a physicist and astronomer who lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts before removing to South Berwick, Maine (which would have been part of Massachusetts at the time). He enlisted in the war in 1780, serving from Berwick. His home, built in 1786, is part of the South Berwick Village District, and you can read more on the Old Berwick Historical Society webpage.

January's pages from the 1771 edition (left) and 1778 (right)

Last year, these two volumes, along with other 18th and 19th century almanacs from our Special Collections holdings, were sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts to receive conservation treatment. They were cleaned and mended and then rehoused in custom enclosures. Their original binding remains intact and they are still somewhat fragile for handling, but while at NEDCC for treatment, they were also digitized and will be added to our digital repository in the coming months, making them available for researchers to examine them remotely (and safely).

If you are in the Boston area, then be sure to visit the library from January 6 through February 3 to see these almanacs on display, and catch up on all of past almanac posts here.

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian

Author Talk with James O’Connell

• Boston and the Making of a Global City by James O’Connell
• Wednesday, January 14, 2026. 12pm - 1:00pm
• In-person and Virtual event. No registration required.
• State Library of Massachusetts - Room 341, Massachusetts State House
• Livestream on YouTube
• Books available for purchase; $25.00 cash or check

The State Library of Massachusetts Author Talks Series kicks off the New Year with author James C. O’Connell! Dr. O’Connell has written seven books on urban planning and New England history. In 2016, he spoke at the State Library on his book Dining Out in Boston: A Culinary History.

This is an in-person and virtual event. The livestream will be available on our YouTube channel courtesy of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Broadcast Services. Tune in at noon!

Be sure to sign up for our Author Talks newsletter and follow our social media channels (Instagram, Facebook, and X) for the latest information on our visiting authors. If you are unable to attend, the recording will be posted to our YouTube channel to watch anytime - view all past recordings here!

About the book: Boston and the Making of a Global City (2025) traces the history of Boston from an economic and globalization perspective. Today, Boston is considered a global city and leader in innovation from robotics to life sciences. Author James O’Connell explains how Boston took advantage of its world class universities and health care institutions to attract the country’s most talented scientists, students, researchers, and thinkers. From being a leading colonial port to now being a biotech hub, O’Connell offers analysis of Boston’s strengths as well as the socio-economic challenges the city faces.

About the author: James O’Connell is an adjunct professor at Boston University teaching in the City Planning-Urban Affairs Program. In addition to his seven books, O’Connell has written several articles on urban affairs. Dr. O’Connell worked as a Planner at the Boston Office of the Northeast Region of the National Park Service. His career experience encompasses regional planning and redevelopment projects within Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. from Bates College and a Ph.D. in American Urban and Cultural History from the University of Chicago.

James also hosts Urban Walking Tours of Boston. He guides groups around Boston neighborhoods including areas like the Seaport, Downtown, and the North End sharing his knowledge and perspective on urban history and city development. For more information on O’Connell and tour dates, please visit his site.

As always, this author talk is free and open to all. Assisted listening devices will be made available upon request. If you are able to join us in person for this talk, attendees will be able to participate in a question-and-answer session with the author.

Books will be available for purchase; $25.00 cash or check.

Any questions or concerns, please email us at AuthorTalks.StateLibrary@mass.gov. For more information on the State Library Author Talks series, please visit our site.


April Pascucci 

On behalf of the Author Talks Working Group

2025: A Blog Post Retrospective

As 2025 comes to an end, we're sharing some of our most popular blog posts from the year! Posts ranged from collection spotlights, to resource highlights and research tips, and more. We are lucky to have contributors across our three departments write content that represents their different areas of expertise!

We hope you've enjoyed our content this year, and we're excited to share more in 2026!

Unfolding History: Highway Maps and State Library Discoveries

By Judith Carlstrom, Head of Technical Services

The Appalachian Mountain Club in the State Library

By Emily Colson, Government Documents Intern

Welcome Home Big George

By Dava Davainis, Assistant Director/Head of Reference and Information Services

Town Report Season: 2025

By Maryellen Larkin, Government Documents Librarian

Reference Tip: Legal Dictionaries

By April Pascucci, Legislative Reference Librarian

Scrapbook Treasures of the Community Music Center of Boston

By Alyssa Persson, Special Collections Librarian/Processing Archivist

Lexington and Concord - Read All About It!

