Blog – Page 13 – Jane Addams Papers Project

June 28, 2016

Documentary Editors at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute

(This post was originally published on the Association for Documentary Editing’s website.)

Since 2001, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), held annually in Victoria, B.C., Canada, has been an annual gathering of technologists, scholars, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students…and editors. For the past three years, Jennifer Stertzer and I, joined this year by Erica Cavanaugh (George Washington Financial Papers Project), have offered a course entitled “Conceptualising and Creating Digital Editions,” one of a rich slate of hands-on and theoretical week-long immersions into digital humanities (for course lists shaping up for 2017, click here)

Students working on their website designs.

The twenty students who took our course came with some incredibly varied and fascinating projects. Just a few include Deanna Stover’s plan to create a digital edition of H.G. Wells’s Floor Games and Little Wars, a 1911 narrative set of gaming rules, Fiona Coll’s work on a digital editions of Morgan Robertson’s short works of fiction based on his sea-going experiences, and Elizabeth Honing’s plan to create a classroom module featuring a digital edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600). The breadth of topics spanned centuries, from Rachel Roberts’ work on Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589) to Eric Rasmussen’s plan to create an online web resource for studying the artistic and social networks around the contemporary American writer Lynne Tillman, and Kate Sikloski’s project to create a digital companion to her critical biography of Tobagonian-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip. Paula Johanson was seeking guidance on turning her guide to kayaking, Green Paddler, into a digital edition, while Ellen Malenas Ledoux investigated creating a critical edition of Mary Darby Robinson’s Memoirs. All the projects represented rich resources that will be greatly enhanced by the editorial work planned for them.

Jennifer with Rachel Roberts and Melinda Creech at the class showcase on Friday afternoon.

The four and a half day course covered a lot of ground, but was focused on introducing students to many of the editorial issues that arise when contemplating a digital edition. We discussed how the main tasks of editing, selection, transcription, annotation, and research are changed when the materials are presented in a digital platform. We spent time talking about the pros and cons of various digital edition platforms and the tactics editors need to use to adapt them, focusing on TEI/XML, Drupal, Omeka, WordPress and Scalar. Through description, demonstration, and analysis, we helped students decide between platforms by focusing on the goals of their edition and the nature of their documents.

Erica and I at the course showcase on the last day of DHSI.

Students used one of the tools, Omeka, to begin to craft plans for their digital projects. They drafted policies on selection, transcription, annotation, and searching, developed site maps to envision navigation, page appearance, and useability, and estimated the time and work hours that it would take to complete their projects. Students played with metadata by creating sample documents, transcriptions and descriptions of their materials. They had one on one time with Erica, Jennifer and I to ask for advice, to experiment with visualization tools such as text analysis, digital maps and timelines, and some created rough prototypes of their site plans using Drupal.

DHSI offers many other courses of interest to editors, from intensive work with TEI encoding to text analysis, and project management. Victoria is beautiful (we went whale watching!), and the immersion on hands-on work with other people passionate about documents, scholarship, and technology makes for an experience unlike any other.

June 22, 2016June 21, 2016

Reading Jane Addams’ Palms

Fortune telling, in the forms of reading tea leaves, tarot cards, palms, and crystal ball gazing, have long been popular forms of entertainment. People were and are fascinated to see readings of celebrities, hoping to learn more about them.

Palm readers could become celebrities in their own right, like Nellie Simmons Meier (1864-1944) who built an international reputation as a palmist by insisting that it was a scientific practice rather than an occult hobby. Meier did not tell fortunes–she conducted “character readings”–but she gathered them for some of the most famous people in the early 20th century–Albert Einstein, Margaret Sanger, George Gershwin, Walt Disney, and Jane Addams. Meier organized over 100 palm prints and character readings into chapters in a book, called Lion’s Paws, that she published in 1937.

Addams’ palms were included in the chapter “Can The Leopard Change His Spots?,” along with Norman Thomas, Margaret Sanger, Susan B. Anthony, Ben B. Lindsey, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Jacob Riis. She prefaced the readings with a question:

If a reformer or a radical makes his living in the very work of reform, he is doubly suspect; if he makes no money, he is believed to be seeking notoriety, honor, distinction. Do the hands of reformers and radicals sustain this suspicion?

