Advancing the Bibliography, Bit by Bit

Distractions come in all forms--home, health, work on the NYSEC archives, holidays, and on and on.  I have not been able to work as consistently on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture as I would like in the past few months.  One advantage of a quiet holiday is time for the mind to return to whatever constitutes homeostasis.  For me, that "set point" or baseline seems to involve a chance to tinker with the Bibliography.  And so I did.

This morning's tinkering was a return to Ethical Addresses.  I am trying to track down the publication history of the articles in this serial, starting with the First Series (1895).  The volume's preface indicates that all of the lectures included were "given before Ethical Societies" and one had been published in the Forum.  Only M. M. Mangasarian's address--"The Religion of Ethical Culture"--includes specifics about its history, i.e., that it was an address given to the Chicago Ethical Society, April 8, 1894.  

Recently I found a typed list of addresses delivered to the New York Society for Ethical Culture from 1893 to 1933.  The list provided dates for Felix Adler's three addresses, all three of which appear to have been presented at Carnegie Hall:

• What Do We Stand For? - October 22, 1893
• The Modern Saint - March 11, 1894
• Prayer and Worship - December 2, 1894

The first of these was acknowledged as having been published in The Forum without providing more specific information.  I managed to track it down--The Forum, Volume 16, November 1893, pp. 379-87--with the title:  "Modern Scepticism and Ethical Culture."  At the same time, I found that the version published in EA had an addendum not included in the original essay--"A Statement as to the Attitude of the Ethical Movement toward Religion"--which is attributed to the joint agreement of the Ethical Culture "lecturers" of the period.

The Ethical Society of St Louis has inventoried and had posted a large portion of its archives online, but now that material seems to be unavailable to non-members.  I did (earlier) manage to confirm the dates (years) when Walter L. Sheldon's two lectures were given to that Society:

• What Does it Mean to Be Religious, and What Is Religion? - 1894
• True Liberalism - 1894

I was unable to find further references to any of William M. Salter's lectures in this volume.  The search will continue.

Another "area" for recent work on the Bibliography has been the result of the DDOS attack on the Internet Archive in October.  All of the issues of Ethical Addresses & Ethical Record are posted there as are many other works that have been listed in the Bibliography.  In the weeks following the attack(s), none of these works were available, which substantially hampered my ability to check references and such.  One task that I had intended to carry out was to add the link to each issue of EA&ER to each article listed in the Bibliography.  I had already provided links to the volumes, but that still required users to scroll up and down between the volume link and the individual articles.  Thinking I would make things easier to use, I started adding those links.  Since it's a tedious process, I would only complete one issue in a day and move on to something more interesting.  That work came to a screeching halt with the DDOS attacks and made me very aware of the vulnerability of a sole repository.  Now that service has returned, I am continuing to add those links.  It's still just as tedious, so it will be a while before I complete the effort, but at least it's possible.

One thing that is no longer possible with the Internet Archive is the result of another sort of attack, this one entirely legal but with lasting effect.  Hatchette v. Internet Archive resulted in the removal of thousands of books that had been made available for online lending--one hour at a time--from the site.  I can no longer remotely check out a book to look at its contents and determine whether it is relevant for the Bibliography much less spend any time reading it.  This will slow some of the work down considerably, since I have limited mobility and find it difficult to park and enter the brick and mortar libraries that are within driving distance of my home.  

Going forward (while remaining in out-of-copyright territory), I have begun looking at the International Journal of Ethics, which was published by the AEU from 1890 to 1914.  The goal will be to continue searching for overlap between EA&ER and IJE as well as to identify more primary and secondary sources related to Ethical Culture.  Hathi Trust looks like it will be my source for this material.  It should keep me busy between home, health, NYSEC archives, holidays and so on and on.

Happy new year!

Wayback at the AEU

 

AEU Library - On the Wayback Machine

I can't believe that I just found a Library of Ethical Culture.  It's the American Ethical Union Library.  It exists on the Wayback Machine in the Internet Library (archive.org).  The Wayback Machine shows that its last crawl of this site was November 30, 2013.  After that, pffft!  

I don't see the Library on any AEU web space that I have access to.  We can be grateful to the Wayback Machine (and now the Internet Library) for recovering this lost resource.

