Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University
A place for news and information about rare books, manuscripts and university archives.
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
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
As part of Andrea Benefiel’s work on the Collection on Legal Change (CLC) earlier this year, she created an online finding aid for the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Political, Profession, and Judicial Papers. The papers document the illustrious career of Vanderbilt, a Wesleyan alumnus from the class of 1910. Vanderbilt had a long career in private … Read more
This week I have been working on processing the scrapbook of Stephen Henry Olin, an influential figure in Wesleyan’s history (most commonly known as the son of President Stephen Olin of Olin Library fame). The scrapbook does not detail Olin’s many life accomplishments, however, but instead reveals the fancies of a thirteen year old boy … Read more
On Friday, January 15, I had the honor of interviewing former Wesleyan president, Douglas J. Bennet, Jr. I had spent the spring and summer of 2009 arranging and describing his professional papers which are now open for research in SC&A. As a processing archivist I am privileged to spend many weeks working with the materials … 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
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 … 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
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 … Read more
