Pick of the week, April 12: Mrs. Booth’s promptbook

What do you think of when you see the name “Booth” on the cover of a 19th-century U.S. play?  Does the name “John Wilkes Booth” come to mind, perhaps?  I’ve been cataloging just such an item, a promptbook of the 1859 play The Octaroon. Right at the top of the cover, handwritten in ink, is … Read more

Pick of the week, April 5: Plantin Polyglot Bible, 1569

Suzy Taraba recently showed Prof. Kate Birney’s Introduction to Ancient Greek (GRK101) class the 1569 polyglot Bible, “the second of the great Polyglots, known as the Antwerp, or Plantin’s polyglot, otherwise the Royal polyglot,” according to Darlow & Moule. The class was studying Exodus 21:22-25 in Greek (see below). A polyglot Bible contains multiple translations … Read more

Pick of the week, March 29: Nixon goes to Wesleyan

Vice President Richard M. Nixon, accompanied by his wife Patricia Nixon, is shown here visiting campus on Oct. 18, 1956, during a reelection campaign swing through Connecticut on behalf of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and himself. The Argus reported that Nixon spoke to about 400 students who crowded around him on High St. Suzy Taraba … Read more

Pick of the week, March 8: Stereo view of Memorial Chapel, 1893

As I was refiling some photographs, I came across this stereograph taken of Memorial Chapel in 1893. I’m afraid I don’t know what the event is. These cards are also called a steropticans, stereograms, or stereo views. When you look at them through a stereograph viewer (shown below), the two images merge into one 3-D … Read more

Pick of the week, March 1: Charles Church’s class album, 1864

A reader was interested in class albums, including this one that belonged to Charles Washburn Church, Class of 1864. In the 19th century, before there were college yearbooks, Wesleyan students assembled albums and selected the photographs they wished to include. At first, the albums consisted of portraits, but in the 1870s and 1880s, photographs of … Read more

Pick of the week, Feb. 22: Bicycles on parade, 1900

A reader asked to see 1650-1900. Mattabeseck. Middletown. A description of the exercises connected with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, October 10 and 11, 1900. This booklet has a tremendous amount of detail about the celebration, including a full description of what we’re told was one of the longest parades yet assembled. The page … Read more