Houghton Library celebrated the bicentennial of Abraham
Lincoln’s birth with Harvard’s Lincoln, an exhibition featuring
selections from its extensive Lincoln collection. Harvard
College Library’s rich holdings devoted to Abraham Lincoln,
which now reside in Houghton, were built primarily by two
significant donations in the early decades of the twentieth
century: the Alonzo Rothschild collection in 1916 and the
William Whiting Nolen bequest in 1924. Alonzo Rothschild
(1862-1915), born in New York City to German-Jewish parents,
developed early in life an interest in books and reading. As a
young man, Rothschild tried his hand at journalism, spending
several months working as a reporter for the New York Commercial
Advertiser. Employment with a wholesale jewelry company
interrupted for several years his plans for a journalistic
career. However, it was through the jewelry business that
Rothschild returned to journalism, when in 1885 he founded The
Jeweler’s Weekly, a publication devoted to covering news of the
tra