Addams's right hand print, as published in Lions Paws — Addams’s right hand print, as published in Lions Paws

When Meier observed Addams’ palms she noted both the extraordinary similarities and important differences between her prints and those of Susan B. Anthony’s. Both women, she reported, demonstrated practical and executive ability, appreciation of the arts, and honesty, as well as strong wills and love for others. However, she saw important differences, primarily centering around the reasons that they did what they did.

Addams, Meier claimed, was motivated by the individuals she helped. For her it was not about fame or even about the “common good” as she claimed it was for Anthony. Rather, everything came down to her interactions with individuals, and the justice and mercy served, rather than a more nebulous greater good. It is certainly evident that Addams cared about those around her and wanted to help people–if she had not she probably would not have started Hull House or crusaded for the rights of workers and immigrants.

Addams's left palm print, as published in Lion's Paws. — Addams’s left palm print, as published in Lion’s Paws.

According to the palm reader, Addams was also a born conservative, cautious about everything. Something that, intriguingly enough, appears to be present in many of her letters, which paint a picture of Addams as a woman who is faultlessly polite and dignified- the very image of a conservative woman.

Is Meier’s character reading an accurate one? It certainly seems to be in line with the Jane Addams in the letters being transcribed. However, this is also information anyone could get just by reading her books and news articles about her. These present a picture of a woman who sounds exactly as Meier described. Of course, it is possible that Jane Addams’ kindness, generosity, and care for others was indeed written in her hand, but perhaps it is more important that it was written in her life.

For more on Nellie Simmons Meier and her character readings, see finding aids to collections of her papers at the Library of Congress and the Indiana Historical Society. For details on her home, see a description of Tuckaway from Historic Meriden Park.

May 23, 2016May 23, 2016

A Nation in Mourning: The Death of Jane Addams

Jane Addams's funeral at Hull-House. Photographed by Wallace Kirkland. (Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Special Collections, Lea Demarest Taylor Papers). — Jane Addams’s funeral at Hull-House. Photographed by Wallace Kirkland. (Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Special Collections, Lea Demarest Taylor Papers).

On May 21, 1935, Jane Addams died, at the age of 74. Her funeral was held at Hull-House 81 years ago today.

Addams’ body was brought from the hospital and lay in state at Hull-House from 10am to 6pm on May 22nd and then from 9am to noon on May 23rd. A brief twenty-minute non-denominational funeral was held on May 23 at Hull-House. The papers reported that over 20,000 people pressed in to view and pay tribute to Addams at a rate of over one thousand an hour.

There was no demonstration. There was little conversation. The people stood about in little groups. They were waiting, and had been waiting for hours, just for a chance to pass rapidly through the hall inside and view for a second the peaceful face of their benefactor before she was taken to her girlhood home in Cedarville, Ill. to be buried in the tiny cemetery there. (Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, May 23, 1935)

Reporters talked to mourners, and noted the wide variety of people present. “Foreign-born men and women who claimed her as their best friend grieved beside millionaires and society matrons from the gold coast across town. Shiny limousines stood at the curb where several hundred Hull House “neighbors” waited, unable to find room in the court.” (DeKalb Daily Chronicle, Oct. 23, 1935).

There was no discrimination. A large wreath of orchids and lillies-of-the-valley sent by a wealthy man and his wife was no more prominently displayed than the blanket of bright red roses sent by one of the mothers’ clubs of Hull House.” (Chicago Daily Tribune, May 24, 1935.)

From the Adena Miller Rich Papers, Special Collections University of Illinois at Chicago.

Among the prominent mourners were Anita McCormick Blaine, a long-time supporter of Hull-House, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, and Sophonisba Breckinridge, also from the University of Chicago. But there were many more people from the neighborhood, people who knew Addams by her deeds.