As a resource, the Library is rather clunky to use.  It takes noticeable seconds to pull up any page that you want to look at.  Some pages indicate that there is more to see, but the Wayback machine seems only to have captured what is on screen and not whatever would have been found by scrolling down the page.  

Nonetheless we will also "capture" what we can and continue looking for the original files.  If they haven't been deleted.

And that, friends, is another reason to do this work.  Sometimes we seem to lack continuity as well as connection to our past--even a past as recent as 2013.  Institutional memory is actually a good thing.

Happy President's Day!

Ethical Addresses - First Series - 1895

 

Ethical Addresses was a serial publication presented by the American Ethical Union.  The AEU was formed in 1889, 13 years after Felix Adler's Founding Address, which established the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  In those intervening years, three additional Societies were founded in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago.  The Leaders for each of these three newer Societies apprenticed under the supervision of Adler in New York and then set out to found their own Societies in those cities.  In 1889, they formed the Union, and in 1895 they began assembling an annual series of volumes which collected selected platforms (speeches) given by the Leaders.  

The First Series, published in 1895, included three essays each by Felix Adler (New York) and William M. Salter (Philadelphia) and two essays each by Walter L Sheldon (St. Louis) and M. M. Mangasarian (Chicago).  The topics tend to cluster around general questions of religion and philosophy and where Ethical Culture fits in.  I have yet to read all of these essays, but I expect there will be some interesting variations among the different Leaders' viewpoints and our thinking in the present day.  I personally find it interesting to consider where we began, with the emphasis on idealism, and how we've changed, with more emphasis on pragmatism.  Naturalism in one form or another does seem to have endured.  

Two essays struck me as different from the others, so I've read them first.  One, by Adler, was "Prayer and Worship."  I rather expected that Adler would have condemned both prayer and worship as futile, there being no evidence of a deity and Adler himself urging us to put creed aside for the sake of common action.  His Founding Address, moreover, had emphasized that our Ethical Culture meetings would be "simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism."  In the same address, he added:

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. [Emphasis added.]

I have seen nothing in any Ethical Culture Society meeting that I have attended (so far) that sounds like prayer or smacks of worship.  Adler surprised me in this platform.  He did find some space for both prayer and worship--as functions--within Ethical Culture, and what he came up with might even have qualified as religious experience to John Dewey.  In any case, I found it a lovely way to accept those concepts into Ethical Culture.

The second essay, by Mangasarian, is an interesting and sometimes practical discussion of "Teaching and Teachers."  Coming from a family of teachers and having some experience in the area myself, I was curious to see what Magasarian had to say.  As expected, there were some attitudes that fit in well with the period, including comments about women teachers and their need to be, well, more ladylike.  He did, however, make some very astute comments about both the value of education and the degree to which informal behaviors become lasting influences.  I'll probably read it again for the sake of its relevance to current discussions about education, the role of parents, and the influence of religion and politics on a, presumably, areligious and apolitical institution.

With this First Series came an immediate set of questions related to bibliographic style and the logistics of the project.

• Ethical Addresses is a serial.  It is an annual collection of speeches by different authors.  There is no named editor.  I am using the Chicago style for bibliographic entries, citing both the individual volumes of the series and each essay title as separate entries. 

         Author Last Name, First M. "Chapter or Essay Title." In Book Title, edited by First M. Last Name, page range.     Place of Publication: Publisher, date.

• Ethical Addresses is long out of copyright.  The entire series has been "digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation."  All of the volumes are available in the Internet Archive (archive.org), some from multiple scan sources.  The First Series can be seen here.  The entire volume can be downloaded in PDF and other formats to read offline.
• It is possible with current technology to extract individual articles from the original volume.  I have, for my personal use, extracted both the Adler and Mangasarian articles discussed above so that I can look at them more closely to refer to them in my writing.  I would be interested to discuss the ethics of reposting those or other articles on a different website might be.  
• The First Series (and others in the series) has been reprinted from the Internet Archive scans by Leopold Classic Library and can be ordered on Amazon and other sources.

Next week I hope to have found a home for the bibliography so that others can use it as a resource.  Each iteration will be dated to reflect its current status (later dates will reflect more entries having been added).  I have begun adding the entries for Series Two; One and Three are completed; the background research on authors and subjects may take a bit more time to complete.