The Social Museum Collection
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The Social Museum at Harvard University was established in 1903 "to promote investigations of modern social conditions and to direct the amelioration of industrial and social life," in the words of its founder, Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody. Peabody was a leader in social reform, teaching popular courses on social ethics as early as the 1880s and forming the Department of Social Ethics in 1906. Peabody believed that "problems of the social order," represented by the rapid influx of immigrants thought to be largely unfamiliar with the principles of democracy, in large measure, took Americans by surprise.
To support his program, Peabody and his staff assembled a large collection of photographs, diagrams, and publications related to the then-burgeoning international social reform movement, which were accessible to students and scholars in the Social Museum at Emerson Hall at Harvard through at least the 1930s. To see how Peabody classified these images, see the list beginning on page 8 of his work The Social Museum as an Instrument of University Teaching: A Classified List of Collections in the Social Museum of Harvard University to January, 1908 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1908).
The Social Museum's astonishing cache of pictures and related documents includes important bodies of work by such pioneering documentary photographers as Lewis Hine (Pittsburgh Survey series, ca. 1908) and Frances Benjamin Johnston (Hampton Institute series, ca. 1900). The collection of photographs resides in the Fogg Art Museum (on permanent deposit from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts).
For more information about each image, click "Display Full Record" and then follow the link next to "VIA ID."
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Listed below are digital resources from the Immigration to the US collection by, about, or related to the Social Museum Collection. These resources represent only a selection of what exists on these topics. More physical materials on these topics may be available at the owning repositories, some of which are open to the public.
Peabody, Francis Greenwood. The Approach to the Social Question: An Introduction to the Study of Social Ethics. New York: Macmillan, 1909.
Peabody, Francis Greenwood. The Social Museum as an Instrument of University Teaching; A Classified List of the Collections in the Social Museum of Harvard University in February, 1911. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1911.
Peabody, Francis Greenwood. The Social Museum as an Instrument of University Teaching; A Classified List of Collections in the Social Museum of Harvard University to January, 1908. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1908.
Harvard Divinity School. Andover-Harvard Theological Library. Finding Aid for the Addresses and Lectures of Francis Peabody, 1915-1923.
Harvard Divinity School. Andover-Harvard Theological Library. Finding Aid for the Papers of Ephraim Peabody, 1831-1884.
Harvard Divinity School. Andover-Harvard Theological Library. Finding Aid for the Writings of Francis Greenwood Peabody.
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