journal

From childhood, Doris Holmes Blake (1892-1978) was a prolific diarist and letter writer. This diary, written when Doris Holmes was 21 years old, details her life and activities while a student at Boston University's College of Liberal Arts, where she studied business and the classics, earning her A.B. in 1913. Some entries employ "mirror writing," backwards writing that must be read with the aid of a mirror.

What did future Smithsonian benefactor James Smithson have at the ready? The receipts (or recipes, as it turns out). Acquired by the Smithsonian in 1914, Smithson's "Receipt Book" contains recipes for everything from incense and ink dyes, to cordials and mulgatawny [sic], to tooth powder and bug poison. This nineteenth-century resource will lift your spirits, calm your ague, and polish your furniture. Hopefully, the ingredients are still available. 

Despite his meticulous field work, professional success in France at such an early age, and further studies in Europe and the United States, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque (1783-1840) was largely regarded as eccentric. His often unconventional ideas were hard for his professional peers to embrace. However, contemporary scientists have come to recognize Rafinesque for his field work and avant-garde thinking.

Despite dying at only 28, Edward M. Haight (1863-1891) established a busy career as an enthusiastic naturalist, collector, taxidermist, and publisher. The Golden State Scientist is one of three serials that he edited in the late 1880s, and it is by far the scarcest. This was the only issue ever published, and only 450 copies made it into print, owing to “the many blunders made in the advertisements." Only about a dozen copies survive in libraries today.