Houghton Library

Join us next Saturday, July 4 at 12:00 PM for a special opportunity to view our "War of Words" exhibition, including the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, on America’s 250th birthday.

It’s officially summer!

🌹🪻🌷🌻⛲️

For our gardeners and garden enthusiasts, here’s a selection of gorgeous garden designs from "Colour in My Garden" by American gardening writer and designer Louise Beebe Wilder. These exquisite plates were painted by her friend and neighbor, Anna Winegar, over the course of a year as a visual chronicle of Wilder’s garden from “the chancy flight of young spring along the languorous road of Summer to Autumn’s shining house.”



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Louise Beebe Wilder (1878–1938) and Anna Winegar (1867–1941). Colour in My Garden. New York, 1918. Lowell 4225.95. From the library of Amy Lowell.

1) The Half Moon Pool (June 28th)
2) Hollyhocks and Delphinium (July 7th)
3) Summer Moonlight (August 10th)

Houghton Library will be closed tomorrow in observance of Juneteenth.

Currently on view in our "War of Words" exhibition: "Liberty Further Extended," a civic sermon written by Lemuel Haynes, the first ordained African American minister, who recognized at once the contradiction between the Declaration’s pronouncement that “all men are created equal” and the ownership of enslaved people by its principal author and many of its signers. Addressing colonial slaveholders, he writes “It is Strange that you Should want the Least Stimulation to further Expressions of so noble a Spirit. Some gentlemen have Determined to Contend in a Consistent manner: they have Let the oppressed go free.”

Explore our "War of Words" exhibition anytime through Houghton’s Bloomberg Connects guide: https://bit.ly/3SdENGF



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Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833). Liberty Further Extended. Unpublished, 1776. MS Am 1907 (608). Gift of J. J. Higginson, 1989.

Matthias Darly capitalized on an English fashion for large hairstyles in the 1770s with a series of comic prints that showed women with impossibly tall and elaborate coiffures. Perhaps the most outlandish of those is this one, showing British and American encampments battling atop a woman’s head.

On view in the Edison and Newman Room through August 7, 2026.



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Matthias Darly (1720–1778). Bunkers Hill, or America’s Head Dress. London, 1776. MS Eng 1900 (1.14). Gift of William B. Osgood Field, 1942.