Fogg Art Museum, 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.
To support this 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. Two important publications by Peabody that were part of this effort have been digitized by the Open Collections program:
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.
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.
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) and the entire collection of approximately 6,000 photographs has been reviewed and more than 600 have been selected for digitization for Women Working.
For more information about each image, click "Display Full Record" and then follow the link next to "VIA ID."