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

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

Pick of the week, January 9: Correcting Waterloo history

  Just because it’s in a history book doesn’t mean it’s correct.  In this detailed study of the Battle of Waterloo from 1815 (where Wellington soundly defeated Napoleon), someone has written tons of annotations (comments in the margins), correcting the author. Given what he’s written, it sounds like the person writing the comments was right … Read more

Pick of the week, April 11: “One hundred women will be admitted in the next freshman class”

  If you were a female high school senior in 1969, you might have encountered this flyer. In 1970, Wesleyan once again admitted women as freshmen (Wesleyan was a coeducational institution from 1872 to 1912), and 2014 marks the 40th anniversary of their graduation. You can read much more about the return to coeducation in … Read more