Hunting the Snark in the NYSEC Archives, Part I

The Birth of Carnegie Hall

I am honored to have received the 2024 Mossler Grant from the New York Society for Ethical Culture to work on a project related to a corpus of lectures to NYSEC delivered between 1893 and 1910 at Carnegie Hall.  It is called, appropriately, The Carnegie Hall Project (and abbreviated as CH in much of my notes).  I started the project when the late Lawn'ence Miller granted me access to the digital scans of some of the CH lectures and wanted to know (and find) more.  As work progresses on converting those scanned lectures into more readable--and editable--formats, I have been searching for the hard copies of those lectures as well as the others that I am hoping also exist in the archives.

I sincerely hope that I am not hunting for a snark, or worse, a boojum.  In the meantime, I've found a fair number of clues to where we should be hunting and some fascinating information about what we are looking for.  

The most concrete resource is the digital file folder of CH lectures that L (as we called him) gave me.  I have already referred to that corpus is earlier posts, so I will try not to repeat myself, but there has been some progress in at least defining the scope of the project.

• Two typewritten lists of lectures to NYSEC have been discovered in the archives and the Adler Study.  I have compared the archive "record" to the AS "ledger" for the period between 1893 (when NYSEC began meeting at CH) and 1910 (when the Meeting House was completed).  
• The "record," with corrections and additions from the "ledger," has now been entered into a spreadsheet, recording date of delivery, title, speaker, and any other information available at this time about the venue, the text, or the speaker.  There is, of course, very little additional information at the moment, but I hope that will change in the coming days as I review other online sources.
• There were seventeen seasons of lectures given at Carnegie Hall.  All of the seasons began around the third Sunday in October (except the 1894-95 season, which began on the first Sunday of November).  Most of the seasons ended around the second Sunday in May with an anniversary address, almost always given by Felix Adler.
• The number of addresses given during a season ranged from 28 to 31, with most having 30 addresses.  Occasionally a late steamer or illness would cause a change in plans for addresses, and a substitution would be listed, but one or two lectures may have been cancelled--or records lost.  The total number of addresses appears to be either 505 or 507.  Until further records--or the lectures themselves--are recovered, the actual total is inexact.
• Adler himself delivered about 60 percent of the lectures (296).  A significant portion of the remainder were given by other leaders of the Movement, including John Lovejoy Elliott (33), Alfred W. Martin (21), Stanton Coit (17), William M. Salter (8), Walter L. Sheldon (10), David S. Muzzey (4), M. M. Mangasarian (30), Leslie Willis Sprague (16), Percival Chubb (9)--and Anna Garlin Spencer (9).  (These numbers do not reflect 5 meetings with untitled presentations from one or more of these leaders speaking with a group of presenters.)
• About 10 percent of the addresses at CH were delivered by guest speakers, including several notables (e.g., Gifford Pinchot) and academics (Nathaniel Schmidt, Edward Howard Griggs, and Charles Zueblin).  Only four women took the platform alone:  Enid Stacy Widdrington, Ethel M. Arnold, Caroline Bartlett-Crane, and Anna Garlin Spencer.  Several platforms were devoted to race-related issues.  Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois spoke as individual lecturers, but there were more than one panel of presenters on this recurring topic.
• As for topics, the CH lectures ran the gamut from Ethics to politics and elections (and the ethics thereof), from contemporary literature to the sacred texts of ancient days, from the travails of poverty to the discomfort of the wealthy.  Given the times, race relations, women's issues, and labor reforms were frequent topics.  

Now that we know more about the corpus of this "collection," we have to find the collection.  There are some hints.  In the process of tracking down those hints, I am also finding out more about Carnegie Hall, cf. the video link above.