A Negro woman trailed by seven solemn children–four boys and three girls–waited hours to reach the casket and then dropped out, tears streaming from her eyes, as she entered the hall. “I’d rather remember her like the day she brought my Martha a doctor when she was dying,” she sobbed. (Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, May 23, 1935)

From Bellaire, Ohio, when she learned of Addams’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt commented, “I’m dreadfully sorry. America has lost a great source of inspiration.” Katharine Lenroot noted, “America has lost her greatest woman, her greatest social worker and the people of America have lost their most understanding and compassionate friend.” (New York Times, May 22, 1935).

May 18, 2016May 9, 2016

Six Remarkable Hull-House Women: Guest Blog by Author Ruth Bobick

What stood out in my research about “six remarkable Hull-House women”–Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, and Grace and Edith Abbott–was the crucial role they played in the reform of America’s industrial system. Equally striking was the Supreme Court’s resistance to regulating it.

When the first generation of college educated women discovered that established professions like the law, government, higher education and the church were reserved for men, they sought alternative occupations. As caregiving had long been a female responsibility, reformers responded to the plight of poor immigrant workers and their families by creating “social settlements,” a Consumer’s League, a federal Children’s Bureau, and the field of Social Work. In turn, their service-oriented programs opened up career opportunities for women, and provided a supporting network of female organizations that fought for social justice from the Progressive Era to the New Deal.

Before proceeding from Hull-House in Chicago onto the national scene, Lathrop devoted her efforts to the reform of state charities, Kelley to an anti-sweatshop campaign, Hamilton to industrial medicine, Grace Abbott to protecting immigrants, and her sister Edith to social research. As the settlement’s head resident, Addams united them in pursuing common goals, and in pressing for labor legislation. But such hard-won laws as prohibiting child labor, limiting a woman’s workday, and establishing a minimum wage, were all-too-often declared unconstitutional in Supreme Court decisions setting an individual’s “freedom of contract,” above a state’s right to “promote its citizens’ welfare.”

In 1914 with Europe plunged into World War I–and America’s entry in 1917–the progressive period drew to a close. Early on, women activists had mobilized a peace party in Washington, which met with its European counterparts in Holland in 1915 to protest the fighting. Jane Addams presided over the conference, and after the war was elected president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom that evolved from it. During her remaining years, she shared her time between settlement work and the cause of peace–for which she received a Nobel Prize in 1931.

Of Quaker descent on her father’s side and a pacifist during the war, she toured a devastated Germany following its surrender; and gave speeches back home to raise funds for Quaker relief of the defeated enemy. As much as any woman of her day, she was able to transcend national boundaries in the hope of alleviating human suffering.

–Ruth Bobick

May 11, 2016February 7, 2017

What Did Jane Write? Publishing Transcribed Documents in a Digital Edition

I’ll be the first to admit it. Reading Jane Addams’ handwriting is difficult, and just when you think that you have gotten it down, you run across a letter that makes you question your profession.

Working on a digital edition with such challenging handwriting has been a bit different than working on a print edition. With print it is essential to get the transcription as perfect as you can because it is unlikely that there will ever be a revised printing of your edition; the best you can usually hope for is an embarrassing errata page that highlights every mistake that you have made (at least those that you have found!). With digital publication, we can seamlessly correct errors in transcription as soon as we discover them. And while this means there is less pressure on us to craft a perfect transcription, we do have to grapple with the question of how good our transcription should be in order to publish it.

From Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, April 30, 1901. Our current reading is: “P. S. I am much impressed with the Methodists. Anybody who says “Protestantism is dying out” [ought] to have seen them Sunday night raising $50000. for a clinical University & heard them sing out the [illegible]—”

First pass transcriptions generally have errors. Most of our draft transcriptions are done by students (amazing students!), who have made great strides in reading and transcribing Addams’ hand, but they are not perfect. Errors are made even when transcribing typed documents, which are sometimes long and have repetitive elements. In order to ensure that these errors are caught and corrected, we proofread each transcription at least once, in teams. What this means is that one editor reads from the document (reading punctuation and capitalization aloud as well) while the other follows along with the transcription. Whenever the two do not match, we stop and identify the discrepancy and correct it. It is not always the transcription–sometimes we read the document incorrectly. But this ensures that we have carefully proofread the original.

