Archive

1In a follow up to last week's post about Special Collections' Principia, here are some pictures of the Newton Day tree planting ceremony and our display of rare science books in the Physics Library.

William & Mary will soon be home of one of history's most famous trees. Well, at least a very close relative. This Saturday, February 22, William & Mary will accept the first of three apple trees grafted from a descendant of the purported apple tree that inspired Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation. The gift comes to us from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is connected to William & Mary is through its founder and W&M alumnus, William Barton Rogers.

Special Collections has recently purchased sixteen women's diaries, totaling about 4,800 pages, written in Connecticut and Oregon. Most of the factual information below is taken from the dealer's description. Twelve of the diaries, dating 1886 to 1945, belonged to Rosanna M. Munger, daughter of Theodore Thornton Munger, a Congregationalist minister and an advocate of Horace Bushnell's "New Theology."

The College Airport was located on Airport Rd which runs perpendicular to Richmond Rd and Mooretown Rd. (click on image for larger view) At the time of construction in the early 1930s, it was suggested that the airport be named "Benjamin Ewell Field" after the former College president who owned a farm nearby. It was only used for a few years in the early 1930's to teach flying to students.

Tasked with processing the Rosina Bowers Papers series of the Hamilton Family Papers, I opened two boxes of photographs and papers as one would expect to find them in someone's home, rather than what you would expect in the stacks of an archive. I had two initial reactions to the yet unprocessed collection.

In this letter, James DeLancey, acting Governor Of New York, writes to William Kempe, the royally commissioned provincial Attorney General of New York, concerning a potential mutiny by sailors on the Hudson River in 1759 during the Seven Years War. More material related to the Seven Years War can be found in Special Collections' Armed Conflicts research guide.

If you are a frequent visitor to our blog, you may notice that things look a little different around here. We have updated our look from the design we initially opened for business with in August 2009.

This is a 1949 aerial photo of campus long before any of the "new campus" buildings. The "X" marks the spot where Swem Library would be built in 1964.

Earlier this semester we displayed a selection of Special Collections' early modern science books for a group of students and faculty. Among the exhibited volumes was a copy of the second Italian edition of Galileo Galilei's Dialogo or Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, published in 1710.

Special Collections and Content Services is thrilled to welcome Xiaoyan Song to the library as Swem's Visiting Librarian.

The United States changed on November 22. The president's promise was lost and the coverage of the event by television affected all who watched with immediacy and intimacy. The American people experienced the tragedy together

The Caley Family Papers in Swem Library's Special Collections consist of letters and diaries spanning almost seventy years and three generations of Caley female descendants. From the 1940s through the 1960s , all three generations of women lived, with no male presence, under one roof or within close distance of one another in Sierra Madre, California.

A popular means of documenting personal interests and life events, the practice of scrapbooking dates back centuries. In contrast to the modern practice of pasting family photographs and vacation mementos onto brightly colored paper, early scrapbooks were often compilations of newspaper clippings, artwork, hand-copied quotes, and letters. In addition to being aesthetically interesting, old scrapbooks provide unique insight on the lives of their creators.

The Special Collections Research Center was pleased to host a meeting of the Colonel Joshua Fry Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Colonists (NSDAC) on September 16, 2013.

Thanks to the generosity of Bruce and Suzie Kovner, Swem Library has received a copy of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible. This version of the King James Bible was created by Barry Moser, the noted printmaker and book illustrator, who spent three years designing and setting the type and carving the engravings.

Like many special collections at universities across the country, the Special Collections Research Center at Swem Library is dedicated to supporting the research mission of the College, but just as important is its role in enhancing the College's commitment to excellence in undergraduate teaching.

In the world of archives, the topic of backlogs always comes up: Do you have one? How big is it? What are your plans to attack it?

Before starting work at the Special Collections Research Center, I assumed archives were repositories of serious things relating to very serious matters.  There are most certainly serious documents which serve very important purposes, but there are just so many more things housed in the archives here. 

Another semester is coming to an end at Swem Library's Special Collections and student employees are getting ready for the hustle of the last few weeks of classes. It is my last semester working at Special Collections, and the year I have spent as a graduate apprentice here has gone by in the blink of an eye.

I have been researching, writing, and planning an exhibit on the Civil War Centennial to be displayed outside the Special Collections Research Center in the Nancy Marshall Gallery. Given that the years 1961 through 1965 were of great historical importance in their own right, one can forget that they also represented the one-hundredth anniversary of the greatest conflict of American history.