{"id":3476,"date":"2013-11-22T13:07:26","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T13:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/?p=3476"},"modified":"2025-11-12T20:53:41","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T20:53:41","slug":"collecting-the-puritans-and-their-contemporaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/2013\/11\/22\/collecting-the-puritans-and-their-contemporaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Collecting the Puritans…and Their Contemporaries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fans of the Special Collections Research Center<\/a> likely know that letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other archival materials usually come to us in collections \u2013 large and small groups of materials either created or collected by a person or organization. Often, the histories behind the gathering together of these primary source materials, and the long road from creation to their final home in SCRC, is as interesting as the content of the materials themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less well known is that we also frequently receive our rare books<\/a> in the form of a collection, as well. While books tend to be rather individual in nature, as collections they have personalities and histories as unique as any archival collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of SCRC\u2019s book collections is the Philip Gardiner Nordell Collection, which consists of over 250 books, primarily rare British imprints on religion from the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries. The collection documents the different predominant and often conflicting ideas during this period, particularly related to religion, religious liberty, and rationalism in England and the New England colonies. Included in the collection are many books on \u201cfringe\u201d groups such as Anabaptists, Ranters<\/a>, and atheists, as well as many works on witchcraft. Authors represented include Francis Bacon, John Cotton, Thomas Hobbes, and Cotton Mather.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Frontispiece from a first edition of Leviathan; Or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill, by Thomas Hobbes (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, 1651).
Philip Gardiner Nordell (1894-1976) was a man of many talents and interests. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1916, and was an All American in the running broad jump. He claimed to have invented the predecessor to boxed cake mixes in the 1920s, founding a business that combined the dry ingredients for muffins, allowing the baker to simply add water. Nordell\u2019s primary research interest was early American lotteries, which he studied for over 30 years. His\u00a0personal collection of early lottery tickets<\/a>\u00a0and related newspaper announcements, brochures, and broadsides, is now at Princeton University.
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Philip Gardiner Nordell (1894-1976) was a man of many talents and interests. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1916, and was an All American in the running broad jump. He claimed to have invented the predecessor to boxed cake mixes in the 1920s, founding a business that combined the dry ingredients for muffins, allowing the baker to simply add water. Nordell\u2019s primary research interest was early American lotteries, which he studied for over 30 years. His <\/span>personal collection of early lottery tickets<\/a> and related newspaper announcements, brochures, and broadsides, is now at Princeton University.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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Map from Tobias Swinden\u2019s An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell (London: Printed by W. Bowyer, for W. Taylor [etc.], 1714).<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Nordell also assembled his extraordinary collection of books documenting religion in Britain and New England in the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries. In a 1965 letter, he said: \u201cMy central aim in gathering the collection has been to furnish important source material helpful in appraising the comparative mental patterns in old and New England.\u2026 In different words, the collection furnishes much of the basic source material to form a sound judgment as to the truth of an observation made in the 1640’s, that while New England was becoming old, old England was becoming new.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Katy Rawdon, Coordinator of Technical Services, SCRC<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fans of the Special Collections Research Center likely know that letters, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other archival materials usually come to us in collections \u2013 large and small groups of materials either created or collected by a person or organization. Often, the histories behind the gathering together of these primary source materials, and the long … Continue reading Collecting the Puritans…and Their Contemporaries<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":987,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[25,14,5,6],"class_list":["post-3476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-news","tag-history-news","tag-rare-books","tag-religion","tag-top-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/987"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5548,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions\/5548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/historynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}