By Elizabeth Roscio, Preservation Librarian

Resource Spotlight Update: New Nolo Books

By Jessica Shrey, Legal Research Reference Librarian

Would You Buy Eggs at the State House?

By Charlsie Wemple and Erin Wood, Special Collections Interns

Happy Holidays from the State Library!

From the State Library to you, our digital greeting card with warm wishes for a wonderful holiday season:

Looking for some seasonal reading? Catch up on some of our past holiday themed posts:

Christmas Eve on Beacon Hill

New England's Flying Santa Tradition

Books as Gifts are Always a Hit

A Puritan "Christmas"

Holiday Traditions and Library Finds

Of Christmases Long, Long Ago

While preparing for our spooky themed Archives Crawl in the fall, Special Collections Department interns found a surprisingly large number of ghost stories printed in our historic newspapers. What made this discovery even more fun was the fact that these 19th century ghost stories were not printed during autumn months, as most people would expect; they were mostly printed in the months of December and January. This presented an opportunity to tell tales of one of my favorite, obscure, historical subjects- the tradition of ghost stories at Christmastime.

Christmas ghost stories were popularized during the Victorian Era, but their origins go back much further. So much further, in fact, they predate Christianity itself. People have commemorated the Winter Solstice since prehistoric times. The longest night of the year has always been tied to the concepts of darkness and death but also rebirth and the impending return of light. Many of our ancestors believed spirits would make themselves known during this transitional time. It’s not hard to imagine why ghost stories came into the picture.

From The Hauntings of Cold Christmas by Verity Holloway, printed in folk-horror magazine Hellebore’s Yuletide Special:

The Boston Daily Globe,
Saturday, November 22, 1884

“Ghosts and Christmas are inextricably linked in the British Isles. The darkening days and the dangers of winter weather naturally breed stories of powerful interlopers intent on harm. The Christmas ghost stories of medieval England are bloody affairs, frequently requiring the wandering corpses of the wicked to be returned to the grave by violence or ritual. The horror author M.R. James pointed out the similarities between these tales of winter revenants and those of Scandinavian midwinter sagas. Stories of contagion, the walking dead, and otherworldly torments are hardly what we would call Christmas cheer. But the similarities between medieval English winter stories and their Scandinavian cousins suggest these tales share a bloodline traveling far back into pre-Christian history.

Modern readers may be more comfortable with the Victorian variety of Christmas ghost, cozily antiquated without being alien, and yet the unwelcome return of the dead remained a strong theme throughout the 19th century. Simon Stern prefaces Volume 3 of the Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by saying that the 19th century festive ghost is an entity with no regard for the starkly contrasting boundaries of the wild and the home, the hearth and the snow, the living and the dead: ‘Instead of scaring up an external threat and imagining the home as the safe harbour, it terrorizes the inhabitants with spectral beings who wander between those two spheres.’”

 The clippings above are from the December 24, 1886 edition of The Boston Daily Globe. 

Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, Volume 1, 1851 

The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas is still alive and well in the U.K. Although the tradition became relatively popular among Victorians in the U.S., as demonstrated by the clippings above, for modern Americans it is largely a relic of Christmas Past. But remnants of the ritual remain. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a Christmas ghost story and one of the most famous stories in literary history, continues to influence the way Americans celebrate the holiday season. "It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," one of the most popular songs of the Christmas genre, says, “there’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago...”

If you’re interested in starting your own new holiday tradition by reviving a very, very old one, it’s as simple as pulling a favorite eerie book off your shelf and slightly frightening everyone in your household. May your holidays be merry and bright- but also a little bit scary and dark, for old times’ sake.

Alyssa Persson

Processing Archivist

Two Water-hens 🎵🎵

This month, stop by the library to see the Least Water-hen (plate 349) on display in our Audubon case. Featuring both the male and the young hen, the water-hens are shown in a marshy environment. You may think that "male" is a typo here, because hens are female chickens, but in fact the water-hen is not a chicken. Water-hens are aquatic birds from the rail family, and their name comes from their resemblance to chickens.

Audubon fans who have paid close attention for the last few years may have noticed that in December we try to display a bird featured in the "Twelve Days of Christmas!" Birds of America doesn't include any traditional hens or chickens, but the water-hen comes close! We have previously shared four colly (calling) birds, turtledoves, and a partridge!

Visit us from December 9 through January 13 to see the water-hens on display, and our apologies if "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is now stuck in your head!

Elizabeth Roscio

Preservation Librarian