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RARE! "Historical Figures" Album Page Signed By 4. Signers are; Mary E Wooley, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Anatole Le Braz and Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (Pen Name John Oliver Hobbes).
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Mary
Emma Woolley (July 13, 1863 –
September 5, 1947) was an American educator, peace activist and women's suffrage
supporter. She was the first female student to attend Brown University and served as the 11th President
of Mount Holyoke College from
1900 to 1937. Woolley was the daughter of Joseph Judah (J.J.) Woolley and his
second wife, Mary Augusta Ferris. She was given the nickname May, and enjoyed a
comfortable, nurturing childhood in New England. She was first raised in Meriden, Connecticut and, starting in 1871, Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Her father was a Congregational minister and his efforts to incorporate social
work into religion, heavily influenced his daughter. Woolley attended Providence High School and a number of smaller schools
run by women before finishing her secondary schooling, in 1884, at the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts.
Woolley returned to teach there from 1885 to 1891. After traveling through
Europe for two months during the summer of 1890, she intended to attend Oxford University, but her father agreed with Elisha Benjamin Andrews,
the president of Brown University, that
Woolley should become one of the first female students at Brown. She began
attending Brown in the fall of 1890, while still teaching at Wheaton. In 1894,
she received her B.A. and in 1895, her M.A. for her thesis titled, The
Early History of the Colonial Post Office. Immediately upon arrival at
Mount Holyoke, Woolley outlined her views on female education. While in the
past, the college had placed an emphasis on women's education in service to
society, Woolley stressed that in the future, a women's education would not
need to be justified by anything but intellectual grounds. Woolley believed
education, roughly, was a preparation for life, and that an educated woman was
able to achieve anything. She argued that if women had not succeeded in the
past, it was because their education, or lack thereof, had held them back. As
the president of a women's college, one of her many responsibilities was to
publicly support female education. During her 36-year presidency, she worked to
end the prejudice of the era that contended that women had a natural learning
disability and that intellectual work negatively affected their health. Woolley
began to have influence within the academic community, and she led cooperative
efforts with other women's colleges to raise funds, academic standards and
public consciousness for women's education. During Woolley's presidency, she
built a strong faculty, attracting scholars from the most prestigious graduate
schools by offering increased salaries, fellowships, and sabbaticals. Woolley
also attempted to improve the quality of students admitted to Mount Holyoke,
after raising admission standards, introducing honors programs and general
examinations for seniors. The college endowment also grew from $500,000 to
nearly $5 million and the campus added sixteen new building during her 36-year
presidency. One of her most significant changes came when she abolished the
domestic work system, instituted by the college's founder, Mary Lyon. When Lyon founded the college in 1837, students
were required to cook and clean for economic reasons, and other women's
colleges followed the example. By 1901, Mount Holyoke was the only women's
college with the system still in place and Woolley thought the system was old
fashioned and an obstacle in her goal of making Mount Holyoke intellectually
equal to male colleges. She also created a position for Jeanette Marks, who
taught English and Theater at Mount Holyoke until her retirement in 1941.
Though the women never publicly acknowledged a lesbian relationship, there were
some undercurrents of resentment at the college for Woolley's alleged
"favoritism" towards Marks.
Arthur
Cushman McGiffert (March
4, 1861 – 1933), American theologian, was born in Sauquoit, New York, the
son of He
graduated at Western Reserve College in 1882 and at Union Theological Seminary in 1885, studied in Germany
(especially under Harnack) in 1885–1887, and in Italy and France in 1888, and
in that year received the degree of doctor of philosophy at Marburg. He was instructor
(1888-1890) and professor (1890-1893) of church history at Lane Theological Seminary,
and in 1893 became Washburn professor of church history in Union theological
seminary, succeeding Philip Schaff. He became
the 8th president of Union Seminary in 1917. His published work, except
occasional critical studies in philosophy, dealt with church history and the
history of dogma. His best known publication is a History of
Christianity in the Apostolic Age (1897). This book, which sustains
critical historical eminence to this day, by its independent criticism and
departures from traditionalism, aroused the opposition of the General Assembly
of the Presbyterian Church;
though the charges brought against McGiffert were dismissed by the Presbytery
of New York, to which they had been referred, a trial for heresy seemed inevitable,
and McGiffert, in 1900, retired from the Presbyterian ministry and retained his
credentialed status by eager recognition from a Congregational Church. Likewise
he retained his distinguished position at Union Theological Seminary.[
A History of Christian Thought constituted a two volume work (1932,
1933) which established an American standard in theological studies and is
still cited regularly by scholars.[ Among his other
publications are: A Dialogue between a Christian and a Jew (1888);
a translation (with introduction and notes) part of Philip Schaff's Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers series); and The Apostle's Creed (1902),
in which he attempted to prove that the old Roman creed was formulated as a
protest against the dualism of Marcion and his denial of the reality of Jesus's life on
earth.
Anatole
le Braz, the "Bard of
Brittany" (2 April 1859 – 20 March 1926), was a Breton poet, folklore collector and translator. He was
highly regarded amongst both European and American scholars, and known for his
warmth and charm. Le
Braz was born and raised amongst woodcutters and charcoal burners,
speaking the Breton language; his
parents did not speak French. He spent his holidays in Trégor, which inspired his later work. He began school aged swiftly to a degree at the Sorbonne, where he studied
for seven years. He
then returned to Brittany, where for 14 years he taught at
the Lycée at Quimper and gradually
translated old Breton songs into modern French, continuing the folklore work
of François-Marie Luzel. He
often entertained local peasants and fishermen in the old manor house where he
lived, recording their songs and tales. His book, Chansons de la Bretagne ("Songs
of Brittany"), was awarded a prize by the .Académie
française In 1898, he
became president of the Union régionaliste
bretonne formed in Morlaix following
the Breton festivals. In 1899 he joined the Association des bleus de
Bretagne. He was made lecturer and then professor in the Faculty of
Arts at Rennes University between 1901 and
1924. Le Braz was sent on foreign cultural missions by the French Government
twenty times. He made several visits to the US, Canada and Switzerland,
lecturing at Harvard University in
1906, and at Columbia University in
1915. During his 1915 visit he married Henrietta S. Porter of Annapolis, who
died in 1919. In 1921 he married Mabel Davison of Manhattan, sister of the
famed banker Henry P. Davison.[1] American novelist John Nichols is his
great-grandson. He is the maternal great-grandfather of the
musician Tina Weymouth and the
architect Yann Weymouth along
with their six siblings. Le Braz died at Menton on the French Riviera. Mourners included the French prime
minister, Aristide Briand.
Pearl
Mary Teresa Richards (November
3, 1867 – August 13, 1906) was an wrote under the pen-name of John
Oliver Hobbes. Though her work fell out of print in the twentieth-century,
her first book Some Emotions and a Moral was a sensation in
its day, selling eighty-thousand copies in only a few weeks.
Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, born in Boston, Massachusetts, was the eldest daughter of the
businessman John Morgan Richards and
his wife Laura Hortense Arnold. Her father had Calvinist roots and her
grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. The family moved to London soon after
her birth, and she was educated in London and Paris. When she was nineteen, she
married Reginald Walpole Craigie, by whom she had one son, John Churchill
Craigie. The unhappy marriage was dissolved on her petition in July 1895. She
was brought up as a Nonconformist,
but in 1892 she was received into the Roman Catholic Church,
where she remained, until her death, a devout and serious member. Her
successful career as a novelist and playwright also made her a popular socialite
with associates as diverse as George Tyrrell, Aubrey Beardsley,[1] and George Moore, who had been
her lover.