Coeducation Collection now digitized

Special Collections & Archives holds a rich collection of documents and photographs related to the Wesleyan’s first period of coeducation, 1872-1912, and it has been recently digitized and is fully available online. The Coeducation Collection finding aid has been updated to provide links to the digital files. You can also browse the collection. This is … Read more

New exhibition: “A Stellar Education: Astronomy at Wesleyan, 1831-1916”

The new SC&A exhibition, “A Stellar Education: Astronomy at Wesleyan, 1831-1916,” is now open. It explores the study of astronomy at Wesleyan from the University’s founding in 1831 through the construction of Van Vleck Observatory in 1916, which celebrates its centennial this year. Items on display include atlases, textbooks, photographs, an original Henry Bacon Van … Read more

New exhibition: “Textile Messages: Wesleyan Student Apparel Through the Decades”

Freshman beanies, a 1927 letter sweater, a 1970 “Strike” arm band, a 1985 Feminist House T-shirt, and more—this exhibition includes items of student apparel that were (or could have been) worn on a day-to-day basis, and those that were not are evocative of key social and academic aspects of student life. The show is on … Read more

Pick of the Week, Sept. 18: Learning to read Tamil numbers

Can you read the text on this page? Neither can I!  But it’s one of many foreign-language Bibles in our Special Collections that I’ve had to catalog.  Back in the early 19th century, the British Foreign and Bible Society was hard at work on its goal of translating the Bible into as many foreign languages … Read more

New finding aids completed in SC&A

As part of my internship at SC&A I created finding aids for three collections. The most notable among these is the finding aid for a collection that I processed during my internship dealing with Wesleyan President James L. McConaughy, his wife Elizabeth, and son James Jr. The collection entitled, McConaughy Family Papers, details important aspects … Read more

Pick of the week, May 15: A Spatial History of Wesleyan University

A Spatial History of Wesleyan University combines geographical and quantitative analysis with archival and oral history research to interpret the past in place. It is the product of the Spring 2015 course in Digital History at Wesleyan taught by Visiting Assistant Professor of History Amrys O. Williams, part of the university’s Digital and Computational Knowledge … Read more