Problems arise when we cannot make out the words at the proofreading stage either. We mark the places where we are unsure of the meaning of the word with [square brackets], adding [question marks?] when the reading is a bit less certain that that, and we admit that the word or words are [illegible] when we just can’t make them out. No editor likes to see [illegible words] in her edition–each one stabs at us, taunting us with our own inadequacies–no matter how hard that word really is to read!

hard-2 — From Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, Nov. 18, 1902. Our current reading is: “I have given a long lecture. Esther’s baby is so pretty and dear. I spent Sunday in St. Louis and came away with a lot of [cherubic?] [illegible]”

For most editors, the decision of when to give up and publish a problem document’s transcription is a difficult one, and we review and revise our readings of the document over and over until we throw our hands up in frustration and let it go out with an [illegible]. When publishing a digital edition, this decision gets even harder. Is it more useful for our readers that we publish a transcription of 99% of a document quickly, or that we wait and wait to get that last 1%? We have made the decision to publish the 99% and to invite help, both from experts on our Advisory Board, Addams scholars, but also from the general public, to help tease out that 1%.

Jane Addams to Richard T. Ely, November 27, 1902. Our current reading is: “Women [illegible] tending with the house–conventional [war]. [Women] entering into the commercial life & work industrial condition with its element of warfare, of competition of “racing” [piece] work withdraw the [illegible] in a certain sense.”

We’ve done this by creating a Help! tag for documents in the digital edition that have words that we cannot read. To get a look at them, follow this link, or select Browse Items, and then Browse by Tag. If you think you can read the [illegible words] that we couldn’t, drop us a line in the Comment box at the bottom of the document. If this is something you enjoy doing, reach out to us; we would be delighted to have you check our problem documents before they are published.

May 2, 2016May 2, 2016

Sneak Peek at the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition!

JADE-home

I’m delighted to announce that we have begun publishing Jane Addams documents on our website — http://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu! We are still in the early stages, and have lots of work yet to do, but the site is up and running.

JADE-doc

The digital edition is built on the Omeka content management system, with plugins built by programmer Daniel Berthereau in order to optimize it for operating a digital edition. Some of the features already in place for documents are:

Metadata–the Jane Addams Digital Edition provides detailed metadata on each document in its collection, helping you locate materials by date, type, subject, language, and description.
Images–the digital edition includes document images from the microfilm (and some scans from original documents as well).
Transcriptions–all documents will be transcribed so that they are text-searchable.

We are also building identifications of the people and organizations, and some events and places named in the documents. These short identifications will provide readers with some context for the documents, and will provide links to our sources and to open-access resources to help them in their research.

JADE-bio

Metadata–We are also building ways for readers to explore Jane Addams’ world by searching her correspondents and associates. You can search descriptions of people using tags to identify all social workers, all men or women, all politicians, or all family members, etc.
Images–When we can locate a rights-free image of the person, we will include it with a citation.

JADE-repo

We have gathered information on the repositories that contain Jane Addams material, starting by entering over 700 archival collections that appear in the Jane Addams Microfilm Edition, and adding new collections as we locate materials. Once documents from these collections are added to the digital edition, they will be linked to the archival collection.

JADE-Tags

The tag cloud allows readers to find everything on a set of large-scale topics. It also provides a good overview of the kinds of materials that are in the collection.

JADE-map

We are also using a map to plot people, organizations, events, and documents, producing another way to explore the materials. A search page below the map enables you to limit the items–looking at where Addams’ correspondents lived in 1903, or where settlement houses were located, etc.

Content

We began with the goal of publishing documents between 1901-1903 as our first installment. In order to publish a complete document, we need to:

Create and proofread the metadata
Create and proofread the transcription
Obtain permission to publish the image from the archive, library, or person that owns it.
Obtain copyright permission when needed.

We can only publish a document when all four steps have been completed. Fortunately, many of our document’s authors are in the public domain, which makes the process easier. We have received the cooperation of most of the archives and libraries that own the document, but obtaining permission is a cumbersome task. Proofreading our transcriptions of difficult-to-read documents has also been a slow process. This helps explain why not all of the documents between 1901-1903 are up yet. We are clearing them for publication as fast as we can, and will post them as soon as possible.

