Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University
A place for news and information about rare books, manuscripts and university archives.
We have a new feature in our online repository, WesScholar, that allows visitors to browse theses by department. Just visit WesScholar and take a look at the “Theses and Dissertations,” or link directly to the list of majors here. We added this feature after hearing from students and faculty that they wanted to be able … Read more
Though Wesleyan has outgrown many of its former “hippy” associations such as being the token “naked” campus, the school still definitely maintains an earthy and involved atmosphere that manifests itself everywhere from its activist groups to the vegan food scene. Outsiders and Wesleyan students alike often see the school’s personality as a remnant of the … Read more
While processing the diary of James Oliver Longstreet (class of 1857) last semester, I came across mention of the Wesleyan Young Men’s Republican Club in the context of the presidential election of 1856. After seeing my interest in the political lives of Wesleyan students in the 1850’s, Valerie Gillispie here at Special Collections and Archives … Read more
I like to think that most people have some experience with journals-whether its the two-sentences a day that your third grade teacher forced out of you, or that tome that you’ve been adding to faithfully since high school. For me, journaling was never a huge interest– instead I kept notebooks of lists; things to buy, … Read more
I have recently completed processing the diary of James Oliver Longstreet, a Wesleyan alumnus from the class of 1857. The diary is a colorful historical document, providing a rare glimpse into the daily life of a Methodist college student in the middle of the 19th century. It provides insight into the political and social activities … Read more
We have been adding student theses to WesScholar, our online repository of Wesleyan scholarship. We have most of the 2009 and 2008 theses, a smaller number of 2007 theses, and we’re adding earlier theses as time allows. We just added one of our all time most popular theses, The “Quails”: the History of Wesleyan University’s … Read more
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 … Read more
In the archives, there is a fascinating collection of examinations from 1868 to 1970. While going through this collection, I had to do some research on the curriculum during that time to see how these exams fit into the history of the development of academics at Wesleyan. In the mid- to late- 19th century, the … Read more
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 the … Read more
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, … Read more
