Simplicity

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 19, 2024

It always amazes me what can catch your eye – even the simplest of things.


After two weeks of our Junior Historians classes – one in July and one in August – our class supply cabinets become a little tired. There are knots of embroidery thread, shells that have found themselves among beads, a pile of fabric, a jumble of tinsmithing cans. I love to try and straighten and neaten and organize but I may have met my match in our high school intern (her second summer with us). She loves organizing and tasked with a huge knot of embroidery thread – this is what she came up with. She found a few too many needles still in the jumble – which she rescued – but look at this neatness and the colors! I think William Mitchell would adore this – the colors that is!


JNLF

Recent Posts

The Evil Four Inches

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 5, 2025
I have posted this during Women’s History Month before but because it is March and Women’s History Month, I think it’s worth repeating. It’s clever and helps to tell an important story in women’s history while giving it a bit of a 21 st century twist. It comes via the National Women’s History Project .  JNLF

Keep Calm and Bird On: May 2025

May 1, 2025
“If you don’t look, you don’t see. You have to go and look.” -Edith Andrews

Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • April 28, 2025
Lynn, Ap. 25 1869  My dear President, I am not sure I told you how long I must be away from the College. If I took only the Sunday’s rest, it would be possible for me to reach the Obs. By Tuesday, but I feel the need of more than one day of quiet, before I enter upon the new and incomprehensible life before me . . . William Mitchell died on April 19, 1869 and for the first time, Maria Mitchell was alone. Save for her trip to the southern United States and Europe in 1857 and 1858, her father was always by her side. She did not know much of a day in her life without him nearby and she knows that. It was difficult for her – and her siblings worried about her and this new world she was now in. She had been – expect for that trip – the caregiver for both of her parents. Her mother, Lydia Coleman Mitchell, died in 1861 on Nantucket and Maria had cared for her as well. She was the child who became the caregiver of the family – both in her youth as her siblings sought her out for care, humor, love, and adventures while their mother was busy with younger children and household duties – and then her parents as the only child who did not marry and remained by their sides. JNLF
Show More