A place for news and information about rare books, manuscripts and university archives.
An inquirer asked about Laban Clark’s journal from 1807. Clark kept a number of journals. Here you see the first page of journal “No. 17,” which starts on Christmas Day. You can find a full description of the Laban Clark Papers here. From 1801 to 1851, Laban Clark was engaged in the work of the … Read more
Long-time members of the Wesleyan community will remember Willie Kerr. He joined the university in 1959 as an assistant professor in the History Department and later served as assistant provost, provost, and secretary of the university. He retired in 1993 and died in 1999. At Professor Kerr’s February 26, 1999, memorial service, former President Colin … Read more
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
