Now wenches, listen, and let lovers lie: women's storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare

This essay involves two ‘borders’. The first is the border of gender, between male poet and female subject. The second is a cultural border, much criss-crossed in the early modern period, but still tricky for the nineteenth-century ‘labouring-class’ poets to negotiate: the border between oral and printed culture. If I do not on this occasion cross the river Tweed, I am nevertheless keenly aware here that John Clare’s ‘absent’ grandfather was an itinerant Scottish schoolmaster, and that Scotland itself in the period was, as Hamish Henderson reminds us, the very powerhouse of British balladry and folk culture

Ellalou Dimmock, A Memorial Concert, October 2, 1995

This is the concert program of the Ellalou Dimmock, A Memorial Concert performance on Monday, October 2, 1995 at 8:00 p.m., at the Boston University Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were "Dove Sei" from Rodelinda by George Frideric Handel, "Illustratevi, o cieli" by Claudio Montiverdi, Remembering Ellalou: A Friend's Reminiscence by Marjorie McDonald, If Music be the food of love by Henry Purcell, Le Colibri by Ernest Chausson, Eem Yerke by Kurken Alemshah, Mandoline, En Sourdine, and Green by Gabriel Faure, Remembering Ellalou: A Poem by Joanne Mouradjian, from Six Songs from Time and Eternity by Martha Alter, from Das Marienleben by Paul Hindemith, and Epilogue: Ständchen by Richard Strauss. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

In the Heat of Battle: Letters from the Normandy Campaign

Harold S. MacDonald was an officer with the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment from June 1942 until the end of the Second World War in Europe. Throughout this period he penned a steady stream of letters to his bestfriend, his wife, Marjorie, who was then a newspaper reporter with the Saint John Evening Times-Globe. These letters, totalling 463, were carefully preserved by Marjorie and provide a continuous and absorbing account of the experiences of a front-line Canadian infantry officer in Northwest Europe during the Second World War. They begin in June 1942 with a description of the rowdy voyage on the troopship carrying him and his regiment to England, and go on to provide vivid portrayals of his experiences of life in wartime Great Britain and of numerous training exercises in which he participated. For the most part, however, they are concerned with his fraught and demanding responsibilities on the battlefields of continental Europe. Hal MacDonald was born in Saint John on 15 February 1917. A graduate of the Modern Business College in Saint John, he was working with the accounting department of T. McAvity and Sons, in Saint John, when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. He enlisted that year as a private, and progressed through non-commisioned ranks to officer training at Brockville in the fall of 1941. In June 1942 he was posted to the North Shore Regiment and remained with that unit until the end of the war. In action, he served successively as second-in-command of “D” Company, commander of the Carrier Platoon, commander of the Support Company, and then as adjutant. At war\u27s end he was the North Shores’ liaison officer with the 8th Brigade, of which the regiment formed a part. Upon his return to Canada and demobilization in 1945, MacDonald joined Colonel Charles Leonard in the century-old Saint John firm of manufacturers’ agents and food brokers, which in due course became Leonard and MacDonald Ltd. His many activities and interests included the New Brunswick presidency of the Canadian Red Cross from 1964 to 1967, and also the presidency of the Canadian Food Wholesalers from 1977 to 1978. He was killed in an automobile accident on 11 November 1984, leaving his wife, a son and a daughter. The letters presented in the following narrative cover the period from MacDonald’s landing in France in late June 1944 until the end of the campaign in Normandy in the third week of August. They constitute an invaluable source of information about that campaign from the point of view of an observant and articulate front-line participant and tell us much about such important subjects as battle stess and exhaustion, the conditions under which soldiers lived and died, morale, the debilitating effects of friendly fire and the daily grind of attrition warfare. The letters are presented here to stimulate interest in the collection as a whole, which almost certainly merits publication in its entirety

Journal of Simeon Lyman of Sharon Aug. 10 to Dec. 28, 1775

Covers the period Aug. 10 to Dec. 28, 1775

"The apple at the glass": Halloween and Scottish poetry

This paper explores Halloween observances in eighteenth century Scotland, as represented in Robert Fergusson's 'Hallow Fair' and in the two 'Halloween' poems by Robert Burns and Janet Little. These three pieces, taken together, provide a comprehensive picture of Halloween customs--economic and cultural--in eighteenth century Scotland. Halloween provided a potent imaginative source of expression for eighteenth century Scottish poets like Fergusson, Burns and Little, and it is suggested, that their representations of this calendar custom illuminate the ways in which individuals engage in different ways with community celebrations