In 1913, Harry Wolfson began a scrapbook to document his college life at Harvard. He was one of a handful of Jewish students there at the time, where he served as president of the Harvard Menorah Society. In his junior year, Wolfson won one of two coveted travel scholarships in the college. (The other one went to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s grandson.) Throughout Wolfson’s scrapbook are clippings not only from Harvard, but also from his hometown newspaper in Scranton, Pennsylvania — yet the scrapbook itself is touchingly personal, even narrow. The world is, for the most part, shut out while young Harry concentrates on sports, studies, and making sense of his rich, intellectually expanding world. The degree to which his scrapbook reads like an ordinary college boy’s collection of memorabilia adds to its charm, revealing the more human, vulnerable side of this remarkable young man. Wolfson’s accomplishments eventually led him back to Harvard, where he would hold a distinguished professorship for nearly half a century. (Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, MA.)

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