Caleb Gannett collection

Scope and Contents

Notebook contains transcriptions by Caleb Gannett from Edmund Halley's Astronomical tables with precepts, both in English and Latin. It is possible he started the notebook while he was a graduate student at Harvard. Includes several hand drawn diagrams of projections of eclipses in Cambridge; formulas to calculate solar and lunar eclipses, the vernal equinox, and the summer solstice in 1766; and examples for determining the placement of planets in 1769.

Scope and Contents Commonplace book, circa 1770s, containing excerpts from writings on varied subjects such as scripture and religious dissension, the aurora borealis, medicine, and the invention of printing, and mathematical formulas. Includes excerpts from Gentlemen’s Magazine on the national debt and the history of the game of chess; measurements of the gravity of types of wood; “queries relating to Sound”; and recipes for cider and wine, medical remedies, and household cleaning....

Scope and Contents Contains copies of letters from Caleb Gannett to family members, friends, other ministers, merchants, and politicians, dated April 25, 1770-June 29, 1771, written while he was a minister in Fort Cumberland, Nova Scotia. There is an index to names on the last page, and a loose note fragment in several hands laid in to the volume.Correspondents include Boston merchant Henry Bass (1739-1813), Reverend Ebenezer Gay (1696-1787; Harvard AB 1714), his sons, Nova Scotia politician Jotham...

Scope and Contents Contains copies of letters from Caleb Gannett to merchants, other ministers, and politicians, dated June 29, 1771-March 30, 1774, mainly regarding the impact on his Fort Cumberland parish by the arrival of Church of England missionary John Eagleson, and Eagleson’s attempts to claim Gannett’s glebe lands.Correspondents include Boston merchant Henry Bass, Congregational clergyman Charles Chauncy (1705-1787; Harvard AB 1721, AM 1724), Jotham Gay, Reverend Simeon Howard, Malachy...

Scope and Contents

Mathematical notebook kept by Harvard student Lewis Vassall in 1758, which he handed down to Caleb Gannett, who kept it from 1760 to 1764, and at least one other Harvard student. Includes tables and rules for addition, subtraction, division, fractions, square roots, and compound interest.

Title transcribed from the cover.

Scope and Contents

Contains geometry and trigonometry rules and problems, with hand drawn diagrams, copied from math treatises by Caleb Gannett, possibly while he was a Harvard undergraduate or graduate student from 1759 to 1766.

Scope and Contents

Partial manuscript copy of Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy Samuel Williams’ article “Observations and conjectures on the earthquakes of New England,” published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1785.