All posts from February 2012

Greetings from Cambridge, Mass.! My name is JJ Ford and I have been working as the BHL Project Assistant at the Ernst Mayr Library located in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology since May 2011.

One of the earliest mentions of Groundhog Day can be found in the diary of a Pennsylvania storekeeper named James Morris, who, on February 4, 1841, wrote:Some one hundred and seventy years later, Groundhog Day, celebrated on February 2nd in the U.S. and Canada, is a spirited, suspenseful day on which we discover our winter fate, or our fate as the groundhog foresees it, anyway. If the groundhog sees his shadow, it’s another six weeks of winter.