We have located over 1,000 individual people in our first six months of work, and while we have been creating entries as fast as we can, there are still many to go, and we haven’t proofread and checked all of them. As names go live, the links between documents and subjects will also go live.

What’s next?

This summer we will focus on getting more documents up, more identifications complete and developing the design of the site. Its an exciting time at the Jane Addams Papers Project.

Please let us know here, or by emailing me at chajo@ramapo.edu what you think of the work done so far.

March 7, 2016March 4, 2016

What would this election mean to Jane Addams?

In the wake of Super Tuesday and with all the fuss about the presidential election, I was wondering: What would Jane Addams think about our latest crop of presidential candidates and the political system we have in general? Well, we can’t really know since she died in 1935, but thanks to her prolific writing we do know what she valued in the political system. As always, her focus was on the people, not the ones in power. She had little patience for politicians who put their own interests and beliefs above those of the people they served, especially on the city level. However, she was also extremely critical of elected officials who pander too much to their constituents and put them before humanity as a whole. In short, Addams wanted a politician who could achieve a balance between caring about the people they served and being able to look towards effecting change on a much grander scale.

Finding someone who fits this definition is not easy. After all, Tammany Hall may have been corrupt and self-interested, but also offered tangible help to their constituents. Was it any surprise then that they stayed in power so long? Addams argued that “the successful candidate…must be a good man according to the morality of his constituents” (Democracy and Social Ethics, 229). She was right then and her words ring true today as well. Today we see over and over again elected officials who focus exclusively on their most loyal groups, often to the exclusions and detriment of other groups, be they religious, racial, or socioeconomic. This is not a good way to run the most powerful country in the world. Placing the whims and needs of a few over those of the whole is selfish and makes any kind of progress for the good of the whole extremely difficult, but is also the simplest way to get elected.

The thing Addams criticized most in elected officials was their machinations and manipulations. She despised how they used events- sad and happy- to convince people to vote for them. She also disliked when officials bribed people, especially when they did it subtly enough that their constituents didn’t realize what was happening. Addams strongly looks down on manipulating situations because “many a man…has formulated a lenient judgement of political corruption” (Dem & S.E., 239) She spoke primarily about more local officials, but arguably it can be applied to the national level as well, especially when one considers the role of backers and endorsements. The system is corrupt and works not for the good of the people, but for the good of those in charge. This arguably is one reason why there is so much opposition and difference in modern American politics. Neither of the parties in American politics put the people before the big funders and any attempts to make meaningful reform are blocked as quickly as possible to prevent upsetting the donors. Therefore, the system is continually chasing its own tail and cannot actually accomplish anything.

So what would this election mean to Addams? Truthfully, she most likely wouldn’t like any of the candidates. Her policies are more in line with Bernie Sanders than with Donald Trump, however, in her day she challenged all the elected officials and demanded that they improve and pay more attention to the needs of the people and I see no reason why she would change her opinion today. Addams was certainly a woman who knew her own mind and had no interest in keeping those opinions under wraps, at least not where the rights of the poor were concerned, and she wielded the influence she had to create change. That doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would sit this election out and just quietly support a candidate, but rather a woman who would use the influence she wielded to force all candidates to listen to her.

All I can say is #JaneAddamsForPresident2k16

February 13, 2016February 13, 2016

Jane Addams Plays Cupid

Letter from Mary Hill Dayton to Gerard Swope sent from Hull-House.

To get in the mood this Valentine’s Day, we here at the Jane Addams Papers Project are getting romantic inspiration from none other than the match-maker herself; Jane Addams.

Hear us out. In between the settlement work done at Hull House at the turn of the century, two residents entered into a courtship. One that was fostered by none other than Jane Addams.

New Jersey Native Mary Hill Dayton came to South Chicago to teach English classes. While teaching, Dayton met fellow Hull House resident Gerard Swope. An employee of GE, Swope was taking time off to teach classes on electronics and algebra.

The two teachers seem to hit it off because when Swope left Hull House in 1899, he and Dayton maintained a long distance relationship via correspondence.

The separation only seemed to strengthen their affections. In their writings they referred to their relationship as “IT.” Dayton wrote that “every time I turn on to Halsted St. my heart warms up about 50° – and I long for a time when we can be on it together.”

