News

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

  • Professor Crystal Feimster on the Long Civil Rights Movement (podcast)

    January 20, 2020

    In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Salovey and Professor Feimster discuss the “long” civil rights movement, the contributions of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and how Yale students are using the university’s archival and museum collections in their classes.

  • Celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 16, 2020

    King and the African American Freedom Movement Jan. 20, noon-4 p.m. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. Highlights from the Beinecke Library’s collections related to King and to the African American freedom movement will be on public view in the courtyard-level reading room.

  • The Forever Bond (99 per cent invisible)

    January 7, 2020

    Rouwenhurst, on behalf of Yale’s Center for International Finance, actually purchased one of the oldest active bonds to date — a 1648 corporate Dutch water authority bond written on goatskin that was originally issued to raise money for the construction of a pier. Most of the oldest active perpetual bonds are from this very same Dutch water board, because this board has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands for hundreds of years and is very stable. You don’t need a record of ownership to keep the bond active, but the catch is that the bearer of the bond needs to travel to the water board’s registrar’s office to have it notated, meaning the staff at Yale needs to travel all the way to Holland to maintain it.

  • Searching for La Belle Dame (WSU Insider)

    December 18, 2019

    Where in the world had the Clumber Park Chartier disappeared to? Joan Grenier-Winther, the Marianna M. and Donald S. Matteson Distinguished Professor of French at Washington State University Vancouver, really needed to examine the fifteenth-century collection of poems by Alain Chartier and others.

  • The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin (Hyperallergic)

    November 30, 2019

    If Walt Whitman, whose bicentenary all New York has been celebrating, can come across as absolutely contemporary — a big-bearded hipster tipping back Pabst Blue Ribbons and spouting poetry in some Brooklyn dive bar — John Ruskin, also 200 this year, seems stubbornly and remotely Victorian. The Yale Center for British Art’s Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin aims to assert Ruskin’s contemporary relevance while firmly retaining his 19th-century context.

  • ‘Pass the pickled eel’: a guide to an 18th-century Thanksgiving

    November 25, 2019

    Don’t want to bother with brines, barbecues, glazes, or boiling oil? Consider turning back the clock to simpler times when dining occurred over candlelight, ovens were wood fired, and it was a safe bet that nobody around the table had recently bathed. That’s right: Transport your friends and family to the 18th century for a truly memorable Thanksgiving feast. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library has resources to guide your gastronomic time travel.

  • Happiness Lab Episode 10: Making the Grade (Podcast)

    November 20, 2019

    From school grades to fitness trackers, we're all being ranked and rated on a daily basis. This is having a huge impact on our happiness and preventing us from living our lives to the fullest. Can giving up on grades radically improve our well-being? This episode includes Laurie Santos' visit to the Beinecke Library to read the diaries of Ezra Stiles from 1785.

  • Listening to Will Wilson’s Portraits (Yale Herald)

    November 18, 2019

    Today wet-plate collodion photography is, unsurprisingly, scarce, enabling the materialization of Wilson’s three figures in PNGB to serve as a bait-and-switch: their initial perceived age soon deteriorates into their present reality. Unlike in Curtis’s images, each subject has chosen their own pose and clothing, has written their own caption, and has been gifted the aluminum plate — the reproductions we see in the YUAG exhibition are archival pigment prints from a high-resolution scan of the original, on loan from the Beinecke. The photographic exchange is literal, as is Wilson’s reinscription of Indigenous culture, both shifting the seat of influence towards equality.