Did you come here looking for something that you did not find? Are your research travels cancelled and you’re looking for other ways to stay busy? Or were you simply so intruiged by our Cushman-collection that you want to read even more about this fascinating actress? Either way: you’re in luck! Thanks to Cushman’s large social network, letters sent and received by her, and numerous other texts that mention her are widely available in other digital archives.
So, in the hope that it might proof useful to some fellow American studies folks, celebrity studies people, (gender) historians, and who else might profit from nineteenth-century primary material, here’s a collection of digital sources we have relied on repeatedly in our own research.
(Stay tuned for updates, and get in touch, if you have any questions!)
Letters
Anne Whitney Papers, Wellesley College Digital Repository: Personal Correspondence about Charlote Cushman
Brownings Correspondence, Wedgestone Press: lists the letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning currently available.
The Browning Letters: Baylor University, Digital Collections, Armstrong Browning Library, Digital Collection
Charlotte Cushman Papers, Duke University, David M. Rubenstein, Rare Book & Manuscript Library: Letter from Frances Anne Kemble to Charlotte Cushman
Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Parts 1-6, Colorado College: Transcriptions of Letters to and from Charlotte Cushman
Louise and Barry Taper Collection, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum: Part of Chronicling Illinois, several letters from Mary Devlin Booth to Emma Crow Cushman between 1861 and 1863, e.g. Mary Devlin Booth to Emma Cushman, Feb 26, 1862
Seward Family Digital Archive: Letters by the Seward family about Cushman in the 1860s.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne collection of papers, NYPL Digital Collections: Correspondence with Charlotte Cushman
The Carlyle Letters Online: Letters by the Carlyles about and to Cushman, archival documents with CC mentions
Misc. Archival Documents
Emma Stebbins Scrapbook, 1858-1882. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Donated 1981 by Elizabeth Milroy, a relative of Stebbins.
Beecher-Stowe Family Papers, 1798-1956. Charlotte Saunders Cushman, 1816-1876. Box of file cards of notes by Lyman Beecher Stowe re Charlotte Cushman. A-102, 432a. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
The Frick Collection’s “Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America” lists Charlotte Cushman as an important patron of the arts and offers an overview of relevant archives with letters and other material by/about Cushman.
19th-Century Auto/biographies
19th-Century Articles
America’s Historical Newspapers
Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse): English articles about Cushman
The New York Times TimesMachine
(authors: Katrin Horn, Selina Foltinek)
