Probably few members of the present generation, who shudder at the inhumanity of the old laws allowing imprisonment for debt, realize that it is still allowable under the laws of certain states. In New York and Pennsylvania, for example, a man may be imprisoned for debt incurred by neglect or misconduct in any professional employment. In Nevada, he may lose his liberty for nonpayment of damages arising out of cases of fraud, libel and slander. And in Massachusetts, he may be sent to prison even for ordinary breach of contract if he owes as much as twenty dollars, exclusive of costs, and if his creditor can prove any one of six charges, among them, “that since the debt was contracted the debtor has hazarded or paid money or other property to the value of $100 or more in some kind of gaming prohibited by the law of the State.”

On April 10, 1928, the first complete periodical ever sent over the telephone wires was issued by a Cambridge firm.

The papers of “Israel Thorndike, Esq.” are the first manuscript collection arranged and mounted by Baker Library. They are fragmentary first hand tales of shipwrecks; of the capture and imprisonment of sailors and sea captains; of trading meat, metals and upland cotton for silks and spices (these were the early days of the American pepper trade), by bright, vivid young captains and supercargoes who were virtually agents of a wealthy house, and whose reports of the market and conditions in foreign seaport towns were a valuable portion of America's knowledge of foreign economic and political affairs.