News

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

  • World’s oldest printed objects to join Gutenberg Bible in Beinecke display

    January 24, 2023

    Yale’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, on view since 1963 in a bronze case on the mezzanine of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is a landmark in the history of the printed word. Today, another landmark of the same history, a 1,250-year-old print of Buddhist prayers — the earliest known printed text that can be reliably dated — joins it on regular display.

  • A COMPOSITIONAL COLLABORATION(?) BETWEEN MARGARET BONDS AND FLORENCE PRICE: “Sleep Song” (Medium)

    January 20, 2023

    And it’s how we know that Florence B. Price had a hand in producing the only surviving exemplar of Margaret Bonds’s earliest surviving choral work: the Sleep Song for women’s chorus and piano, recently published by Hildegard Publishing Company as part of their ongoing Margaret Bonds Signature Series. That undated manuscript is held among the Margaret Bonds Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (shelfmark JWJ MSS 151 Box 8, folder 41), as are the three autographs for the solo version of Sleep Song. The latter all identify Margaret Bonds as a member of ASCAP, which Bonds joined as a non-participating member in 1952, and of which she became a full member in 1955.

  • How Janet Malcolm Created Her Own Personal Archive (LitHub)

    January 18, 2023

    It’s hardly coincidental that Malcolm was organizing her own archive around the same time that she began to explore writing about her life. In 2013, she sent her first shipment—59 boxes of assorted detritus—up to New Haven, where they would live at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. To say that Malcolm organized her papers would be a stretch. In some cases, she simply emptied the contents of her filing cabinets into cardboard boxes. But elsewhere, she annotated letters and folders, leaving easter eggs and reminders for any future researcher that she was thinking carefully about what to include in her archive and, more importantly, what to leave out.

  • Campus events honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

    January 10, 2023

    The Yale and New Haven communities will commemorate the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during a series of campus events, including a keynote address by his eldest son, Martin Luther King III. The campus celebrations, which also will include library exhibits highlighting King’s contributions, a poetry slam, an exploration of King’s influence on environmental justice, and a love march, are part of the university’s annual campus commemoration of the famed civil rights activist and preacher.

  • The sailor's guide

    January 1, 2023

    Medieval and early modern navigators of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had no telescopes to help them guide their ships into port. But they had maps: specifically, portolan charts, which showed where to dock and how to avoid dangers. Portolans were used for at least 500 years. The earliest surviving portolan is the Carte Pisane, a fragment dating from the end of the thirteenth century. The Beinecke Library has a significant collection of portolan charts, dating from 1403 to 1789.

  • Discover 5 Fascinating Yale University Museums and Galleries (TRAVELMAG)

    December 19, 2022

    There are, quite unsurprisingly, many excellent Yale libraries dotted around the Connecticut city of New Haven. Among the collections, the most notable and rare books have made their way into the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and, occasionally, make it to the displays of the library’s public exhibition on the ground floor.

  • A conversation with Janet Odetsi Twum

    December 8, 2022

    Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Tour It was striking that a magnificent building has been dedicated to collecting and preserving literary manuscripts and rare collections. The color of the monumental Beinecke edifice was attractive enough to make you wonder what it contains. Visiting the Beinecke Library was my first time seeing huge volumes of rare and archival resources well preserved and arranged. The icing on the cake for the visit was how Michael Morand (Director of Community Engagement) welcomed me to the Beinecke Library to begin the tour. He came along with a Ghanaian student and wore some paraphernalia from Ghana. It was a great learning experience for me on how to welcome guests (PR & Customer service). I hope to take a cue from it back home.

  • Understanding the impact of Nazi racism and American Jim Crow laws (WNPR)

    November 30, 2022

    This week, we discuss antisemitism today, how we teach the history of the holocaust and Nazi racism’s connection to American Jim Crow laws. We also hear about the Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies. This conversation was part of a panel moderated by host Khalilah Brown Dean that followed a screening of The U.S. and the Holocaust, a documentary miniseries directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein. Classroom-ready materials and teaching resources created collaboratively with teachers, scholars and the Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University can be found here. GUESTS: Christina Chavarria: Program Coordinator for the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jeffrey A. Fletcher: Executive Director of The Ruby and Calvin Fletcher African American History Museum in Stratford, CT. He recently completed a 20-year career as a police officer in New Haven. Aya Marczyk: Curriculum Development Fellow at the Fortunoff Video Archive For Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University

  • Zelda Fitzgerald's Wish to Publish Paper Dolls Book Fulfilled Decades Later (Newsweek)

    November 18, 2022

    Zelda Fitzgerald once gauged a publisher's interest in creating a collection filled with the striking paper dolls she made for her daughter, but the book she imagined never materialized. More than 70 years after Zelda's death, that imagining has now come to life in The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald, a collection pulled together by Zelda's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan. Scribner is publishing the book on November 22. During a recent interview with Newsweek, Lanahan said she first came across the paper dolls while exploring her mother's attic as a child.

  • Hands-on learning: Three student curators explore color in theory and practice

    November 14, 2022

    To provide students with a close look at artwork and objects, classes were held at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Haas Family Arts Library, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. The group also made a field trip to Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington and to the nearby Hill-Stead Museum.

  • Open source: Fortunoff Holocaust curriculum builds bridge to local schools

    November 14, 2022

    Leon Bass was 20 years old in April 1945 when his army unit helped liberate Buchenwald, a sprawling concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany. Martin Schiller, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, was 12 years old on the day he watched the American soldiers roll through the camp’s gates in jeeps. Decades later, both men recounted their experiences in recorded interviews with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Those interviews, taped in the 1980s, help form the backbone of a new testimony-based high-school curriculum the Fortunoff Archive, a part of the Yale University Library, has developed in partnership with Yale scholars and teachers from public schools in New Haven and across Connecticut. The curriculum, which officially launched this month, engages students in historical inquiry and close listening through 14 lessons that combine primary and secondary source documents, historical scholarship, and individual testimonies from the archive. While designed for high school students, it can be adapted for students in grades six to eight.

  • New Haven Black history ready to be explored at Yale's Beinecke library (New Haven Register)

    November 14, 2022

    If there's one thing New Haven has plenty of, it's history — and for as long as there have been African Americans in New Haven, that history has been recorded along with the stories of all the ethnicities that call or have called New Haven home. Much of it has been recorded, catalogued and preserved by historical societies and libraries, including the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University which will provide an opportunity Sunday in conjunction with The Greater New Haven African American Historical Society for people to come in an explore.

  • Mississippi Revealed (NHK World Japan)

    October 28, 2022

    Journey with Cannon Hersey as he explores parallels between battles over voting rights today and the historic struggles of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. With his grandfather, famed writer John Hersey's groundbreaking "A Life for a Vote" as a roadmap, Cannon reveals how black farmers cultivated freedom by tending the earth, and are still striving to overcome a legacy of systemic oppression.