The ‘mirror with a memory’
The Harvard University Archives resemble a time machine. Get behind a desk, fill out a form, dial back to the year you want, and there you are: transported by means of collected books, manuscripts, diaries, and more. Then there is “Mirror With a Memory,” a Pusey Library exhibit of photographs and other artifacts from the years when Harvard and the nation were anticipating the Civil War, then fighting in it (or, in some cases, avoiding the fight), and later remembering it. In four glass cases, the display serves a dual role. It distills what Harvard was like 150 years ago, and it showcases the photography of the day. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859, Harvard poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., A.B. 1829, called the new medium, barely 20 years old, “the mirror with a memory.” The Civil War was not the first conflict to be captured in that...