Special Collections & Archives at Wesleyan University
A place for news and information about rare books, manuscripts and university archives.
What do you think of when you see the name “Booth” on the cover of a 19th-century U.S. play? Does the name “John Wilkes Booth” come to mind, perhaps? I’ve been cataloging just such an item, a promptbook of the 1859 play The Octaroon. Right at the top of the cover, handwritten in ink, is … Read more
Suzy Taraba recently showed Prof. Kate Birney’s Introduction to Ancient Greek (GRK101) class the 1569 polyglot Bible, “the second of the great Polyglots, known as the Antwerp, or Plantin’s polyglot, otherwise the Royal polyglot,” according to Darlow & Moule. The class was studying Exodus 21:22-25 in Greek (see below). A polyglot Bible contains multiple translations … Read more
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, accompanied by his wife Patricia Nixon, is shown here visiting campus on Oct. 18, 1956, during a reelection campaign swing through Connecticut on behalf of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and himself. The Argus reported that Nixon spoke to about 400 students who crowded around him on High St. Suzy Taraba … Read more
I was conducting research in women’s athletics and encountered this photograph of the field hockey team taken in 1971.
Here’s a teaser about my next “Historical Row” column in Wesleyan, the alumni magazine: it’s about the night in 1906 that North College went up in flames. You’ll have to read the article after it’s been published to find out more…
As I was refiling some photographs, I came across this stereograph taken of Memorial Chapel in 1893. I’m afraid I don’t know what the event is. These cards are also called a steropticans, stereograms, or stereo views. When you look at them through a stereograph viewer (shown below), the two images merge into one 3-D … Read more
A reader was interested in class albums, including this one that belonged to Charles Washburn Church, Class of 1864. In the 19th century, before there were college yearbooks, Wesleyan students assembled albums and selected the photographs they wished to include. At first, the albums consisted of portraits, but in the 1870s and 1880s, photographs of … Read more
A reader asked to see 1650-1900. Mattabeseck. Middletown. A description of the exercises connected with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, October 10 and 11, 1900. This booklet has a tremendous amount of detail about the celebration, including a full description of what we’re told was one of the longest parades yet assembled. The page … Read more
If you follow our picks of the week, you may remember a very similar image to the one above from a pick made last September. At the time, I didn’t know if or how the photograph was used, but as you can see, a slightly different shot was featured on the cover of the February … Read more
A researcher was interested in photographs of The Highwaymen, a group of Wesleyan undergraduates who hit the top of the pop charts with their single, “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)” in 1961. (You can read more about them here, here, and here. ) We have a number of good shots, including a series of contact … Read more
