In 1939, the Wesleyan Alumni Council started collecting alumni memories, which included those of Wesleyan professors, pranks, the burning of North College in 1906, and the arrival of women in 1872. This collection, the Alumni Council Collection of Recollections, has been a pleasure to read. Because of the nature of these anecdotes, in this post [...]

The following post was written by our intern Annie Benefiel, a library science student in the Simmons College library program.
As one of the earliest “town and gown” organizations at Wesleyan, the Middletown Scientific Association explored popular scientific topics from 1871 to 1968. Its membership was comprised of Wesleyan University faculty members as well as [...]

In 1982 Wesleyan students protested the administrations elimination to their aid-blind financial aid policy. The students held a 150-hour protest on the second floor of North College (as shown in this picture), one hour for each year the university existed. The university responded to their protest by denying the students potty privileges and locking [...]

Once the US entered the First World War, the university became a military hub for training soldiers. Some of the skills that students worked on were combat firing, map-drawing, first aid/sanitation, trench construction (such as in this photo), and military history.
One of the questions that I encountered while processing the history of this collection, [...]

Steven St. Onge, a Quinnipiac University student and history major, is working in Special Collections & Archives this summer, describing some of our 19th century diaries. His discoveries have been fascinating, and I asked him to share some of his findings:
After a month of deciphering handwriting from the 1800s, I’ve finally produced two finding aids [...]

We recently posted a bunch of new finding aids (guides to collections) on our website
Benjamin Arthur Caleb Papers, 1851-1861
Laban Clark Papers, 1794-1935
Deutsche Verein Records, 1909-1960
Monday Club Records, 1892-1995
Dana Plante (Class of 1959) Collection, 1954-1960
Phyllis Rose Collection, 1977-1984
Beatrice Witkin Papers, 1949-1988
With the help of our great student employees, we’ll be putting more finding aids online throughout [...]

We now have an online finding aid for our collection of Nineteenth Century Administrative Records. A finding aid is like a super detailed catalog record, which gives you a description of the types of materials found in the collection, and a box by box description of where items can be found. Finding aids are a [...]