News

Selected stories from the Beinecke Library, YaleNews, and external media outlets (the latter noted by source in parentheses after title of article).

  • Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)

    January 13, 2024

    King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”

  • Fortunoff Video Archive invites applicants to second summer program in Budapest

    January 12, 2024

    For the second consecutive year, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies invites students and scholars to Budapest, Hungary, for its nine-day summer course, “Holocaust Testimonies and Their Afterlives.” The session, hosted by Central European University (CEU), runs July 10–19. Applications to the program are due Feb. 14. This intensive course explores the “era of the witness”—the emergence of Holocaust testimony as a model for eyewitness documentation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Participants directly engage with Holocaust testimony through workshops, seminars, lectures, and film screenings. The course examines first-person testimonies from historical, legal, and moral perspectives. It also introduces new methodological approaches to studying testimony in the digital age and considers the “afterlives” of these materials in related scholarly fields.

  • Beinecke Library 2022-2023 Annual Report

    January 8, 2024

    The Beinecke Library 2022-2023 Annual Report, including statistics and selected recent acquisitions, can be read and downloaded here: Beinecke Library 2022-23...

  • Writing and Resistance: 2024 Black History Month Display

    January 8, 2024

    Materials related to a temporary display on the Beinecke Library mezzanine, January 8 - March 18, 2024, for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Black History Month, and in conjunction with the publication of Yale and Slavery: A History (Yale University Press, 2024) and the exhibition Shining Light on Truth: New Haven, Yale, and Slavery, on view from mid-February at the New Haven Museum.

  • Yale Library Book Talk series announces lineup for spring 2024

    January 8, 2024

    Throughout the academic calendar, the Yale Library Book Talk series hosts acclaimed authors to discuss newly released books of fiction or nonfiction. The three topics this spring season include hacking in the digital age (and its notorious perpetrators), the history of anarchy in America and how it shapes public life today, and the work of six creative thinkers inspired by loneliness.

  • A civil rights champion

    January 1, 2024

    A scrapbook that McGuinn kept, now part of the Yale University Archives, documents his law career and his outspoken support for civil rights. He argued against state and local Jim Crow laws that were being proposed in the early twentieth century, including segregation measures and a voting bill that had a “grandfather clause” designed to exclude Black people. He is credited with helping to get a residential segregation law overturned in Baltimore in 1917. He also spoke out in favor of women’s suffrage. He served twice as a city councilman, from 1919 to 1923 and from 1927 to 1931, fighting Democrats who tried to bar Black people from city patronage jobs.

  • Through Justice’s Papers, Students See Supreme Court Behind the Scenes

    December 19, 2023

    In a first-of-its-kind course this fall, Yale Law School students delved into the working papers of a former Supreme Court justice for an intimate view of the making of landmark decisions. Through hands-on use of these archival materials, students gained research skills once used mainly by scholars but now increasingly valuable for legal practitioners. Taught by lecturers in legal research Nicholas Mignanelli and Michael VanderHeijden, Research Methods in Judicial History centered around the papers of Associate Justice Potter Stewart ’41, which are held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Through Stewart’s papers, the course explored how judges and legal scholars use historical court materials to make sense of judicial decisions.

  • Beinecke at 60: Staff members present favorites from Yale Library’s special collections

    November 30, 2023

    To help celebrate the 60th anniversary of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Michelle Light—director and associate university librarian for special collections—made a special request of library staff. She asked eight staff members—curators, librarians, and subject experts—to present two significant objects from the collection: one that represents a core strength of the Beinecke Library’s special collections, whose mission is to support scholarship across the humanities, and one that points to future directions in collecting.

  • Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)

    November 30, 2023

    This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.

  • Preserving your history: Archivist Jennifer Coggins shares tips of the trade

    November 28, 2023

    The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library provides advice and resources to help individuals organize, preserve, and share their personal histories. This summer, Jennifer Coggins, community engagement archivist at the Beinecke Library, presented her in-person workshop “Preserving Your History: Getting Started with Your Own Archives” at the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) to a local audience eager to build a legacy collection. Coggins offers practical, encouraging advice for taking on what can sometimes feel like a daunting task. “You don’t have to go all out,” she says. “There are simple steps you can take that will go a really long way toward protecting the materials that document your history.”

  • Sixth Henry Roe Cloud Conference celebrates Native and Indigenous legacy at Yale (Yale Daily News)

    November 16, 2023

    This weekend, hundreds of Native and Indigenous students, faculty and alumni attended Yale’s sixth Henry Roe Cloud Conference — a celebration of Native and Indigenous excellence that is hosted every four years. The conference, which began in 2005, is named for Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago), who graduated from Yale College in 1910 with a double major in psychology and philosophy and earned a master’s degree in anthropology from the University in 1914. With his Yale degree, Roe Cloud became a pioneer of Native American education and advocacy. The conference dedicates him as a standard bearer for current and future Native and Indigenous students of Yale to emulate.

  • Office Hours with… Nana Adusei-Poku

    November 13, 2023

    Who is an artist who particularly interests you for this project? Adusei-Poku: Augusta Savage, a sculptress from the Harlem Renaissance who was very active in the early 20th century. The reason why I’m so fascinated by her is that not only can you see in her biography how anti-Blackness consistently made it impossible for her to work, but also we don’t have many of her works left. They are only represented through photographs and yet she was a formative figure of a modernist movement. One reason why I’m so happy to be here at Yale is that we have this incredible archive in the Beinecke [Rare Book & Manuscript Library] and the Yale Art Gallery Collection that’s like a treasure for people who are interested in Black artists from New York in the early 20th century.