Posts Tagged Department of Rare Books Special Collections and Preservation

On December 3, 1847, the first issue of the North Star newspaper was published in the city of Rochester. One hundred and seventy one years later, the city again celebrated abolitionist, activist, author, and orator Frederick Douglass in an evening of words and song at Rochester’s Hochstein Hall. The Prophet of Freedom event include a performance by Eastman School of Music student Jonathan Rhodes ’20 of a song written for Douglass in 1847 that had not been performed in 100 years.

Only two copies of “Farewell Song of Frederick Douglass” are known to exist—and one of them was acquired earlier this year by River Campus Libraries.

The project brings together students in the humanities and computer science and retired volunteers to help transcribe the thousands of Seward family letters written in Victorian-era cursive handwriting.

Several generations after the purchase of Alaska on March 30, 1867, the William Henry Seward Papers at the University of Rochester show the supposed folly to be a shrewd bargain.

Like most African Americans born into slavery, Frederick Douglass was never told the date and year of his birth. He chose February 14 as the day on which to celebrate it, and in 2018 we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth. At the University of Rochester, one of the most extensive collections of Douglass artifacts in the country can be found in Rush Rhees Library.

The teaching of formal cursive handwriting may have declined in our digital age, but to show our appreciation for scribes and their tools of the trade, we dug into our special collections to highlight a sampling of hand lettering, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern conscripts.

Chicago and Delhi. Rome and Rochester. The students in the 100-level course “The City: Contested Spaces” take a virtual tour of them all, while pondering an overarching question—can people’s lives be reshaped by redesigning urban spaces?

For decades, Edward Atwater ’50, a professor emeritus of medicine at the Medical Center, has collected medical history artifacts. In 2007, he began turning his collection of more than 8,000 AIDS education posters over to the University and it is now the world’s largest single collection of visual resources related to AIDS and HIV.

Raymond Borst ’33 assembled one of the most extensive collections of Henry David Thoreau publications in the world, then gave it to the University.

Forgotten for over a century, a recently discovered trove of more than a hundred letters fills in the political details of how the suffrage movement was run and the women activists who ran it.