Briefer Notices

BRIEFER NOTICES By Henry J. Cadbury In Greater Philadelphia: The Magazine for Executives, Vol. V, No. 2 (February 1964), pp. 40-41, 115-119, Ruth Malone writes on "Quaker Quandary." Using as text the town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, she expounds to the nonQuaker public some of the paradox of inheritance and response in modem Quakerism . * * * The latest Ward Lecture differs from its predecessors in being a biographical summary about one Friend, a graduate of Guilford College and the worthy champion of the conservation of wild life (1882-1943), Thomas Gilbert Pearson: Untiring Protector of Birds, by M. Albert Linton (Guilford College, 1964, 27 pages). He was especially active in the campaign against the use of feathers in women's hats, and in the later campaigns of Audubon Societies. * * * There has never been a full biography of William Bradford (1663-1752). The nearest thing to it was John William Wallace's address on the bicentennial of his birth. Now, another hundred years later, we have an inclusive essay in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. LXXIII, Part 2 (1964), pp. 361-384, by Andrew J. Wall, Jr., "William Bradford, Colonial Printer: A Tercentenary Review." A Quaker apprentice and son-in-law of Andrew Sowie, the London Quaker printer, Bradford settled near Philadelphia about 1685. Here he soon lost the Quaker patronage when he espoused the cause of George Keith. He moved to New York and to the Church of England, and became official printer for the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Barbados. His long life was marked with difficulties and conflicts until he retired at the age of eighty-one. His pioneering as a printer in date and in scope makes him important. We had lately occasion to refer to articles on two of his scarcest imprints. See Vol. LII, 115 f., Vol. LIII, 57-58. * * * Two of the Papers published by the Monthly Meeting on the occasion of the formal opening of the Meetinghouse and Friends Center, Montreal, April 25 and 26, 1964, are historical: The Story of Montreal Meeting, 1929-1964, by W. Lloyd G. Williams; Friends in the Eastern Townships (condensed from this Bulletin, L 67-81), by S. A. Zielinski. * * * Not merely a passing alumni publication but based on a doctoral dissertation in history is the article by Dr. Homer D. Babbidge, Jr., himself a University President, "Are the First Hundred Years the Hardest?" in the Swarthmore College Bulletin, April 1964, pp. 13-17, 20. It deals with the tensions between coeducation and equal but separate education of the sexes and between the aims of academic excellence and of loyalty to a special religious heritage. A still briefer abridgment, but with some of the same Quaker silhouettes, appeared in Friends Journal, X (1964), 245 f. The year 1964 makes these articles timely, as Swarthmore College was chartered on April 1, 1864. * * * "The Ordeal of William Penn," by Francis Biddle, former United States Attorney General, was published in American Heritage, XV, No. 3 (April 1964), 122 Briefer Notices123 pp. 30-33, 104-110. Its central theme is the Penn-Mead trial in London in 1670. No doubt the prestige of the author and of the periodical will give the subject substantial dissemination. By coincidence the same subject, "The Trial of William Penn," is dealt with in Bucks County Life the same month (Vol. VI, No. 3, pp. 9-13). * * * Iowa Yearly Meeting of the Five Years Meeting published for its centennial in 1963 a ring-bound book of 99 pages. It is profuse in dates and pictures, and hence well called in its titles "Spiritual Trails of a People Called Friends" and "Remembering 100 Years of History." It has sections on education, missions, the Indians, the Underground Railroad, etc. The pictures are vivid reminders of olden times, persons, and meetinghouses. But why does it suggest in its introduction that once Quaker men and women worshiped separately, or select especially Herbert Hoover and D. Elton Trueblood as its products? ? * * In Historic Nantucket, Vol. XI, No. 4 (April 1964) Katharine Seeler has traced the relation of "Nantucket Quakers and the Founding of Kendal, Ohio." * * * H. G .Tibbutt, in Bedfordshire Magazine (England), IX (Winter 1963-64), 89...