News

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

  • Infinity has a price

    March 1, 2023

    One of Yale’s most intriguing investments is a 375-year-old “perpetual” Dutch bond that still pays interest. It was issued by the Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams, a semi-public organization charged with maintaining the dike along the Lek river in the Netherlands. The water authority was founded in 1323; its successor still operates today, in the province of Utrecht, as the Stichtse Rijnlanden. This is where Yale Beinecke curator Timothy Young showed up in 2015 to collect twelve years of past interest payments, amounting to 132 euros. The authority was glad to pay. There are few entities in the world that can claim such a long, continuous history of good credit.

  • History, found. Richard Henry Greene was the first Black graduate of Yale College. Now, we can see him.

    March 1, 2023

    Nine years ago, a researcher at an auction house reminded Yale of a forgotten piece of its history: Yale College’s first Black graduate, Richard Henry Greene of the Class of 1857. We wrote about the rediscovery of Greene’s accomplishment at the time, but one thing was missing. We could find no pictures of Greene. Now, we have a face to go with the name, thanks to Greene’s great-great-granddaughter, who recently shared with the Yale Alumni Magazine two tintype images of him in his Civil War uniform. (He was an assistant surgeon in the US Navy during the war.) They are the only known images of Greene. What’s more, Greene’s descendant is able to shed a bit more light on the life of this pathbreaking alumnus.

  • In balance Noguchi's marble garden, at eye level.

    March 1, 2023

    Looking out at the sunken sculpture garden from the reading room of the Beinecke Library, a visitor sees what the artist, Isamu Noguchi, once described as a “landscape . . . purely that of the imagination.” Designed as an integral part of the Beinecke when it was built sixty years ago, The Garden (Pyramid, Sun, and Cube) is prized for both its form and its function.

  • Suffragist, Activist, Journalist: The Incredible Life of Jersey City’s Own Ella Barksdale Brown (The Hoboken Girl)

    February 27, 2023

    Her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Circle for Negro War Relief, the New Jersey Civil Rights Bureau, and the National Association of Colored Women led to her friendships with such pioneering civil rights leaders as W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, and James Weldon Johnson. Archive boxes in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library hold letters of well wishes, sympathy, news, and greetings between Ella and her illustrious peers.

  • In Memoriam: Howard R. Lamar, eminent historian and former Yale president

    February 24, 2023

    With the help of Archibald Hanna, the founding curator of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Lamar mined the rich collection of Western research materials donated to Yale by philanthropist William Robertson Coe. The result, a dissertation on territorial politics (later published as “Dakota Territory, 1861–1889”), marked a turn from the then-dominant “frontier thesis” promulgated by historian Frederick Jackson Turner to a more realist look at the forces of capitalism, culture, and environment in the development of the American West.

  • Doc Reveals The New Haven HBCU That Could Have Been (New Haven Independent)

    February 23, 2023

    On Wednesday night at the New Haven Museum, New Haveners had a chance to learn, together, about an uncomfortable truth: that, in 1831, New Haven’s white community leaders overwhelming rejected a serious proposal to found what would have been the first U.S. Black college, on the land where the interchange of I‑95 and I‑91 now exists. That story is told in What Could Have Been: America’s First HBCU, a short and powerful documentary written by Tubyez Cropper and Michael Morand of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library and directed and edited by Cropper. Released in April 2022, the film on Wednesday night enjoyed a robust audience at the museum on Whitney Avenue dedicated to New Haven’s history.

  • In "What Could Have Been," New Haven's Past Haunts Its Present (Arts Paper)

    February 23, 2023

    The year is 2023. Just beyond East and Water Streets, the nation’s first Historically Black College is gearing up for its 192nd anniversary. Balloons bob in the breeze outside. Buildings reach into the blue New Haven sky. Gulls cry and cackle above the water, and sound like they are laughing. All day, the nation’s most prominent Black scholars file in and out of the campus buildings, holding a history that is nearly two centuries old. Except, their path to that day never happened. The year is 2023, and the space is just an ocean of asphalt and road, with a labyrinth of highway winding above. It didn’t have to be this way.

  • Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry (Connecticut Public Radio)

    February 22, 2023

    Yale University has announced that Joy Harjo is the winner of the 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry. The biennial prize is awarded to an American poet for the best book of poems published in the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Harjo won on both counts—for her book Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. This after being U.S. Poet Laureate between 2019 and 2022.

  • Festival encourages writers of all stripes (The Beacon)

    February 21, 2023

    As part of this year’s CityLit Festival, Joy Harjo (left), the winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a reading of her poetry and conversing with a local poet on Tuesday, March 28, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater.

  • Georgia O’Keeffe’s recipe collection (CT Public Radio)

    February 15, 2023

    A selection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s personal recipe collection is on display at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. We talk with its curator about what the iconic American artist was cooking and eating when she wasn’t painting giant flowers, skulls, and landscapes.

  • Joy Harjo photo courtesty of MasterClass

    Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for Poetry

    February 14, 2023

    Joy Harjo has been named the winner of Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The Bollingen Prize, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by Yale University Library through Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The prize includes a cash award of $175,000.

  • A 1,200-year-old scroll finds a home next to the Gutenberg Bible (WSHU)

    February 10, 2023

    The Gutenberg Bible is one of the treasures of Yale University’s Beinecke Library — the first book printed with movable type in Europe. Now it has a companion, a much older Japanese scroll made with an earlier form of printing, and one of the oldest known printed objects in the world. WSHU's Davis Dunavin spoke with Yale history professor Daniel Botsman, who showed him a scroll covered in tiny Japanese letters.

  • Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)

    February 8, 2023

    On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.