The purpose of this report is to analyze and make recommendations to Salve Regina University, the present owner of the building, in regards to the Library. This study will involve, but is not limited to, a survey of the room’s history, including information about the designer, former inhabitants, and historical functions. It will draw on a large number of research venues, including historic maps, photographs, illustrations, drawings, diagrams, floor-plans, measured drawings, scientific analysis methods, wills, land evidence records, and other legal documents of previous owners.

In addition, this report will also include an intimate analysis of the room through the utilization of methodologies coming from the emergent field of Material Culture Studies, which will yield information of an evolving culture. As this report will attempt to track the various changes of the room over time, materials and methods of construction will be included.

Furthermore, works from contemporary authors will be consulted in regards to “country living”, socioeconomic conditions characteristic of Newport throughout the Gilded Age, architecture, interior design, and book collecting. To gain a basic understanding of the Sherman family history, both a cursory genealogical study and oral history project was undertaken.

We intend to conclude with an interpretation of the room which will include the room’s significance and relevance to our own time and place. Our interpretation will form the basis of future recommendations for this room, with goals that are consistent with the preservation and the possible utility of the room. Ultimately, we will be left with a valuable document that can be employed as an informative tool for research.

This is at best, a very difficult, complex, and confusing task. Difficult because we must try to piece together a subject that people generally didn’t write passionately about. Information tends to be factual; this mill has 8,000 spindles, 220 looms, and employs 175 operatives. Complex because Newport had so much in the arena of business going on in the early years and, to a lesser extent, the years following the wars. Confusing because there are often times incomplete or contradictory information that may even been written years after the fact, or by people unassociated with the event. It is only a limited look at a very specific topic. But by understanding what industries were active, we can get an understanding, to some extent, of what life was like and how the people lived. We see that in the beginning, trading cargoes consisted of “agricultural produce, livestock, fish, and wood products such as lumber, barrel staves, shingles, and charcoal. Even William Coddington, the founder of Newport, was exporting sheep, cattle, horses, corn, butter, cheese, wool, and mutton just 20 years after the colony was founded.” (Hale). From this we can at least start to sketch a picture of industrial life.

But one must be cautioned, bread crumbs don’t always lead the way home. Value judgments should not be made about the people or even the industries of the period. Our values are vastly different then the values that may have existed back then, products, I am sure, of their world and the forces in play about them. We might not like living, or working, or going to school next to a lead works or coal-gas company. However, in their world the residents may have seen this as employment, food on the table, and the American Dream.

This does not attempt to be the final word on Newport industry or even District industry. Indeed, it would take tomes of work on top of those that already exist to even come close to this goal. What has been attempted is to give a broad overview of the state of industrial affairs in the District in the time period to give us some kind of idea what life might have been like for the residents. Granted we will never know what it was like to be a part of that time period; we can not. We can only try to glean an understanding of what every day life might have been like by reading what the people of the time period left us; written accounts and material culture. Through this limited set of sources, we get to know our forbearers.

Multiple personality is a condition which is classified today as a form of hysterical neurosis of the dissociative type. Disorders in this group are differentiated in part by the presence of peculiarities in the realm of memory function and include unusual states such as fugue, somnambulism, and amnesia.

One such case was Mollie Fancher who came to be known as the "Brooklyn Enigma" or "The Psychological Marvel of the Nineteenth Century."

This paper concentrates on the introduction of this doctrine to the United States, focusing on Philadelphia where it began and where for a time it became a controversial doctrine within the medical profession.

In particular Philadelphia physicians such as Benjamin Rush and John Bell were early adherents of phrenology.

The attitudes of Millennial generation students from a small, private New England college were measured regarding usage and intended usage of books, e-books and audio books. Their views give an illustration of the outlook of this generation towards the evolution of digital media and how dependent their research skills are on technology.