News

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

  • 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.

  • Students Rally For The Right To Read (Arts Council)

    November 4, 2023

    When Jeremy Thanes picked up Mike Curato’s Flamer for the first time, he didn’t see the most-challenged book of the 2022-2023 school year. His mind didn't go to Newtown, where a school board fought bitterly over banning the book in June. Or to Westport, where a single parent tried to remove it from a high school library alongside Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer and Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay. Instead, he saw himself—and the right that all young people have to be comfortable in their own skin. Thanes, a senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, brought that message to downtown New Haven Thursday afternoon, as he joined close to 100 New Haven high school students marching to protect the freedom to read. In a year that has seen a sharp rise in book bans and book challenges across the country, students showed up in force, visiting both the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL) and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library before the afternoon was over. Throughout, they advocated fiercely not just for themselves, but for the generation of students directly under them, who are just starting their educational journey in New Haven.

  • Salovey and the arts (Yale Daily News)

    November 3, 2023

    According to Michael Morand, Director of Community Engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Salovey is someone who “walks the walk” in supporting and participating in the arts at Yale. Morand specifically pointed to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes, which launched in 2013 and annually provide eight writers with prizes of $185,000. Recent winners include Cathy Park Hong, C.E. Morgan, Ike Hotler and John Keene. “He’s a cheerleader and participant in the [Windham-Campbell] program,” Morand said. “All of the winners come to a festival at the beginning of September. The prize ceremony and lecture is always led by President Salovey. President Salovey has been an enthusiastic and important part of the prize program and the festival.”

  • Louise Glück, Nobel laureate and beloved Yale mentor

    October 13, 2023

    Louise Glück, a poet whose evocative voice shaped the literary world for decades, earning her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, and who became a beloved teacher and mentor as a member of the Yale faculty, died Oct. 13 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80.

  • Then and now: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library turns 60 this October

    October 10, 2023

    On October 14, 1963, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library opened to the public and soon became, just as the benefactors intended, a “source of learning and an inspiration to all who enter.” This year, the staff celebrates the Beinecke Library’s 60 years as part of Yale University Library. Explore the then-and-now photos with the embedded slider on the images below

  • Lector of Cherokee is Yale’s first faculty member in an Indigenous language

    October 6, 2023

    In its search for a lecturer, the search committee did not specify Cherokee, Bowern said, but rather left it open to any North American Indigenous language. “We just really wanted to get a fantastic teacher, and Patrick emerged as the successful candidate,” she said. “Cherokee makes sense as a language at Yale because we have a lot of related materials in the Beinecke Library, and we have students who are members of the Cherokee Nation pretty regularly.” Del Percio attributed their proficiency in Cherokee — which is considered one of the more difficult languages to learn — to the many first-language speakers who supported, accepted, and welcomed them over the years. Having that personal interaction is crucial in learning Cherokee, they said, because it’s a tonal language.

  • Will the Beinecke really suffocate you? (Yale Daily News)

    October 6, 2023

    Mystery rhymes with history. I think that’s a fun coincidence. This year, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library will turn 60 years old. One of its most famous texts, The Gutenberg Bible, will turn 568. Beinecke holds a lot of history. And many, many mysteries.