Scope and arrangement
The Joseph Green Cogswell Collection is an artificially assembled group of papers spanning the years 1817 to 1877. It consists of ten original documents and several folders of photostats. The original documents are chiefly letters to and from Cogswell and span the years 1817 to 1861. Cogswell's 1817 and 1819 letters describe life at Gottingen. An 1852 letter from Edward Everett discusses the Astor Library and its proposed acquisition of the Graberg library. The photostats are of original documents at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Harvard University, the Library of Congress, and the Boston Public Library, which were created in the years 1821 to 1837 and 1877. These are also mainly letters and pertain to Harvard and Round Hill affairs, as well as other matters concerning Cogswell. An 1877 letter discusses Cogswell's grave.