Perhaps Dayton worried about if “IT” was indiscrete because this is where Jane comes in. She assuaged Dayton’s fears that the whole house was gossiping about “IT”, confiding to Dayton that she had heard nothing about it.
Dayton thought that perhaps Addams was just being nice or just not in tune with the Hull House water cooler gossip, because Dayton was getting a healthy dose of teasing.

One night Dayton seemed to be slipped a note from fellow resident Julia Lathrop apologizing for teasing Dayton earlier in the day about her relationship with Swope. She closed her note, “hoping we are all best friends.”

By 1900, Dayton and Swope had become engaged. On Valentine’s day of that year, the couple asked Addams to break the news to their parents. And in 1901, Addams who officiated the wedding at Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Speaking at the wedding, Addams predicated, “Knowing as we do something of the character of these two people, somewhat of the temper of their attachment and to form of the expression we may confidently predict that and all life’s journey through to the end is will be illumined…”

Jane was correct about that. The Swopes would go on to live very happy lives. Gerard became the CEO of GE and both he and Mary remained active in social work throughout their lives.

Jane Addams made a huge impact in the time she lived with her charitable and political work. What is so wonderful about these documents is that they offer a glimpse into the personal impact Jane Addams had. If it had not been for Hull House Mary and Gerard Swope may have never met, and would not have led their lives following her charitable model.

February 4, 2016

An Untapped Resource: Seniors and the Jane Addams Papers

Jo Anne Zellers, Tori Sciancalepore and Cathy Moran Hajo at the presentation at Brandywine Senior Living, Feb. 2, 2016.

One of the goals of the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College is to make our documents available and accessible to a wide audience. We have a dedicated cadre of student workers and volunteers here at the project who are transcribing and indexing the documents for web-based publication. While we have been interested in using crowd-sourcing as a tool to help complete first drafts of Addams’ letters, we had been thinking about it largely in terms of building an it as an option on our website. Last week, however, we started a collaboration with the staff and residents of Brandywine Senior Living in Mahwah.

The idea came from a conversation I had with Jo Anne Zellers, Ramapo College’s Director of Constituent Relations, about the difficulty that readers had with Jane Addams’ handwriting. Addams’ letters are daunting when you first look at them, hastily written, and filled with proper nouns and turns of phrase that are difficult for college students and all but impossible for younger readers. Providing transcriptions is critical to our mission, as they enable readers to make sense of the letters and enable text searches. Jo Anne surmised that older people might have an easier time of reading Addams and her contemporaries, and that led naturally to the idea of seeing whether there was interest from the seniors.

TranscriptionSlide We met with Brienne Fuellhart, the Escapades Producer at Brandywine, and she was enthusiastic about the idea. On Wednesday, Tori Sciancalepore (Assistant Editor at the project), Jo Anne and I traveled to Brandywine and did a presentation on Jane Addams’ life and then a short introduction to transcription and Jane Addams’ hand. While the residents at first found Addams writing difficult, within a few minutes they were calling out their guesses. The next morning Brienne reported that “residents were excited and impressed and I think we should be able to put together a good group to help with this project.”

Our plan going forward is to share a folder of handwritten documents, via a share drive. Brienne will display them in the large screen movie room at Brandywine and residents will come and tease out the meaning of the documents in a transcription group. Brienne or another helper will type up their transcriptions and upload them to the shared drive, where we can access them and add them to our digital archive. Tori and I will proofread the transcriptions and make any corrections needed before we post them on the public site. We will visit Brandywine frequently, giving them some new pointers and introducing the project to residents who did not attend the initial meeting.

Engaging the public in this way is exciting and we feel certain that it will become a model for working with other community groups–schools, clubs, or anyone interested in historical documents. If you know of a group that would like to participate, whether in our neck of the woods, or at a distance, please contact me and we can set things up.

January 26, 2016

Collecting Jane

What does the new editor of the Addams Papers get for Christmas? Addams trading cards, of course, thanks to my sister! And that sent us down the rabbit hole of the Web, investigating other Addams memorabilia. While nowhere as common as collectibles on the Founding Fathers, movie stars or athletes, these quirky mementos are evidence of efforts to popularize history, commemorate famous Americans, and separate history buffs from their hard earned cash. Enjoy the variety of Addams memorabilia below, and please let us know if you have or know of any other collectibles focused on Addams in the comments below.

