Posts Tagged Department of Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation

Rare Books and Special Collections explores Pride Month’s roots in protest and fighting back, with collections that help tell the story of Rochester’s queer community.

Celebrate rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and other literary techniques by exploring the collected papers of poets John A. Williams, Samuel Greenlee, and Vince Clemente.

May 31 is the 200th anniversary of poet Walt Whitman’s birth, and Rochester has a few ties of its own to the poet who contained multitudes.

The family of Louise and Bob Slaughter is donating the late congresswoman’s official papers to the University of Rochester. River Campus Libraries will house, archive, and make available the Louise M. Slaughter Congressional Collection in the coming years.

A new exhibit in Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation chronicles the often radical difference between the real and figurative queen through illustrations, etchings, letters, photographs, and other ephemera.

The picture of the Middle Ages as “awful, smelly, stinky, [and] dangerous” is not accurate, says medievalist and University of Pennsylvania professor David Wallace, this year’s Ferrari Humanities Symposia visiting scholar.

The Alaskan flag, with its simple Big Dipper and North star design, was the winning entry submitted by a 13-year-old Aleut boy, John Bell Benson, for a competition by the Alaska Department of the American Legion. Chosen in 1927, this particular example is now part of the University’s William Henry Seward Papers.

A collaboration between librarians and engineering students, the book wheel in Rossell Hope Robbins Library is a recreation of a 16th-century design, solving the problem of needing access to multiple books at the same time.

Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation has acquired a remarkable collection of 52 personal letters from author and early feminist reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who minces no words when it comes to motherhood, marriage, and depression.

The rare song, scored for voice and piano, probably hasn’t been performed in more than a hundred years, with only two known copies of the sheet music in the world. The only known copy in America now resides at the University of Rochester.