Trading Cards

Jane Addams card from Topps' Heritage Heroes series (2009)

If you thought that baseball cards were just for, well, baseball, then you haven’t delved deep enough into the word of collectible cards. In 2009 Topps issued a 150-card collection in its Heritage series, called the American Heroes Edition. Topps identified people who were “the most courageous, valiant, progressive and enlightened American women and men in our nation’s history,” and created a series of cards with designs drawn from the company’s historic baseball card designs.

The Jane Addams card (#78 in the series) is one of the Humanitarian series, which also includes well-known figures like Florence Kelley, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Clara Barton and Jimmy Carter. Other series include Heroes of Spaceflight, Authors and Journalists, Diplomatic Heroes and Civil Rights Heroes. It uses a photograph of Addams from 1914, colorized, and designed in the style of a Topps 1966 baseball card.

Peacemaker-card-back

Addams also appears in a smaller set of seven “Peacemakers” mini-cards issued in 2013 by Allen & Ginter, a Topps subsidiary. The others appearing are Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Jimmy Carter. The Peacemaker card uses an older vintage look, with the same photo, just colorized differently.

Dolls

Historically significant women are not often made into commercial dolls, but there is a market for specialty dolls featuring historical figures. The Jane Addams-Hull-House Museum offers a nattily dressed Addams (currently out-of-stock) that we hope will grace our shelves one day! She carries a copy of Twenty Years at Hull-House and wears her Nobel Prize as a necklace.

Addams-doll Searching etsy.com brings up UneekDollDesigns‘ page which offers a series of historical and cultural icons made into handcrafted dolls. Jane Addams’s doll is posed holding a replica Twenty Years at Hull-House. Photographed with a historical photograph in the background, this Jane seems a bit dour. Others in this series include actress Bette Davis, the Marx Brothers, and Sojourner Truth.

In 1979 Dover published the Notable American Women Paper Dolls book, by Tom Tierney, with 16 “accurately rendered” historical women, with a change of clothes. Addams appears along with Margaret Sanger, Emily Dickinson, Clare Booth Luce, Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. This book features short biographies of each woman and outfits that are based on historical photographs of the women.

Stamps

addams-stamp In 1940 the United States Postal Service issues a series on Famous Americans that was comprised of 35 stamps, issued in groups: Artists, Authors, Composers, Educators, Inventors, Poets, and Scientists. Jane Addams was included in the Scientist category, along with John James Audubon, Dr. Crawford W. Long, Luther Burbank and Dr. Walter Reed. A mint condition 10-cent Addams stamp goes for about $3.50 today.

The Post Office also commemorated the 100th anniversary of Hull-House in 1979, with a printed post-card. The example on the right, a first-day issue, is postmarked from Chicago and has a drawing of Addams, her neighbors, and Hull-House.

Jewelry

addams-bracelet Jewelry-maker Sarah Wood crafts necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, using historic photographs under the slogan “History is Handmade.” She has a gallery on Women’s History and Feminism that includes Jane Addams pieces like the one shown to the left. The designs are also available with images from a wide array of historical women, many lesser known, as well as a series of suffrage images.

Off the Beaten Path….

Famous women on sugar packets? Sure, why not! Red & White Sugar released a set of sugar packets with the likenesses of Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Pocahontas, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, Carrie Nation, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Addams, Annie Oakley, & Juliette Gordon Low. These emptied packets go for a mere $17 on eBay.

shot-glasses Those who are over 21 can drink a toast to Jane Addams and others founders of sociology using a set of shot glasses featuring Jane Addams, Harriet Martineau, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marianne Weber offered by CalacaCreations, available along with a series of other printed items on etsy.com.

Finally, there are the puns! You can get the slogan “Jane Addams Ran a Hull of a House” on nearly everything, from pacifiers and infant onesies, to iPhone cases, t-shirts, and coffee mugs. These are offered through zazzy.com.